______ _ _ ______ _______ ______ _______ _ _ _
/ _____)(_) (_)(_____ \ (_______)(_____ \ (_______)(_)(_)(_)
( (____ _ _ _____) ) _____ _____) ) _______ _ _ _
\____ \ | | | || __ / | ___) | __ / | ___ || || || |
_____) )| |___| || | \ \ | | | | \ \ | | | || || || |
(______/ \_____/ |_| |_||_| |_| |_||_| |_| \_____/
Surfraw - Shell Users' Revolutionary Front Rage Against the Web
Surfraw stand for: Shell Users’ Revolutionary Front Rage Against the Web and is a funny way to query Search engines and other services on the net from the terminal; well, is funny for people who think that working on the CLI is funny ;), ah and have I told you that Surfraw was originally written by Julian Assange ? yes that one, so it must be a good tools to get information from the net…
Installation
On Debian and Ubuntu the package is available in the main repository so you can easily install it running in a terminal:
sudo apt-get install surfraw surfraw-extra |
Please note that in this example I’ve installed also the package surfraw-extra that contains extra website search tools for surfraw that have large dependency trees (39 packages for me). Currently surfraw-extra only contains opensearch -that is used to search an OpenSearch-enabled website.
The package should be available also on Fedora and openSUSE, but at the moment I’ve no installations of these distributions so I’m not sure.
As alternative is possible to get the package directly from git with the following command:
git clone git://git.debian.org/surfraw/surfraw.git |
Basic usage
Surfraw uses what it calls “elvi” (a tribute to Elvis); elvi are interface widgets for specific engines and databases such as Google, AltaVista, Wikipedia, Dejanews, Freshmeat, research index, Slashdot, ArXiv, Youtube, and a number of others. It allows options for configuration of using a shell browser (lynx, w3m) or a graphical browser (Firefox, Mozilla, Konqueror).
The basic syntax of Surfraw is:
surfraw elvi [options] searchterms |
If possible Surfraw will create a new window in an existing browser session.
Otherwise it will follow its configuration, Surfraw gets it from three sources, in order:
1. Environment variables
2. /etc/xdg/surfraw/conf
3. $HOME/.config/surfraw/conf
In the configuration files it’s possible to use def and defyn to define variables. These functions set variables unless they are already set by the environment. defyn is used for boolean configuration variables, def for all others. For instance:
def SURFRAW_text_browser /usr/bin/lynx
defyn SURFRAW_graphical no
You can see the list of the variables in the manual page of surfraw with the command
man surfraw
Examples with Surfraw
To see the list of elvi type:
surfraw -elvi |
Note that sr is an alias for surfraw, so that could equally be
sr -elvi |
Search in wikipedia the word gentoo
sr wikipedia gentoo |
Show the first 100 results of a search on google of the phrase “RMS, GNU, which is sinner, which is sin?” and display the result with links:
surfraw google -results=100 RMS, GNU, which is sinner, which is sin? -browser=links |
List of Elvi
This is the list of Elvi, web site search scripts, contained in Surfraw
acronym — Look for acronyms definitions (www.acronymfinder.com)
ads — Search SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System
alioth — Search Alioth (alioth.debian.org)
amazon — Search the amazon.com bookstore
archpkg — Search Arch Linux Packages (www.archlinux.org/packages/)
archwiki — Search the Arch Linux Wiki
arxiv — Search arXiv E-Print Archive for articles
ask — Question the web using Ask Jeeves (www.ask.com)
aur — Search aur.archlinux.org for PKGBUILDs
austlii — Search Australian Law docs (www.austlii.edu.au)
bbcnews — Search BBC News (news.bbc.co.uk)
bing — Search the web using Microsoft’s Bing (www.bing.com)
bookfinder — Search for books using www.bookfinder.com
bugmenot — Bypass compulsory web registration with bugmenot.com
bugzilla — Search for bugs on Bugzilla bugtrackers
cablesearch — search openports for OpenBSD packages
cia — Search CIA documents at www.cia.gov
cite — Search computer science papers (citeseerx.ist.psu.edu)
cliki — Search the common lisp wiki
cnn — Search on CNN (cnn.com)
codesearch — Search source code using Google Code Search (www.google.fr/codesearch)
comlaw — Search Australian Law using Comlaw (www.comlaw.gov.au)
ctan — Search the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (ctan.org)
currency — Convert currencies with the Universal Currency Converter (www.xe.net/ucc)
cve — Search for CAN assignments in CVE
