The problem#

I've recently been writing more series of blog posts or otherwise linking between posts using {filename} links. And also I've been adjusting the scheduling of my future planned blog posts, which involves changing the filename as my naming scheme includes the publication date in the filename. Which means there's opportunities for not adjusting the links to match and ending up with broken links between posts.

Pelican does generate warnings like

WARNING  Unable to find './invalid.md', skipping url        log.py:89
         replacement.                                                

but currently building my entire blog takes about a minute, so I generally only do it when publishing. So I wanted a more lightweight way to just check the intra-blog {filename} links.

The solution#

I wrote the script check_filename_links.sh:

#!/bin/bash

content="${1:-.}"

find "$content" -iname '*.md' -type f -print0 | 
  while IFS= read -r -d '' filename
  do
    grep '^\[.*]: {filename}' "$filename" |
      sed 's/^[^ ]* {filename}\([^\#]*\)\#\?.*$/\1/' |
      while read -r link
      do
        if [ "${link:0:1}" != "/" ]
        then
          linkedfile="$(dirname "$filename")/$link"
        else
          linkedfile="$content$link"
        fi
        if [ ! -f "$linkedfile" ]
        then
          echo "filename=$filename, link=$link,"\
               "file does not exist: $linkedfile"
        fi
      done
  done

Run it from your content/ directory or provide the path to the content/ directory as an argument and it will print out the broken links:

filename=./foo/bar.md, link=./invalid.md, file does not exist: ./foo/./invalid.md

The details#