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Exporting All Obsidian Links to a Text File

#obsidian #productivity #bash #tutorial

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Exporting All Obsidian Links to a Text File

Obsidian offers a powerful system that makes it easy to create links between notes. The [[...]] style wiki links are used to establish these internal relationships. So, how can we export all of these links?

With the command below, we can scan all Obsidian links in our Vault directory and collect them into a file named all_links.txt:

rg -o '\[\[.*?\]\]' ~/Vault > all_links.txt
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Explanation:

  • rg (ripgrep): A fast and efficient text search tool, ideal for searching large sets of files using regular expressions.
  • -o: Outputs only the matching portion, not the entire line—so it extracts just the [[...]] parts.
  • '\[\[.*?\]\]': This regular expression finds all wiki-style links used in Obsidian.
  • ~/Vault: The directory where the search will be conducted. Replace this with the path to your own Obsidian Vault.
  • > all_links.txt: Redirects the output to a file named all_links.txt.

What Is It Good For?

This method is very useful for generating a list of all links in your Vault and performing analysis on them. For example:

  • Which notes have the most incoming links?
  • Which notes are "orphans" (i.e., without backlinks)?
  • How are clusters of content forming around specific topics?

Such analyses help improve the effectiveness of your personal knowledge management system and give you insights into how your content interacts.

This command and workflow provide a powerful starting point for Obsidian users who want to perform link-based content analysis.

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