View the newest xkcd comic.

curl -s 'xkcd.com' | awk -F\" '/^<img/{printf("<?xml version=\"1.0\"?>\n<xkcd>\n<item>\n <title>%s</title>\n <comment>%s</comment>\n <image>%s</image>\n</item>\n</xkcd>\n", $6, $4, $2)}'

I wasn't sure how to display the image, so I thought I'd try xml for a different twist.

Sample Output

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xkcd>
<item>
<title>Spinal Tap Amps</title>
<comment>Wow, that's less than $200 per ... uh ... that's a good deal!</comment>
<image>http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/spinal_tap_amps.png</image>
</item>
</xkcd>

By: putnamhill

2009-12-03 19:49:37

awk awk curl xkcd comic webcomic

10 Alternatives + Submit Alt

View the newest xkcd comic.

This function displays the latest comic from xkcd.com. One of the best things about xkcd is the title text when you hover over the comic, so this function also displays that after you close the comic. To get a random xkcd comic, I also use the following: xkcdrandom(){ wget -qO- dynamic.xkcd.com/comic/random|tee >(feh $(grep -Po '(?<=")http://imgs[^/]+/comics/[^"]+\.\w{3}'))|grep -Po '(?<=(\w{3})" title=").*(?=" alt)';}
This is sample output - yours may be different.
24

xkcd(){ wget -qO- http://xkcd.com/|tee >(feh $(grep -Po '(?<=")http://imgs[^/]+/comics/[^"]+\.\w{3}'))|grep -Po '(?<=(\w{3})" title=").*(?=" alt)';}

eightmillion · 2009-11-27 09:11:47 25
View the newest xkcd comic.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
6

eog `curl -s http://xkcd.com/ | sed -n 's/<h3>Image URL.*: $.*$<\/h3>/\1/p'`

bluesman · 2010-08-31 13:23:21 6
View the newest xkcd comic.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
1

wget `lynx --dump http://xkcd.com/|grep png`

metalx1000 · 2009-12-03 23:10:22 4
View the newest xkcd comic.

This function displays the latest comic from xkcd.com. One of the best things about xkcd is the title text when you hover over the comic, so this function also displays that after you close the comic. To get a random xkcd comic use the following: xkcdrandom() { wget -qO- http://dynamic.xkcd.com/comic/random | sed -n 's#^<img src="$http://imgs.[^"]\+$"\s\+title="$.\+\?$"\salt.\+$#eog "\1"\necho '"'\2'#p" | bash; } These are just a bit shorter than the ones eigthmillion wrote, however his version didn't work as expected on my laptop for some reason (I got the title-tag first), so these build a command which is executed by bash.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
0

xkcd() { wget -qO- http://xkcd.com/ | sed -n 's#^<img src="$http://imgs.[^"]\+$"\s\+title="$.\+\?$"\salt.\+$#eog "\1"\necho '"'\2'#p" | bash ; }

John_W · 2010-08-25 15:44:31 7
View the newest xkcd comic.

Same thing just a different way to get there. You will need lynx
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-1

lynx --dump --source http://www.xkcd.com | grep `lynx --dump http://www.xkcd.com | egrep '(png|jpg)'` | grep title | cut -d = -f2,3 | cut -d '"' -f2,4 | sed -e 's/"/|/g' | awk -F"|" ' { system("display " $1);system("echo "$2); } '

solarislackware · 2009-12-03 18:53:57 4

What Others Think

rahimhh21 · 109 weeks and 1 day ago

Perfecthomepugs · 100 weeks and 4 days ago

pugpuppies95 · 62 weeks and 5 days ago

yeneba6574 · 17 weeks and 5 days ago

What do you think?

Any thoughts on this command? Does it work on your machine? Can you do the same thing with only 14 characters?

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