ABC in Svalbard [#0]

It has started! In case you need the link to follow the talks, here it is! And most slides and past talks are also on-line.

BibTool on the air

Yesterday night, just before leaving for Coventry, I realised I had about 30 versions of my “mother of all .bib” bib file, spread over directories and with broken links with the original mother file… (I mean, I always create bib files in new directories by a hard link,

    ln ~/mother.bib

but they eventually and inexplicably end up with a life of their own!) So I decided a Spring clean-up was in order and installed BibTool on my Linux machine to gather all those versions into a new encompassing all-inclusive bib reference. I did not take advantage of the many possibilities of the program, written by Gerd Neugebauer, but it certainly solved my problem: once I realised I had to set the variates

check.double = on
check.double.delete = on
pass.comments = off

all I had to do was to call

bibtool -s -i ../*/*.bib -o mother.bib
bibtool -d -i mother.bib -o mother.bib
bibtool -s -i mother.bib -o mother.bib

to merge all bib file and then to get rid of the duplicated entries in mother.bib (the -d option commented out the duplicates and the second call with -s removed them). And to remove the duplicated definitions in the preamble of the file. This took me very little time in the RER train from Paris-Dauphine (where I taught this morning, having a hard time to make the students envision the empirical cdf as an average of Dirac masses!) to Roissy airport, in contrast with my pedestrian replacement of all stray siblings of the mother bib into new proper hard links, one by one. I am sure there is a bash command that could have done it in one line, but I spent instead my flight to Birmingham switching all existing bib files, one by one…