4 ms·

Surfraw

42 points by naner 16y ago

res0nat0r 16y ago
As with all of these cli based www search tools I just don't see how learning/installing these is any quicker than: alt-j (I'm using wmii which is pretty 'raw'), "<imdb|slashdot|freshmeat|define> keyword" from your firefox google based homepage, cut/paste. I like to be minimal and love my mutt/irssi/cplay/vim sessions all wrapped in screen, but google based keyword searching via a firefox homepage seems hard to really beat in practicality.
- mcav 16y ago
  Could be useful for scripting.
  - zzzzzzzzz 16y ago
    How so? Afaict it just produces a url and hands it off to a browser of your choice. For example, the piratebay example which Bjoern posted (which requires a separate 'dlynx' script, btw): surfraw -browser="dlynx" piratebay 2012 | whatever... can be rewritten as: lynx -dump http://thepiratebay.org/search/2012 http://thepiratebay.org/search/2012 | whatever...
leif 16y ago
I'd be happier with this if it would, for example, parse the google results and just print them rather than opening a browser window. Also, it seems to be broken with chrome.
alanh 16y ago
Anybody want to put this into plain English? (Why are the example usages void of output?)
- Bjoern 16y ago
  The output depends if you want to use e.g. w3m, lynx, firefox, etc. etc.
Bjoern 16y ago
I found this article interesting to explain a bit more [1]. Then I was still not happy and tried it myself. Basically it is a tool that lets you choose what frontend you want to use e.g. w3m, lynx, firefox etc. and gives you shortcuts to certain interesting pages [2] you might want to access on CLI. That shortcut again has also a help page - very interesting for scripting. It's sort of like the "dict" command but for all kind of webpages. I played around... surfraw -browser="dlynx" translate -from=fr -to=en la verite vous liberera | head -50 > Will show the proper translation surfraw -browser="dlynx" piratebay 2012 | egrep -i "\.torrent" | head -1 | sed 's/^[0-9. ]*//g' | xargs -iin wget in > Will download a torrent file from piratebay etc. [1] http://crazylazy.info/blog/content/scrapers-surfraw http://crazylazy.info/blog/content/scrapers-surfraw [2] http://surfraw.alioth.debian.org/#elvilist http://surfraw.alioth.debian.org/#elvilist
limmeau 16y ago
Interesting: Copyright (c) 2000-2001 Julian Assange <proff@iq.org> (probably the Julian Assange of wikileaks fame)
- tptacek 16y ago
  Unless there are two Julian Assanges that call themselves "proff", yes.

42 points by naner 16y ago

As with all of these cli based www search tools I just don't see how learning/installing these is any quicker than: alt-j (I'm using wmii which is pretty 'raw'), "<imdb|slashdot|freshmeat|define> keyword" from your firefox google based homepage, cut/paste. I like to be minimal and love my mutt/irssi/cplay/vim sessions all wrapped in screen, but google based keyword searching via a firefox homepage seems hard to really beat in practicality.

mcav 16y ago
Could be useful for scripting.
- zzzzzzzzz 16y ago
  How so? Afaict it just produces a url and hands it off to a browser of your choice. For example, the piratebay example which Bjoern posted (which requires a separate 'dlynx' script, btw): surfraw -browser="dlynx" piratebay 2012 | whatever... can be rewritten as: lynx -dump http://thepiratebay.org/search/2012 http://thepiratebay.org/search/2012 | whatever...

leif 16y ago

I'd be happier with this if it would, for example, parse the google results and just print them rather than opening a browser window. Also, it seems to be broken with chrome.

alanh 16y ago

Anybody want to put this into plain English? (Why are the example usages void of output?)

Bjoern 16y ago
The output depends if you want to use e.g. w3m, lynx, firefox, etc. etc.

Bjoern 16y ago

I found this article interesting to explain a bit more [1]. Then I was still not happy and tried it myself. Basically it is a tool that lets you choose what frontend you want to use e.g. w3m, lynx, firefox etc. and gives you shortcuts to certain interesting pages [2] you might want to access on CLI. That shortcut again has also a help page - very interesting for scripting. It's sort of like the "dict" command but for all kind of webpages. I played around... surfraw -browser="dlynx" translate -from=fr -to=en la verite vous liberera | head -50 > Will show the proper translation surfraw -browser="dlynx" piratebay 2012 | egrep -i "\.torrent" | head -1 | sed 's/^[0-9. ]*//g' | xargs -iin wget in > Will download a torrent file from piratebay etc. [1] http://crazylazy.info/blog/content/scrapers-surfraw http://crazylazy.info/blog/content/scrapers-surfraw [2] http://surfraw.alioth.debian.org/#elvilist http://surfraw.alioth.debian.org/#elvilist

limmeau 16y ago

tptacek 16y ago
Unless there are two Julian Assanges that call themselves "proff", yes.