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2011-03-12 - Confoo 2011 presentation
Slides are available from the commandlinefu presentation at Confoo 2011: http://presentations.codeinthehole.com/confoo2011/
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Retrieve a random command from the commandlinefu.com API

Terminal - Retrieve a random command from the commandlinefu.com API
wget -qO - http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/random/plaintext | sed -n '1d; /./p'
2010-12-05 15:32:14
User: dramaturg
Functions: sed wget
7
Up
Down
Retrieve a random command from the commandlinefu.com API

Seeing that we get back plain text anyway we don't need lynx. Also the sed-part removes the credit line.

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Alternatives

There are 7 alternatives - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives
lynx --dump http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/random/plaintext | grep .
2010-12-04 20:53:10
User: root
Functions: grep
2
Up
Down
Retrieve a random command from the commandlinefu.com API

Can be integrated into your .bashrc if you like. You'll probably want to grep out my name.

Show sample output | Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

You can simplify the sed bit to just:

sed 1d
Comment by flatcap 132 weeks and 2 days ago

Of course. But then you will get additional empty lines in the output which was the reason for grep in the original solution.

In my humble opinion you can then just omit sed/grep altogether, because one line of credits wont matter.

Comment by dramaturg 132 weeks and 2 days ago

Nice for MOTD as fortune alternative or complement.

Thank you for the idea :)

Comment by Dereckson 132 weeks and 1 day ago

Your point of view

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