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Watch the National Debt from the Command Line

Mar 11, 2009  By Mitch Frazier
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Neater formatting

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, 04/18/2009 - 14:57.

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

Tuxly_Tuxford_McTuxtington's picture
Submitted by Tuxly_Tuxford_M... on Thu, 03/19/2009 - 22:48.

Grepping the GIF for the alt text is a cool idea... I never thought about doing anything like that before. Powerful stuff!

Nice!

Sean Corbett's picture
Submitted by Sean Corbett (not verified) on Fri, 03/13/2009 - 07:54.

Cool tip! Just added it to my .conkyrc!

Use watch instead

Dan Fekete's picture
Submitted by Dan Fekete (not verified) on Thu, 03/12/2009 - 18:56.

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

Brett Dreher's picture
Submitted by Brett Dreher (not verified) on Thu, 03/12/2009 - 02:58.

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.

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 03/11/2009 - 19:49.

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

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 03/11/2009 - 13:50.

$ 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

amygdala's picture
Submitted by amygdala on Fri, 03/13/2009 - 10:45.

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

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 03/11/2009 - 13:40.

I wonder why so many people think locally and act globally... ;)

Very nice tech tip, BTW.

Thanks!

lolz! dDoS

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 03/11/2009 - 13:29.

did you do it for the lulz?