Recursive directory parsing with Pandoc on Mac

Question

I found this question which had an answer to the question of performing batch conversions with Pandoc, but it doesn\'t answer the question of how to make it recursive. I sti

Answer 1

Create the following Makefile:

TXTDIR=sources
HTMLS=$(wildcard *.html)
MDS=$(patsubst %.html,$(TXTDIR)/%.markdown, $(HTMLS))

.PHONY : all

all : $(MDS)

$(TXTDIR) :
    mkdir $(TXTDIR)

$(TXTDIR)/%.markdown : %.html $(TXTDIR)
    pandoc -f html -t markdown -s $< -o $@

(Note: The indented lines must begin with a TAB -- this may not come through in the above, since markdown usually strips out tabs.)

Then you just need to type 'make', and it will run pandoc on every file with a .html extension in the working directory, producing a markdown version in 'sources'. An advantage of this method over using 'find' is that it will only run pandoc on a file that has changed since it was last run.

Answer 2

Just for the record: here is how I achieved the conversion of a bunch of HTML files to their Markdown equivalents:

for file in $(ls *.html); do pandoc -f html -t markdown "${file}" -o "${file%html}md"; done

When you have a look at the script code from the -o argument, you'll see it uses string manipulation to remove the existing html with the md file ending.