Mine the Harvest

Whilst perusing about, I chanced upon these great bash functions (original author unknown) which you and place in your .bashrc  They are a great example of how simple it can be to define a function in Bash and are actually pretty useful. First some examples of the output:

paracelsus@Callandor:~> weather London
Weather for London, UK 59°F Current: Cloudy Wind: W at 9 mph Humidity: 67%

paracelsus@Callandor:~> translate cat japanese
“cat” in Japanese:              猫

paracelsus@Callandor:~> define haxor
* Leet or Eleet (sometimes rendered l33t, 1337, or 31337), also known
* A variant spelling of hacker in the leet argot

Note that as a defined function auto completion of the initial call works too, which I didn’t know.

The code to implement this is quite simple really and is the same as the site above, only I changed one line to update a reference so the translation function works:

(Displayed in the nifty new wp-codbox plugin I just installed.)

# richs-lxh needs to find rude words in other languages, define new groovy  words that the kids use nowadays, and see if it's sunny ; D

# Weather by placename # weather "Barcelona"
weather ()
{
declare -a WEATHERARRAY
WEATHERARRAY=( `lynx -dump "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=weather+${1}&btnG=Search" | grep -A 5 -m 1 "Weather for" | grep -v "Add to "`)
echo ${WEATHERARRAY[@]}
}

#Translate Spanish/English  - USAGE: translate lamer spanish  # See dictionary.com for available languages (there are many).
translate ()
{
TRANSLATED=`lynx -dump "http://translate.reference.com/browse/${1}" | grep -i -m 1 -w "${2}:" | sed 's/^[ \t]*//;s/[ \t]*$//'`
if [[ ${#TRANSLATED} != 0 ]] ;then
   echo "\"${1}\" in ${TRANSLATED}"
   else
   echo "Sorry, I can not translate \"${1}\" to ${2}"
fi
}

# Define a groovy word - USAGE: define lamer
define ()
{
lynx -dump "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%3A+${1}&btnG=Google+Search" | grep -m 3 -w "*"  | sed 's/;/ -/g' | cut -d- -f1 > /tmp/templookup.txt
         if [[ -s  /tmp/templookup.txt ]] ;then
            until ! read response
               do
               echo "${response}"
               done < /tmp/templookup.txt
            else
               echo "Sorry $USER, I can't find the term \"${1} \""
         fi
rm -f /tmp/templookup.txt
}

These function templates are great and provide examples from which all manner of interesting things could be made. Thanks to whomever originally contributed them!

Cheers,
Pete