Watch the National Debt from the Command Line
March 11th, 2009 by Mitch Frazier in
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Mitch Frazier is an Associate Editor for Linux Journal and the Web Editor for linuxjournal.com.
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December 2009, #188
If last month's Infrastrucuture issue was too "big" for you then try on this month's Embedded issue. Find out how to use Player for programming mobile robots, build a humidity controller for your root cellar, find out how to reduce the boot time of your embedded system, and if you're new to embedded systems find out the basics that go into one. You can also read about the Beagle Board, the Mesh Potato and a spate of other interestingly named items. And along with our regular columns don't miss our new monthly column: Economy Size Geek.
Neater formatting
On April 18th, 2009 Anonymous (not verified) says:
while true; do echo -ne "`wget --quiet http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock -O - | grep debtiv.gif | sed -e 's/.*ALT="//' -e 's/".*//' -e 's/ //g'`\r"; sleep 1; done
cool
On March 19th, 2009 Tuxly_Tuxford_McTuxtington says:
Grepping the GIF for the alt text is a cool idea... I never thought about doing anything like that before. Powerful stuff!
Nice!
On March 13th, 2009 Sean Corbett (not verified) says:
Cool tip! Just added it to my .conkyrc!
Use watch instead
On March 12th, 2009 Dan Fekete (not verified) says:
You can also use watch to run programs periodically. Try this:
$ cat > nationaldebt
#!/bin/bash
wget --quiet http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock -O - | grep debtiv.gif | sed -e 's/.*ALT="//' -e 's/".*//' | sed 's/ //g'
$ chmod +x nationaldebt
and run it like so:
$ watch ./nationaldebt
Fun Find
On March 12th, 2009 Brett Dreher (not verified) says:
Nice find, tweaked it slightly with another sed statement (i'm no expert with sed/awk and regex) to trim the spaces from it in a small bash script now, my final version:
#!/bin/bash
wget --quiet http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock -O - | grep debtiv.gif | sed -e 's/.*ALT="//' -e 's/".*//' | sed 's/ //g'
Socialism is death.
On March 11th, 2009 Anonymous (not verified) says:
If only there were a way to kick that bum socialist Obama out of the white house from the command line.
$ while true > do > wget
On March 11th, 2009 Anonymous (not verified) says:
$ while true
> do
> wget --quiet http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock -O - | grep debtiv.gif | sed -e 's/.*ALT="//' -e 's/".*//'
> sleep 3
> done
$ 1 0 , 9 5 9 , 5 0 2 , 1 4 8 , 9 8 5 . 0 4
Shorter
On March 13th, 2009 amygdala says:
watch -n 9 "wget -q http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock -O - |grep debtiv.gif |sed -e 's/.*ALT=\"//' -e 's/\".*//' |sed 's/ //g'"National debt... for the USA you mean
On March 11th, 2009 Anonymous (not verified) says:
I wonder why so many people think locally and act globally... ;)
Very nice tech tip, BTW.
Thanks!
lolz! dDoS
On March 11th, 2009 Anonymous (not verified) says:
did you do it for the lulz?
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