Find files that are not included by any other files

Question

In a larger latex project am using \include to include the chapter files and within those \input for sections and subsections.

I just discovered that due to some rearranging some of the \input commands got lost, so that several files did not get included and were no part of the generated PDF anymore.

I am not sure, if any other includes got missing as well. How can I check that efficiently?

My .tex files are scattered in a folder and one sub-folder of it, there are about 30 or 40 .tex files.

I am using ubuntu (if there are solutions outside of latex)

Answer 1

Under Linux, you can use the facilities of bash. First, you make an array—a list of .tex files in the current folder (based on a wonderful StackOverflow answer):

arr=( $(find ./ -maxdepth 1 -iname "*.tex" | cut -c3- | sort | rev | cut -c5- | rev ) )

The cutlery removes the ./ at the beginning of each file (but we still want to preserve the relative file path, so we can’t printf or -exec basename them). If you want recursive search, remove the -maxdepth 1 option. Apparently some people include .tex files without extensions, so the code was modified: we cut off the extension and then search for it optionally. UPDATE. Besides that, we need the original list of files with extensions, so we need to run this (based on this solution):

arrtex=( $(find ./ -maxdepth 1 -iname "*.tex" | cut -c3- | sort ) )
arrtex=$(printf " %s" "${arrtex[@]}")
arrtex=${arrtex:1}

Assuming that you want to search whether they are included in your master file, just loop through every element of the list and check whether it exists in the master file:

for i in "${arr[@]}"
do
 a="\\\\in(put|clude)\{${i}(\.tex)\}"
 if grep -P -q -e "${a}" ${arrtex}
 then msg="found"
 else msg="NOT found"
 fi
 echo "Inclusion of ${i} in any TeX file: ${msg}"
done

Obviously you should disregard the fact that your master file is not included in your master file. I just wanted this code to be as simple as that.

If you want to search for inclusions in your master file only (say, main.tex), then use this reduced version:

arr=( $(find ./ -maxdepth 1 -iname "*.tex" | cut -c3- | sort | rev | cut -c5- | rev ) )
for i in "${arr[@]}"
do
 a="\\\\in(put|clude)\{${i}(\.tex)\}"
 if grep -P -q -e "${a}" main.tex
 then msg="found"
 else msg="NOT found"
 fi
 echo "Inclusion of ${i} in main.tex: ${msg}"
done

There is much room for improvement, so any suggestions are welcome!

Sample output for my recent project (where chap02.tex is an actual chapter, main.tex is the master file and TODO.tex is a garbage pile for notes):

Inclusion of chap02 in any TeX file: found
Inclusion of main in any TeX file: NOT found
Inclusion of TODO in any TeX file: NOT found

echo ${arr[@]}
chap02 main TODO