[Tex/LaTex] Using BibTool with BibLaTeX, again

biblatexbibliographiesbibtool

I've installed BibTool and it seems to work for e.g. printing a formatted bibliography to the terminal. I'm trying to extract a bibliography from an .aux file from a document compiled with BibLaTeX. As a MWE here's such a document:

\documentclass[12pt, oneside, article, a4paper]{memoir}

\usepackage[backend=biber, natbib, style=authoryear-comp]{biblatex}
\ExecuteBibliographyOptions{alldates=short, language=british, sortcites}

\usepackage{kantlipsum}

\title{BibTool MWE}
\author{Thomas Hodgson}
\date{11 May 2013}
\bibliography{bibtool_mwe}

\begin{document}
\maketitle

\kant

\citet{Melville2007}

\printbibliography
\end{document}

This compiles, and generates a bib tool_mwe.aux file that looks like this:

\relax 
\providecommand*{\memsetcounter}[2]{}
\abx@aux@sortscheme{nyt}
\@writefile{toc}{\boolfalse {citerequest}\boolfalse {citetracker}\boolfalse {pagetracker}\boolfalse {backtracker}\relax }
\@writefile{lof}{\boolfalse {citerequest}\boolfalse {citetracker}\boolfalse {pagetracker}\boolfalse {backtracker}\relax }
\@writefile{lot}{\boolfalse {citerequest}\boolfalse {citetracker}\boolfalse {pagetracker}\boolfalse {backtracker}\relax }
\abx@aux@cite{Melville2007}
\abx@aux@page{1}{3}
\@writefile{toc}{\defcounter {refsection}{0}\relax }\@writefile{toc}{\contentsline {section}{References}{3}}
\abx@aux@page{2}{3}
\memsetcounter{lastsheet}{3}
\memsetcounter{lastpage}{3}

And, in case it's necessary here's the .bib file:

@book{Melville2007,
    Author = {Melville, Herman},
    Booktitle = {Moby-Dick},
    Date-Added = {2013-05-12 09:35:11 +0000},
    Date-Modified = {2013-05-12 09:37:33 +0000},
    Location = {London},
    Publisher = {Vintage},
    Title = {Moby-Dick},
    Year = {2007}}

When I put the following in the command line BibTool produces a blank line, when I leave it with ctrl-D it generates a .bib file, but it's empty.

bibtool -x bibtool_mwe.aux -o test.bib

For a while I thought this was the same problem as this question. I'm using BibLaTeX as well. But I was getting similar error messages only when I got BibTool's syntax one. In any case, my problem couldn't be solved in the way suggested by the answer to that question because my .aux file is different to the one described there.

Best Answer

Just run biber as follows:

biber mainfile --output_format bibtex

where mainfile.tex is your tex file. You will then get an file

mainfile_biber.bib

contained the relevant bib entries.

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