org-dead-refs

find refs to non-existent org nodes

sudo curl https://raw.github.com/yumiris/org-dead-refs/master/org-dead-refs.sh -o /usr/local/bin/org-dead-refs
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/org-dead-refs

Introduction

This nimble Bash script will print out all of the references in your .org files which point to non-existent Org/Org-Roam nodes. A practical use for this is to remove links to a file or node you've deleted!

To use it, simply cd into your Org/Org-Roam directory and invoke the script. If you want to be fancy, you can install the script to your /usr/local/bin directory!

#!/bin/bash

# org-dead-refs.sh --- Find refs to non-existent Org nodes.
#
# Filename: org-dead-refs.sh
# Description: Find refs to non-existent Org nodes.
# Author: Emilian Roman
# Created: Mon, 26 Sep 2022
# Version: 0
# URL: https://github.com/yumiris/org-dead-refs.git

UUID='[[:xdigit:]]{8}(-[[:xdigit:]]{4}){3}-[[:xdigit:]]{12}'
LINK='id:'
NODE=':ID:.*'

comm -23 \
    <(grep -rhEwoa "${LINK}${UUID}" | sed 's/id://g' | sort -u) \
    <(grep -rhEwoa "${NODE}${UUID}" | sed 's/.* //g' | sort -u) \
    | xargs -I {} grep -ran {} # find context for known dead refs

Logic

The script aims for speed, and works like so:

1. Recursively find all of the [[id:<uuid>]] in every text file. These are created by you!
2. Recursively find all of the :ID: <uuid> in every text file. These are created by org-id.el.
3. Generate a list of UUIDs that were found in step 1, but not in step 2, then find all the text files containing these UUIDs.

The script took roughly one second to find all of the invalid links in a directory with nearly 3,000 .org files.

The contents range from tiny nuggets of notes, to biblical streams of consciousness which no deity could ever hope to finish reading.