Run HTML Tidy in batch on Mac OS X?

Question

I want to run HTML Tidy on a large number of files located in folders and subfolders. I can use the following command in Terminal to run it on a single file:

tidy -f errors.txt -m -utf8 -i sample.html

But how can I run it specifying a root folder and have it go through each of the html files in there, and then do the same on each subfolder?

Answer 1

Use find.

find /path/to/folder -type f -name "*.html" -exec tidy -f errors.txt -m -utf8 -i {} \;

This will run tidy on all .html files in the specified folder:

• -type f matches all files (as opposed to folders, symbolic links, etc.)
• -name "*.html" matches all files with .html extension
• -exec tidy -f errors.txt -m -utf8 -i {} \; runs the specified tidy command line, with the full file path inserted at {}. \; is required by find to terminate this command.