Problem

We have multiple files for each chapter and subchapter, but would like to deliver one file per chapter to nostarch.

I did this by hand recently, but it was a little tedious and not quite what I wanted, so it'd be nice to have exactly what I wanted in a script.

Solution

This script should be written in Rust and should:

• Take a directory as an argument (this might be a temporary directory and I'm not sure of its name yet, I'd like to hook this into the script for Need a link remover script #182, but you should be able to test this without the other script by passing this script the src directory)
• Group all the *.md files in that directory by their chapter prefix
• Concatenate the subchapters in order, and with one newline in between
• Write the output to a file in the nostarch directory named for that chapter.

For example, this is what should happen for chapter 1 if we pass this script the src directory:

• Take these three files because they start with ch01-:
  • src/ch01-00-introduction.md
  • src/ch01-01-installation.md
  • src/ch01-02-hello-world.md
• Concatenate so that the result looks like this (I'm showing the beginning and end of each subchapter here:

# Introduction

Welcome to “The Rust Programming Language”, an introductory book about Rust.

...

## Contributing to the book

This book is open source. If you find an error, please don’t hesitate to file an
issue or send a pull request [on GitHub].

[on GitHub]: https://github.com/rust-lang/book

## Installation

The first step to using Rust is to install it. You’ll need an internet

...

### Local documentation

The installer also includes a copy of the documentation locally, so you can
read it offline. On Linux or Mac, run `rustup doc` to open the local
documentation in your browser. On Windows, the documentation is in a
`share/doc` directory inside the directory where Rust was installed.

## Hello, World!

Now that you have Rust installed, let’s write your first Rust program. It's

...

> Note: If you want to look at Cargo in more detail, check out the official
[Cargo guide], which covers all of its features.

[Cargo guide]: http://doc.crates.io/guide.html

• Store the result in nostarch/chapter01.md.

This should happen for all the chNN-NN-whatever.md files, and also for the appendix-NN.md files. There might be more filename patterns someday (glossary?), so make a place where it's easy to add new ones.