Randall Munroe as usual nails it. xkcd

The quest to remove friction from posting to this blog continues. In an earlier post, I shared how I used rake to automatically generate a blog template for me and place it in Jekyll’s drafts folder. Now, I realized I’d also like to handle publishing that post with approximately 10% fewer keystrokes.

I’ll share the script first, then explain my motivations and how it works.

#!/bin/bash
PS3="Choose a draft to publish: "
select FILENAME in _drafts/*;
do
    today=$(date -I)
    shortfile=$(basename $FILENAME)
    mv $FILENAME _posts/$today-$shortfile && echo "Successfully moved" || echo "Had a problem"
    break
done
exit

That’s it, that’s literally it, but I’m so excited about it.

Jekyll considers a post to be a draft if it is a markdown file in its _drafts folder. It considers it to be published if it is in its _posts folder. I believe the filename in _posts also needs to contain the date (e.g. 2025-11-19-this-is-a-post.md) but I’m not sure if that’s a hard requirement or just a requirement for my setup.

So what I have to do when I publish a new post is mv _drafts/mydraft.md _posts/yyyy-mm-dd-mycoolpost.md and that is clearly too many keystrokes, right? Now I just have to write rake publish (I created a rake task that just runs this script), choose my file from a list of files, and I’m done.

To write this I had to learn about two new-to-me bash concepts, the select construct and basename.

The select construct

select can be used to create (super basic) menus. The man page for select…..is for the wrong thing! But a good writeup on the select construct can be found here. In short, select thing in list will pop up a menu that you can interact with by choosing the item number, and assign the value to the variable $thing.

You can do: select option in "BLT" "cheesesteak" "pb&j" and you’ll get the following output:

1) BLT
2) cheesesteak
3) pb&j
$>

In the case of my script, the “in” is the contents of the directory _drafts/*.

(Notice the syntax is not in ls _drafts/*, implying that we’re not just executing a command and passing the results to the select construct. Which is a mystery for another time.)

The upshot, however, is that I get a list like:

1) _drafts/ai-is-hard.md            3) _drafts/microblogging.md         5) _drafts/recipe-buddy-part1.md
2) _drafts/efficient-linux-ch-4.md  4) _drafts/rake-publish.md

(oooh, a peek behind the curtain!)

select will then allow you to choose one of the numbers, and store the value in the variable we defined (here, $FILENAME.)

It will continue to loop until it reaches a break command, so the break is important in this script. But then all we need to do is get today’s date and rename/move the file to its new home.

basename

This is a lil one, but a handy one. Again, let’s go to the man page for this util:

BASENAME - strip directory and suffix from filenames

Does what it says on the tin. If you have /home/user/long/path/to/file.md and you want file.md, basename /home/user/long/path/to/file.md will get that for you. Note that it removes the extension if and only if the extension is provided as a second argument, and if the provided extension matches that of the file, which is a little quirky. In my case I want to keep the extension, so this works well for my use case.

And there you have it, 10 lines of code that took longer to write about than to write, and which will surely save me hours minutes seconds of precious time. Huzzah!