Surfraw

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 [2] http://surfraw.alioth.debian.org/#elvilist

Interesting: Copyright (c) 2000-2001 Julian Assange <proff@iq.org>

(probably the Julian Assange of wikileaks fame)

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

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.

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.