# A command line to reformat a list of links as an html document.
# This needs additional logic, for example to create the <dt> elements
# and to deal with www.blah.com type links, which a browser might interpret
# as a relative link in some cases. The file 'textdocs2html.txt/sh' has
# a similar example.
# It will be obvious from the collection of shell scripts at the location
#   http://www.geocities.com/matth3wbishop/eg/unix-shell/
# that I am fond of simple structured plain text formats rather that 
# big and unwieldy, though theoretically powerful xml style formats for
# textual data. This is really a philosophical and personality trait.

# The 'link file' which this filter script is supposed to transform is 
# assumed to be in a simple format, namely that each link has a * character
# somewhere before it on the same line, and that the lines following the 
# url are descriptive sentences refering to that url, until another line
# containing a * character is encountered, and so on.
# Author: M Bishop.

cat geo-links.txt | sed "s/^ *\* *\([^ ]\{1,\}\)/<di><a href='\1'>\1<\/a><\/di>/gi" | less