Command Line Life: Weather at Your Fingertips

Mar 01, 2023 @ 7:05 pm

I’ve been playing around with various command line tools and will be sharing some of the fun ones I’ve found here on LowEndBox. Today’s tool: ansiweather.

ansiweather -a false -l "Portland,US" -u imperial
Weather in Portland => 45 °F - Wind => 5.99 mph S - Humidity => 63 % - Pressure => 30.12 inHg

Of course, it’s called ansiweather so if you leave out the “-a false” you’ll get things in color.

This is a standard Debian package, so just

apt-get install ansiweather

And you can find further documentation here.

Under the covers, it’s a very simple script – and it’s just that, a shell script. /bin/sh in fact – no bashisms and it runs cleanly Linuxes and BSDs.

It works by querying the openweathermap.org API, and then parsing the JSON it gets back using jq, a command-line JSON parser.

After that it’s just formatting, processing options, and adding colors.

The code is quite nicely formatted. If you’re tempted to change it to get the output different, you might just want to query the API directly and emit different stuff with jq – and the code is a great reference on how to do that.

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raindog308

Dread Lord of LowEnd Content at LowEndBox

I'm raindog308, techno polymath and long-time LowEndTalk community Administrator. My technical interests include all things Unix, perl, python, golang, shell scripting, vintage operating systems such as MVS, and relational database systems such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.

I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308