Managing your library

Move library to a new location

Moving a library can be tricky. Simple cases are:

• files are stored in a central repository, and the bibtex contains absolute paths. Then moving the bibtex by hand is fine.
• files are stored alongside the bibtex, and the bibtex contains relative paths. Just move around the folder containing bibtex and files.

In any other cases, you risk breaking the file links.

Papers tries to be as little opinionated as possible about how files are organized, and so it relies on your own judgement and use case. When loading a bibtex, it always interprets relative file links as being relative to the bibtex file. When saving a bibtex, it will save file links according to the default setting path (usually absolute, unless local install or unless you specify otherwise).

In any case, the following set of commands will always work provided the initial file links are valid (optional parameters in brackets):

touch new.bib
papers add /path/to/old.bib --bib new.bib [ --rename ] [ --relative-paths ] [ --filesdir newfilesdir ]
rm -f /path/to/old.bib

check

It's easy to end up with duplicates in your bibtex. After adding PDFs, or every once in a while, do:

papers check --duplicates

filecheck

Check for broken links, rename files etc. Example:

papers filecheck --rename

The command can be used to move around the file directory:

papers filecheck --rename --filesdir newfilesdir

That command is also convenient to check what's actually tracked and what is not. Example workflow:

papers filecheck --rename --filesdir tmp
# check what's left over in your initial files directory, e.g.
# papers extract files/leftover1.pdf
# papers add files/leftover1.pdf
# ...
papers filecheck --rename --filesdir files

There is also a command specifically designed to clean up zombie files and folders:

papers filecheck --clean-filesdir

That command will ask before removing anything, unless --force is passed. Currently it ignores hidden files and folders, and will only consider folders that have a .{folder}.bib file inside, which is the convention papers follows to store multiple attachments. That command works best when the files are in their own folder, and not mixed up with other things, obviously.