LowEndBox - Cheap VPS, Hosting and Dedicated Server Deals

Command Line Life: Weather at Your Fingertips

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.

raindog308

No Comments

    Leave a Reply

    Some notes on commenting on LowEndBox:

    • Do not use LowEndBox for support issues. Go to your hosting provider and issue a ticket there. Coming here saying "my VPS is down, what do I do?!" will only have your comments removed.
    • Akismet is used for spam detection. Some comments may be held temporarily for manual approval.
    • Use <pre>...</pre> to quote the output from your terminal/console, or consider using a pastebin service.

    Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *