Define words and phrases with google.

define(){ local y="$@";curl -sA"Opera" "http://www.google.com/search?q=define:${y// /+}"|grep -Eo '<li>[^<]+'|sed 's/^<li>//g'|nl|/usr/bin/perl -MHTML::Entities -pe 'decode_entities($_)';}

This version works on Mac (avoids grep -P, adding a sed step instead, and invokes /usr/bin/perl with full path in case you have another one installed). Still requires that you install perl module HTML::Entities ? here's how: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=640489

By: gthb

2010-01-30 13:08:03

grep sed bash perl macosx curl function google nl

2 Alternatives + Submit Alt

Define words and phrases with google.

This function takes a word or a phrase as arguments and then fetches definitions using Google's "define" syntax. The "nl" and perl portion isn't strictly necessary. It just makes the output a bit more readable, but this also works: define(){ local y="$@";curl -sA"Opera" "http://www.google.com/search?q=define:${y// /+}"|grep -Po '(?<=<li>)[^<]+';} If your version of grep doesn't have perl compatible regex support, then you can use this version: define(){ local y="$@";curl -sA"Opera" "http://www.google.com/search?q=define:${y// /+}"|grep -Eo '<li>[^<]+'|sed 's/<li>//g'|nl|perl -MHTML::Entities -pe 'decode_entities($_)' 2>/dev/null;} Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
$ define bash
     1  knock: a vigorous blow; "the sudden knock floored him"; "he took a bash right in his face"; "he got a bang on the head"
     2  sock: hit hard
     3  an uproarious party
     4  The American comedy television series Weeds was created by Jenji Kohan and airs on premium cable channel Showtime. ...
     5  Bash is a free software Unix shell written for the GNU Project. Its name is an acronym which stands for Bourne-again shell. ...
```
18

define(){ local y="$@";curl -sA"Opera" "http://www.google.com/search?q=define:${y// /+}"|grep -Po '(?<=<li>)[^<]+'|nl|perl -MHTML::Entities -pe 'decode_entities($_)' 2>/dev/null;}

eightmillion · 2010-01-29 05:01:11 18
Define words with google. (busybox version)

This is a minimalistic version of the ubiquitious Google definition screen scraper. This version was designed not only to run fast, but to work using BusyBox. BusyBox is a collection of basic Unix tools that have been compiled into a single binary to save space on tiny installations of Unix. For example, although my phone doesn't have perl or the GNU utilities, it does have BusyBox's stripped down versions of wget, tr, and sed. It turns out that those tools suffice for many tasks. Known Bugs: This script does not handle HTML entities at all. I don't think there's an easy way to do that within BusyBox, but I'd love to see it if someone could do it. Also, this script can only define a single word, not phrases. (Well, you could if you typed in %20, but that'd be gross.) Lastly, this script does not show the URL where definitions were found. Given the randomness of the Net, that last bit of information is often key. Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
$ def lek
A communal courtship arena which is used by several males to try to attract a female for mating.
```
0

wget -q -U busybox -O- "http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF8&q=define%3A$1" | tr '<' '\n' | sed -n 's/^li>$.*$/\1\n/p'

hackerb9 · 2010-02-01 13:01:47 9

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projack · 10 weeks 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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