Batch Libreoffice Writer file modification

Question

When a family member started using Libreoffice Writer on Ubuntu they used a particular document over and over as a starting point for new documents. Subsequently these documents were themselves used as starting points over and over for even more documents. Unfortunately the family member wasn't aware of the "Title" field for these documents.

End result, now they have hundreds of documents with bogus content in the "Title" field, all the same. Except, after they learned about this, they started fixing the Title field, so not every document has this problem. Only most of them.

Is there a command line / batch / terminal way to

1. select the offending documents
2. blank out the Title field

Doing it document by document is impractical because there are so many.

Searching ask.libreoffice.org didn't yield an answer.

Answer 1

This script (this version) seems to do it.

#!/bin/bash
#
#   Last updated: "Sun Jul 29 23:43:59 2018"
#
# Replace "Unwanted content" with "Desired Stuff" in the document's "Title" (File->Properties->Title)
# **WARNING** Leaves original unmodified "<file>" in "<file>~". Overwrites previous "<file>~"
# modified to remember the contents of the zip archive, and zip
# every one back together
if [[ "$1" = "-d" ]] ; then
    set -x
    shift
fi
while [[ "$1" ]] ; do
    file="$1"
    shift
    contents=$(unzip -l "$file" | tail -n +4 | awk '{print $4}' | tr "\n" " ")
    dirs=$(unzip -l "$file" | tail -n +4 | awk '{print $4}' | grep / | cut -d/ -f1 | uniq)
    unzip -qq "$file"
    sed -e 's/dc:title>Unwanted content/dc:title>Desired stuff/' meta.xml >meta.xml.new
    mv -f meta.xml.new meta.xml
    mv -f "$file" "${file}~"
    zip --quiet -o "$file" -r $contents
    rm -r $contents $dirs
    cmp --quiet "$file" "${file}~"
    if [[ $? -eq 0 ]] ; then
        mv -f "${file}~" "$file"
    fi
done

Make the script, called FixMyTitle executable, and store in in a directory in your $PATH. $HOME/bin is good.

Then, use find (read man find) to pass the names of the files to FixMyTitle:

find $HOME -type f -name '*.odt' -print0 | \
    xargs -0 FixMyTitle

Later, clean up the obsolete originals by:

find $HOME -type f -iname '*.odt~' -delete