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This is not specifically a Linux question. But I was wondering if I can get this done in BASH. I have multiple HTML files in a folder and I want to generate a HTML table of content. So for file1.html and file2.html, I want to generate a file like this : 

<html>
   <body>
    <h1>Table of Contents</h1>
    <p style="text-indent:0pt">
       <a href="file1.html">file1</a><br/>
        <a href="file2.html">file2</a><br/>
     </p>
   </body>
 </html>

The process is simple but can get tedious and confusing when you have more than ten files with long names. I use the table of content file to convert the HTML files to an ebook format using Calibre. If it can be done automatically it'll save a lot of trouble.

Thank you for your time. Any help would be appreciated.

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  • what is the condition for filling such table of contents? how it should look if there are 10 html files in a folder?
    – RomanPerekhrest
    Nov 8, 2017 at 16:53
  • This seems like a very simple scriptable task (if you don’t have to worry about files with weird non-alphanumeric characters in their names). What have you tried?
    – G-Man Says 'Reinstate Monica'
    Nov 8, 2017 at 18:24
  • With more file added it should just add lines like this <a href="file1.html">file1</a><br/> <a href="file2.html">file2</a><br/> <a href="file3.html">file3</a><br/> . . I don't know much about scripting, since I am a Linux newbie. I was just wondering if there's something simple that could be done. I will learn scripting later on, but I don't want to learn it just to do this.
    – Joenikushimi
    Nov 8, 2017 at 18:36

1 Answer 1

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0

Create a file with the following contents:

#!/bin/sh
echo "<html>"
echo "   <body>"
echo "    <h1>Table of Contents</h1>"
echo "    <p style=\"text-indent:0pt\">"
for fil
do
    echo "       <a href=\"$fil\">${fil%.html}</a><br/>"
done
echo "    </p>"
echo "  </body>"
echo "</html>"

Give it a name such as toc.  Type chmod +x toc, and then run ./toc *.html in the directory where the files are.  It will write the HTML Table of Contents to the standard output, which you can, of course, redirect to a file.

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  • Thank you! This worked like a charm. It'll save me so much trouble. Much appreciated
    – Joenikushimi
    Nov 10, 2017 at 13:45

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