For sorting bib files (LaTeX)

The idea is: You have bib files containing items like

@article{boers2019,
    author = {N. Boers AND B. Goswami AND A. Rheinwalt AND B. Bookhagen AND B. Hoskins AND J. Kurths},
    title = {Complex networks reveal global pattern of extreme-rainfall teleconnections},
    journal = {Nature},
    year = 2019,
    volume = {566},
    pages = {373-377},
    doi = {10.1038/s41586-018-0872-x}
}

@Book{baxter1982,
  author =    {R. J. Baxter},
  title =     {Exactly Solved Models in Statistical Mechanics},
  publisher = {Academic Press},
  address =   {London},
  year =      {1982},
}

and the bib item should be sorted according to the key (here boers2019 and baxter1982). By default the sorting is case insensitive.

It will print the sorted files to the terminal

Compiling

If you do not have Rust (and cargo) installed, install it [https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch01-01-installation.html]. Then clone this repository. Open a terminal in the folder of this README.md

Option 1)

Compile via:

cargo b -r

The executable "bib_sort" is now in the folder ./target/release You need to add the executable to your PATH to be able to call it as bib_sort from anywhere.

Option 2)

You can also run

cargo install --path .

when inside the folder of this README.md This will add the executable to .cargo/bin which is added to your PATH during the installation of Rust, at least with default settings, so you can skip the PATH adding step and still call bib_sort from anywhere

Usage

Bibfiles are expected to be encoded in UTF8. ASCII is also fine. Other encodings may lead to errors.

Sorting bibfiles:

bib_sort path.bib

will print the sorted file in the terminal

bib_sort path.bib -o out.bib

will write the sorted bibfile to the file out.bib

bib_sort --help

for help Info

Note: If you want to overwrite the bibfile: Do NOT pipe into it. Commands like "bib_sort literature.bib > literature.bib" will DELETE the literature.bib file before the program reads it, which means it is essentially just creating an empty file.

INSTEAD: You can safely use "bib_sort literature.bib -o literature.bib" as this will first parse the bibfile and then overwrite it with the sorted file only if no errors were detected.