Force a certain source file to always be recompiled

[Pito Salas]

Hi all,

This might be a unique requirement. Because I have a pretty complicated app built on top of Nanoc I would like to say that a particular source file, say ./content/toc.md.erb is always recompiled whenever any other file is being recompiled. So file x changes, nano compile sees that x changed, and recompiles ./content/toc.md.erb as well as x.

Is that possible? I tried some tricks with guard file and that didn’t work. Then I tried nanoc compile -w but that didn’t work because part of my content is in a symlinked directory and it seems that compile -w doesn’t watch the symlink directory as well.

Ideas?

Pito Salas
Faculty, Computer Science
Brandeis University

[Dave Everitt]

The first thing that came to mind would be to set up a bash alias (e.g. `compileall` that runs `touch toc.md.erb; nanoc compile`, if just changing the date and not the contents of a file will trigger Nanoc to recompile that file. If that doesn't do it:

Set up `compileall` like before as an alias, but use find and mv to change the filename to a unique timestamp with seconds before the `nanoc complile` command, which would make nanoc recompile:

find ./ -name ./toc-*.erb -exec mv {} ./"toc-$(date +"%F-%H-%M-%S").erb" \;

"./" can be replaced with whatever path is needed

A test:

Filename before: toc-2021-08-25-14-09-23.erb

Filename after: toc-2021-08-25-14-15-35.erb

If neither approach appeals, perhaps add a commented-out version number or date at the top of "toc.md.erb" that you change with awk, then run as an alias as before (sorry, no examples for this one!)

[Pito Salas]

Good ideas Dave. I was looking through the `Rules` file options but didn't see anything there. Actually I am using `Guard` myself if you are familiar with it. I might try your idea with Guard. Thanks again!

Pito Salas
Faculty, Computer Science
Brandeis University

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