Bash in real life
A few days ago I was trying to download a bunch of images off of some website listing the best jazz and blues albums of the last 100 years.
I wrote a small Bash script to download all the images in bulk. I was reminded of the first time I actually used Bash to make my life easier.
I had just transferred to the University of Guelph and was enrolled in CIS 2750 - Software Systems Development and Integration. My professor, like many other CS instructors had a strong disdain for the school’s web portal and posted his lecture notes on his own website.
I had to write a self extracting installation script for the course project, which was incredibly cool. It also exposed me to the wonders of scripting!
Here’s the script I wrote to download all of the course notes. I felt like a damn wizard.
curl "http://www.uoguelph.ca/~dmccaugh/teaching/CIS2750/Notes/" # Get HTML from McCaughan's site
| grep -e "\.pdf" # Find all the pdf files
| grep -v "labs" # Remove lab pdfs
| cut -d"\"" -f 2 # Get file names
| while read -r fileurl ; # Loop over file names and download them into current dir
do curl -O "http://www.uoguelph.ca/~dmccaugh/teaching/CIS2750/Notes/$fileurl";
done