Update figure numbering

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 15:42:00 -0400

I was editing some markdown and had to insert a new figure in the middle. The problem is that this document already has an explicit figure numbering (e.g., “Figure 5”), so changing tens of figures felt dull. I like to run small (GNU) awk scripts for this type of tasks.

# update_figures.awk
{
 if (match($0, "Figure ([0-9]+)", num)){
 if (num[1] > after)
 gsub("Figure ([0-9]+)", "Figure " num[1] + increase_by)
 };
 print $0
}

This changes Figure X into Figure X + increase_by starting after the variable “after”. And we can run it as follows:

awk -v after=4 -v increase_by=1 -f update_figures.awk input_file.md

To edit the file in-place add the -i flag.

Recursive search and replace

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 13:07:00 -0400

I needed to rename all occurrences of a pattern with another, where I knew there was no ambiguous situations. This uses ripgrep, xargs and GNU sed. source.

rg old_pattern --files-with-matches | xargs sed -i 's/old_pattern/new_pattern/g'

textediting on Alán's blog

Update figure numbering

Recursive search and replace