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Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Command line search utility

While studying for one of the finals this year, I felt the need for a CLI search utility that would search on Google, Wikipedia, Google Images, etc. I didn't know of any tools that would already do this so I decided to write my own little bash script:


#!/bin/bash
#Needs the htmlview package

opt="$1"
str="$2"


#Create the search string
until [ -z "$3" ]
do
str="$str+$3"
shift
done

case "$opt" in
"google" )
htmlview http://www.google.com/search?hl=en\&q="$str"&btnG=Google+Search &
;;

"image" )
htmlview http://images.google.com/images?q="$str"\&safe=off &
;;

"wpedia" )
htmlview http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search="$str" &
;;

"scholar" )
htmlview http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q="$str"\&ie=UTF-8\&oe=UTF-8\&hl=en\&btnG=Search &
;;

"ieee" )
htmlview http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/search/searchresult.jsp?queryText=\%28\%28"$str"\%29\%3Cin\%3Emetadata\%29 &
;;

* )
echo "Usage: search engine searchterm [searchterms]"
echo
echo "Engines: google Basic Google websearch"
echo " image Unfiltered Google image search"
echo " wpedia Wikipedia (English)"
echo " scholar Google Scholar"
echo " ieee IEEE Xplore (needs subscription)"
echo
echo "Example: search image batman"
;;
esac

echo

exit 0



It makes use of the htmlview package to discover the default browser and display the results. The use of the script is quite straightforward:


[darkknight@darkworld bin]$ search image batman begins



As is, it considers all search terms. Fancy things like Boolean expressions are not supported (yet :)). A copy of the script can be found here.

1 Comments:

Blogger Zubin said...

You forgot to mention which final you were studying for...

11:37 PM  

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