A simple build system as a bash script

build.md

README

Frustrated with using make for generating pdf and html files from asciidoc documents (I use asciidoctor a lot), I wrote a simple shell script doing the job.

The problem with make is that it cannot work with files having spaces in their file names. Gradle, bazel, ninja and other build tools seemed like overkill for such a tiny task. And bash runs anywhere.

build.sh

#!/bin/bash

all() {
    build "html"
    build "pdf"
}

clean() {
    echo "Cleaning up ..."
    rm -f *.html
    rm -f *.pdf
}

build() {
    echo "Building $1 files ..."
    for file in *.adoc; do
        target_file="$(basename "$file" .adoc).$1"
        if ! [[ "$file" -nt "$target_file" ]]; then
            continue # skip files, which are not outdated
        fi 
        case $1 in
            html)
                asciidoctor -o "$target_file" "$file";;
            pdf)
                asciidoctor -r asciidoctor-pdf -b pdf -o "$target_file" "$file";;
            *)
                echo "unmatched file type";
                exit 1;;
        esac
        echo "success: $target_file";
    done
}

if [[ "$1" == "all" ]]; then
    all
elif [[ "$1" == "clean" ]]; then
    clean
else
    build $1
fi