Build with me! Slugify text with a bash script

A small script that turns an article title into a filename.

What’s a slug, anyway?

A slug is a human-readable, unique identifier, used to identify a resource such as a blog article or a file name. Good slugs are search-engine optimized, which means they can be parsed to quickly indicate what the resource is all about. It’s usally the same as the resource title, but lowercased and snake-cased.

This tiny script is great for blog writing, but for creating system filenames too. Similar to Wordpress or other content management system that does this automatically when saving a file. Yes, I’m sure there are plugins that do this for Jekyll. But I wanted to write a bash script.

A good slug is short, descriptive, lower-case, has no accents, or ambiguous or hard to read-at-a-glance characters, and is unique. (Dave Sag)

The script

Create an alias

If I’m in the same directory as the script, I can run sh slugify.sh from the command line. But that’s not convenient. So I’ll add an alias in my bash profile:

alias slugify="sh slugify.sh"

I’ll start a new session to pick up the file change. Now, I can just type slugify to execute the script.

Make it available everywhere

Navigating to the directory where I created the script isn’t convenient either. So I’ll move slugify.sh to my When I save this script to /usr/local/bin. This directory is already added to my Bash $PATH. Now, I can access this script from any directory. From the command line, when I run slugify, it gives me the following prompts:

Hi, clairefannan! Please enter the string you want to slugify:

hello sweet world

hello-sweet-world was copied to your clipboard.

That’s it! Now I can paste the slug into my code editor. What will you use it for?