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Simon Willison’s Weblog

Abusing the command line

If you’re running OS X, try this:

say -v Kathy `curl --silent http://api.technorati.com/getinfo?username=simonwillison | grep ’<inbound’ | sed -e ’s/ <//’ | sed -e ’s/inboundblogs>/Simons blog has /’ | sed -e ’s/<\/inboundblogs>/ inbound blogs and /’ | sed -e ’s/inboundlinks>//’ | sed -e ’s/<\/inboundlinks>/ inbound links/’`

Your computer should read out to you my Technorati inbound blogs and inbound links, extracted from the Technorati web API. Parsing XML using sed is a nasty trick I picked up from this O’Reilly article; speaking the output of a command using the ’say’ and the backtick shell operator was my moment of inspiration for the day.

Posted 26th March 2004 at 1:28 am

This is Abusing the command line by Simon Willison, posted on 26th March 2004.

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7 comments

  1. I'm embarrassed to admit I just spent the last 10 minutes making my computer 'say' uh, bad things.

    Gina - 26th March 2004 02:56 - #

  2. Festival is good for that on Linux:

    $ festival --tts < file.txt

    Michael - 26th March 2004 04:09 - #

  3. or, on a linux system:

    Your comment could not be added:

    * XHTML is not well-formed

    oh well, i tried.

    Eric - 26th March 2004 05:41 - #

  4. You probably forgot to painstakingly escape every single ampersand, less-than and greater-than sign. Of course, it's absurd that you have to remember to do that. Time to make the comment system a bit less draconian.

    Simon Willison - 26th March 2004 06:46 - #

  5. You don't need all those sed commands. You can join them up into one big sed command with lots of -e flags. It'll run ever so slightly quicker. :-)

    Whilst it's a very cute one liner, I'm finding more and more that I would knock up a quick XSLT stylesheet to do jobs like this instead. It's a lot less brittle if you end up using it a lot. I would say that XSLT is hard, but compared to Unix shell scripting, there's probably not much in it! It doesn't have the "one liner" factor as much though.

    -Dom

    Dominic Mitchell - 26th March 2004 07:16 - #

  6. Ok, I couldn't resist. Here's a slightly condensed version.

    say -v Kathy `curl --silent "http://api.technorati.com/getinfo?username=simonw illison"  |
sed '/<inbound/{s/ <//;
s/inboundblogs>/Simons blog has /;
s/<\/inboundblogs>/ inbound blogs and /;
s/inboundlinks>//;
s/<\/inboundlinks>/ inbound links/;}'`

    Dominic Mitchll - 26th March 2004 07:23 - #

  7. On Debian you can also use flite:

    echo 'hello' | flite

    Levin - 26th March 2004 11:48 - #

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