$ def lek A communal courtship arena which is used by several males to try to attract a female for mating.
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($_)' 2>/dev/null;}
Show Sample Output
This version works on Mac (avoids grep -P, adding a sed step instead, and invokes /usr/bin/perl with full path in case you have another one installed). Still requires that you install perl module HTML::Entities ? here's how: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=640489
Any thoughts on this command? Does it work on your machine? Can you do the same thing with only 14 characters?
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define(){ wget -q -U busybox -O- "http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF8&q=define%3A$(echo "$@"|tr ' ' '+')" | tr '<' '\n' | sed -n 's/^li>\(.*\)/\1\n/p';}