Better HN search with bash

The interface for Algolia search is horrible for picking date ranges so I made this little bash function to fix it (noting that "open" is an alias to "xdg-open" for me on Linux). Might work in other shells too. function hn() { if test $# -lt 1 || test $# -gt 3; then echo "Usage: $0 <query> [start=1970] [end=now]" echo "start and end are ISO dates like 2014-03-23." return 1 fi query=$1 start=$(test $# -gt 1 && date --date "$2" +%s || date --date @0 +%s) end=$(test $# -gt 2 && date --date "$3" +%s || date +%s) url="https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&type=story&query=${query}&dateRange=custom&dateStart=${start}&dateEnd=${end}" echo $url open "$url" }