pombredanne / consecutive

Rename files so they always start with consecutive chapter numbers, optionally leaving gaps so you can knit in new chapters.

Consecutive

You're writing a novel, a technical manual, a thesis, and it's organized like so:

1-introduction.md
2-literature.md
3-research.md
4-conclusion.md

But then you decide you need a "methods" chapter in between the literature and the research, and unlike a word processor, your filesystem doesn't automatically update your chapter numbers. So you delete a file here and want to squeeze in another chapter there, and it's terribly annoying to have to rename all of those files to keep them in order.

This little consecutive executable will rename all files you hand it so they have a consecutive numbering. And when you need room for a new chapter, pass on any gaps consecutive should leave in the numbering, and gaps there will be.

Usage

# after you've deleted a chapter, you can redo the entire numbering like this
ls *.md | consecutive

# the same thing works marvelously when you've reached chapter ten
# and need to pad all previous chapter numbers with a zero
ls *.md | consecutive

# to create a new chapter 3 and 4 and bump up all subsequent chapters
ls *.md | consecutive 3 4

Installation

sudo wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/stdbrouw/consecutive/master/consecutive -O /usr/local/bin/consecutive;
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/consecutive;