Produce a Table of Contents from a Markdown (.md) document.

• Introduction
• Dependencies
• Files
• Usage
• Example
  • Stuff A
  • Stuff B
    • B.1
    • B.2
    • B.3
  • Stuff C
• History
• Author

This simple shell script reads a file that is in markdown format and extracts all the headers. From this it produces a small snippet of markdown which constitutes a table of contents of links.

This is a shell script. Uses sed and awk and of course /bin/sh. Oh and it uses grep. No other dependencies.

• tocgen.sh - this is the shell script to run
• SAMPLE.md - this is a sample file
• SAMPLE_TOC.md - this is the output of the script.

Standard Usage:
	$ ./tocgen.sh README.md > toc.md

Split Usage:
	$ ./tocgen.sh pass1 README.md > tmp.txt

Review the file tmp.txt for errors:
	$ ./tocgen.sh pass2 tmp.txt > toc.md

This is just made up stuff. The table of contents for the README.md file was produced using this script.

Stuff A goes here.

Stuff B goes here. Now we have more sub stuff:

Here is the first subdivision of Stuff B

Here is the second subdivision of Stuff B

Here is the third subdivision of Stuff B

Stuff C goes here.

In 2023 I was writting a large README.md file. I wanted to have a nice table of contents for it. I searched github for a solution. The solutions all were convoluted pieces of crap. Over designed junk. They didn't work! Standard crappy software by standard crappy developers.

Ken Stauffer