Tiny Tool: checkRefs.sh

while read -r referenced_String; do
    matches=$(grep -Flsi "$referenced_String" *)
    echo "## ${referenced_String}"
    if [ -n "$matches" ]; then
        echo "$matches"
    else
        echo "unreferenced"
    fi
done

Used with ls -1 ../templates | sh ../checkRefs.sh, this will check the files in the current directory to see which ones use a file from ../templates

I used this when building playbooks, to see which templates were used by files in the current directory – and which were unused. If a file referenced two templates, I could see that, too.

I built the tool because I did the work by hand a couple of times, and that became slow and error-prone as the number of files and strings increased. I couldn't find a way to make a tool (either on the commandline or within my IDE) do it. So it's tool time. Making it took about 15 minutes, and taught me some stuff – time well spent. Writing about making it has taken an hour.

I imagine I'll use it generally: I'll certainly use it on my current project again.

Subscribers get to see how I used LLMs Qwen3 and Claude3.7Sonnet.