content: git-add-filename-automation
This data as json
| author | category | content | published_date | slug | summary | title | url |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ryan | productivity | In [my last post](https://www.ryancheley.com/2022/01/24/auto-tweeting-new- post/) I mentioned the steps needed in order for me to post. They are: 1. Run `make html` to generate the SQLite database that powers my site's search tool1 2. Run `make vercel` to deploy the SQLite database to vercel 3. [Run `git add <filename>` to add post to be committed to GitHub](https://www.ryancheley.com/2022/01/26/git-add-filename-automation/) 4. Run `git commit -m <message>` to commit to GitHub 5. [Post to Twitter with a link to my new post](https://www.ryancheley.com/2022/01/24/auto-tweeting-new-post/) In that post I focused on number 5, posting to Twitter with a link to the post using GitHub Actions. In this post I'll be focusing on how I automated step 3, "Run `git add <filename>` to add post to be committed to GitHub". # Automating the `git add ...` part of my workflow I have my pelican content set up so that the category of a post is determined by the directory a markdown file is placed in. The structure of my content folder looks like this: content ├── musings ├── pages ├── productivity ├── professional\ development └── technology If you just just `git status` on a directory it will give you the status of all of the files in that directory that have been changed, added, removed. Something like this: ❯ git status On branch main Untracked files: (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed) content/productivity/more-writing-automation.md Makefile metadata.json That means that when you run `git add .` all of those files will be added to git. For my purposes all that I need is the one updated file in the `content` directory. The command `find` does a great job of taking a directory and allowing you to search for what you want in that directory. You can run something like find content -name '*.md' -print And it will return essentially what you're looking for. Something like this: content/pages/404.md content/pages/curriculum-vitae.md content/pages/about.md content/pages/brag.md content/productivity/adding-the-new-file.md content/productivity/omnifocus-3.md content/productivity/making-the-right-choice-or-how-i-learned-to-live-with-limiting-my-own-technical-debt-and-just-be-happy.md content/productivity/auto-tweeting-new-post.md content/productivity/my-outlook-review-process.md content/productivity/rules-and-actions-in-outlook.md content/productivity/auto-generating-the-commit-message.md content/productivity/declaring-omnifocus-bankrupty.md However, because one of my categories has a space in it's name (`professional development`) if you pipe the output of this to `xargs git add` it fails with the error fatal: pathspec 'content/professional' did not match any files In order to get around this, you need to surround the output of the results of `find` with double quotes ("). You can do this by using `sed` find content -name '*.md' -print | sed 's/^/"/g' | sed 's/$/"/g' What this says is, take the output of `find` and pipe it to `sed` and use a global find and replace to add a `"` to the start of the line (that's what the `^` does) and then pipe that to `sed` again and use a global find and replace to add a `"` to the end of the line (that's what the '$' does). Now, when you run find content -name '*.md' -print | sed 's/^/"/g' | sed 's/$/"/g' The output looks like this: "content/pages/404.md" "content/pages/curriculum-vitae.md" "content/pages/about.md" "content/pages/brag.md" "content/productivity/adding-the-new-file.md" "content/productivity/omnifocus-3.md" "content/productivity/making-the-right-choice-or-how-i-learned-to-live-with-limiting-my-own-technical-debt-and-just-be-happy.md" "content/productivity/auto-tweeting-new-post.md" "content/productivity/my-outlook-review-process.md" "content/productivity/rules-and-actions-in-outlook.md" "content/productivity/auto-generating-the-commit-message.md" "content/productivity/declaring-omnifocus-bankrupty.md" Now, you can pipe your output to `xargs git add` and there is no error! The final command looks like this: find content -name '*.md' -print | sed 's/^/"/g' | sed 's/$/"/g' | xargs git add In the next post, I'll walk through how I generate the commit message to be used in the automatic tweet! 1. `make vercel` actually runs `make html` so this isn't really a step that I need to do. ↩︎ | 2022-01-26 | git-add-filename-automation | In [my last post](https://www.ryancheley.com/2022/01/24/auto-tweeting-new- post/) I mentioned the steps needed in order for me to post. They are: 1. Run `make html` to generate the SQLite database that powers my site's search tool1 2. Run `make vercel` to deploy the SQLite database to vercel 3. [Run `git add <filename>` to add post to …](https://www.ryancheley.com/2022/01/26/git-add-filename-automation/) | git add filename automation | https://www.ryancheley.com/2022/01/26/git-add-filename-automation/ |