BibTool Manual Introduction Using BibTool --- Some Instructive Examples

Using BibTool --- Some Instructive Examples

BibTool has been developed on UN*X and UN*X-like machines. This has influenced many of the design decisions. Version 1 was controlled using numerous command line options. This way of controlling has been supplemented in version 2 by the concept of a resource file. This resource file allows the modification of the various internal parameters determining the behavior of BibTool.

When BibTool has been compiled correctly there should be an executable file named bibtool¹. We will assume that you are running BibTool from a command line interpreter. There you can simply issue the command

bibtool

Now BibTool will start reading from the standard input lines obeying the rules of a BibTeX file.² The entries read are pretty-printed on the standard output. It is obvious that this behavior is not very useful in itself. The origin of this kind of interface lies in the concepts of UN*X where many commands can act as filters.

Usually we do not intend to use BibTool in this way. Thus we need a way to specify an input file. This is simply done by adding the file name as argument after the command name like in

bibtool file.bib

The result of this command can at once be seen on the screen. The contents of the file file.bib is pretty printed.

Now that we have seen the simplest case of the application of BibTool we will see the case of a useful application of BibTool. This application is the sorting and merging of BibTeX databases.

Sorting and Merging

Key Generation

Normalization

Extracting Entries for a Document

Extracting Entries Matching a Regular Expression

Translating ISO 8859-1 Characters

BibTool Manual Introduction Using BibTool --- Some Instructive Examples