cat-log

a tiny book collection cataloging script

Description

cat-log resolves ISBNs to short lines of information, and appends them to a file in tsv format. ISBN lookup is handled via the OpenLibrary API.

Usage

Before using cat-log, ensure you have awk, curl, and jq installed.

cat-log has two modes of operation: add and bulk. In add mode, a single ISBN is given to the script, like so:

./cat-log add 0131103709 collection.tsv

This allows for adding books to the collection file one at a time. If you have many ISBNs and want to add them all to the catalog, bulk mode is used, like so:

./cat-log bulk my-isbn-list collection.tsv

Each line in the ISBN list file should contain a single ISBN-13 or ISBN-10 on its own, without any dashes or characters aside from digits. Empty lines and lines starting with '=' are skipped.

If the specified collection file does not exist, cat-log will create it.

Issues

cat-log was initially a personal project, only released in the hope that someone else may find it useful. As such, I haven't thoroughly tested certain edge cases; if you come across a book that breaks the script, feel free to open a PR or issue.