How to sort (by whatever key) BibTex entries in `.bib` file?

Question

I work with LaTeX and do versioning with Git. For bibliography management I use Mendeley.

The problem is that each time Mendeley synchronizes it's .bib exports, they are in different order, what makes bibliography versioning much harder.

My idea is to sort BibTex entries in .bib file, each time before commit.

Could you help me, how to do this in smart (short&sweet) way ? :)

P.S. I can run this routine manually. I do not need git integration. I just want program/script to sort .bib file.

Answer 1

How about bibsort?

NAME
     bibsort - sort a BibTeX bibliography file

SYNOPSIS
     bibsort [optional sort(1) switches] < infile >outfile

DESCRIPTION
     bibsort filters a BibTeX bibliography, or bibliography frag-
     ment,  on  its standard input, printing on standard output a
     sorted bibliography.

It's a shell script wrapping nawk (and tr, sort and grep) and includes two warnings you might have to pay attention to (see the source).

(Edit There're also a lot of bibtex-related Perl modules...)

Edit2 I just recognized you'd like to sort for any key, while bibsort apparently sorts by the bibtex tags only -- but maybe its source (it's not too long) is still helpful...?

Answer 2

The reference manager jabref seems to have such an option in the preferences (see Sort order section in File page). It also has many interesting features:

Answer 3

I had the exact same problem, right down to my choice of tools: using git and Mendeley on linux.

My 'solution' is sub-par compared to a command-line script, but nonetheless it made me happy, so here it is:

(i was also already using emacs, so) what i do is open a copy of the bibtex file in emacs after i do any work in Mendeley, then i run

M-x bibtex-sort-buffer

in emacs, save the results, and commit those sorted results to git.

Apparently bibtex-mode is standard in emacs, because I didn't have to install anything, and emacs automatically recognized my '.bib' as a bibtex file.