Example: you have worked on a project for a few weeks/months/years and over that time you have changed which figures are used. This generally leaves a trail of unused files which now you want to remove. The simple answer is to find all occurances of includegraphics and check if it exists in your image collection (for me I use ./img), then delete the rest. Here we will provide some tools to faciliatet this.

Firstly we define what we want to find is the figurename.png in:

\begin{figure}
\centering
\includegraphics[]{figurename.png}
\caption{}
\label{}
\end{figure}

Getting the figures used in the latex file

This can be as simple as first grep for lines with figrues in them, then pipe the output into another grep matching only the contents of the {} paranthesis`. This method was inspired by this SO post and takes the form:

grep "includegraphics" *.tex | grep -oP "\{\K[^}]+"

For our nice example above, this will produce figurename.png as expected. Unfortunately life isn't ever simple and we often split the filename over two lines. This neccesitates a more involved approach. I personally found it easier to write a simple python script which follows the following logic: find includegraphics, then find and print the inside of the next set of paranthesis. For example something like

{% highlight python %}

!/usr/bin/python

""" Find figs based on includegraphics in tex docs and prints the file names"""

import sys

filename = sys.argv[1]

with open(filename, "r") as f: lines = f.read()

parts = lines.split("includegraphics") files = [] for p in parts[1:]: files.append(p[1+p.find("{"): p.find("}")])

files = sorted(files, key=lambda s: s.lower())

for f in files: print f

I will assume now this is saved in an exuctable print_tex_figs which takes as it's only argument the tex file of interest.

Diff the figures in the file, with the image directory

Now all we need to do is a simple diff:

vimdiff <(print_text_flags somefile.tex) <(ls -1 img/)

Note we use the -1 flag to ensure that ls prints one file per line. This will give a vimdiff view of the files in the tex file, and those existing in the image. In theory you could automate deleting the unused files, but this is generally a bad idea as there is no garuntee that these files aren't used in some other way.