Organise collections of LaTeX documents with BSD Owl Scripts

Let us discuss how to handle collections of LaTeX documents with the build system BSD Owl Scripts. In our example we pretend that we are preparing an electronic journal and want to distribute each article of the journal as a separate electronic document. Organisation on the file-system We use the following...

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Testing complex shell programs without installing them

A simple shell script fitting in one file can easily be tested from the command line. Complex scripts relying on several shell subroutines libraries and other file assets are a bit more complicated to test, because the file assets used by the script lie at different locations on the file system when...

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Delegating complex treatments to filters in shell programs

Novice shell programmers tend to reproduce procedural structures they learnt from classical procedural languages like Pascal or C¹. While it produces results, this approach is catastrophic and complex treatments should be delegated to filters. I will first convince you that catastrophic is not as...

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Drawing METAPOST pictures with BSD Owl Scripts

METAPOST, a program my John Hobby, is a powerful language for creating technical drawings and it is found in most if not all TeX distributions. While most LaTeX compilation assistants do...

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Debian and Ubuntu packaging for BSD Owl Scripts users

I recently wrote Debian and Ubuntu packages for anvil, a small software package using BSD Owl Scripts as build system. I documented my work in the form of a short document and of a series of commits in a dedicated branch of the anvil repository. You can take advantage of this documentation if you want...

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