debbugs — Search the debian BTS (bugs.debian.org)
debcontents — Search contents of debian/ubuntu packages (packages.debian.org/packages.ubuntu.com)
deblists — Search debian mailing lists (lists.debian.org/search.html)
deblogs — Show changelogs for a package in Debian main (changelogs.debian.net)
debpackages — Search debian/ubuntu packages (packages.debian.org/packages.ubuntu.com)
debpkghome — Visit the home page for a Debian package
debpts — Search the Debian Package Tracking System (packages.qa.debian.org)
debsec — Search the Debian Security Tracker for CVE ids or package names
debvcsbrowse — Browse the VCS repository for a Debian package
debwiki — Search the Debian Wikis (wiki.debian.org & women.debian.org/wiki)
deja — Search usenet using Google Groups (groups.google.com)
deli — Search Delicious bookmarks
discogs — Search the Discogs database of music information (www.discogs.com)
dmoz — Search the Open Directory Project web directory (dmoz.org)
duckduckgo — Securely search the web using duckduckgo (www.duckduckgo.com)
ebay — Search the Ebay auction site
etym — Look up word origins at www.etymonline.com
excite — Search on Excite (www.excite.com)
finkpkg — Search Fink packages (pdb.finkproject.org)
foldoc — The Free On-Line Dictionary Of Computing (foldoc.org)
freebsd — Search FreeBSD related information (www.freebsd.org)
freedb — Search for cd track listings in FreeDB (www.freedb.org)
freshmeat — Search Freshmeat (www.freshmeat.net)
fsfdir — Search the FSF/UNESCO Free Software Directory (directory.fsf.org)
gcache — Search the web using Google cache (www.google.com)
genbugs — Search the Gentoo bug tracker (bugs.gentoo.org)
genportage — Search gentoo-portage.com for packages
google — Search the web using Google (www.google.com)
gutenberg — Search for books on Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org)
happypenguin — Search the Linux Game Tome (www.happypenguin.org)
imdb — Search the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com)
ixquick — Search the web using ixquick [HTTPS] (www.ixquick.com)
jamendo — Search Jamendo: free music with Creative Commons licenses (www.jamendo.com)
javasun — Search Java API docs (java.sun.com)
l1sp — Search lisp documentation
lastfm — Search last.fm
leodict — Search Leo’s German English dictionary (dict.leo.org)
lsm — Search the Linux Software Map
macports — Search macports packages (macports.org)
mathworld — Search Wolfram MathWorld
mininova — Search the mininova bittorent source.
musicbrainz — Search MusicBrainz (musicbrainz.org)
netbsd — Search NetBSD related information (www.netbsd.org)
ntrs — Search the NASA Technical Report Server
openbsd — Search OpenBSD related information (www.openbsd.org)
openports — search openports for OpenBSD packages
opensearch — Search an OpenSearch-enabled website
pasearch — Search the unofficial Penny Arcade archives (pipefour.org/pa)
pgpkeys — Search the PGP key database
piratebay — Search thepiratebay.org for torrents
pubmed — Search medical/molbio databases (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
rae — Busca en el diccionario de la Real Academia de la Lengua Española (Spanish Dictionary)
rfc — Search RFCs (internet standards documents)
rhyme — Search for rhymes et al using Lycos Rhyme (rhyme.lycos.com)
rpmsearch — Search for RPMs in various distros
scholar — Search Google Scholar (scholar.google.com)
scicom — Search Scientific Commons
scirus — Search for science using Scirus (scirus.com)
scitopia — Search for science with scitopia.org
scpan — Search the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (search.cpan.org)
scroogle — Search Google anonymously via Scroogle (www.scroogle.org)
slashdot — Search stories on Slashdot (www.slashdot.org)
slinuxdoc — Search entries in LDP (www.linuxdoc.org)
sourceforge — Search SourceForge (www.sourceforge.net)
springer — Search Springer for Books and Articles
stack — Search Stack Overflow
stockquote — Get a single stock quote (multiple providers)
sunonesearch — Search Sun One Search (onesearch.sun.com)
thesaurus — Look up word in Merriam-Webster’s Thesaurus (www.m-w.com)
translate — Translate human languages (various providers)
urban — Search urbandictionary.com for a definition
W — Activate Surfraw defined web-browser
w3css — Validate a CSS URL with the w3c CSS validator (jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator)
w3html — Validate a web page URL with the w3c validator (validator.w3.org)
w3link — Check web page links with the w3c linkchecker (validator.w3.org/checklink)
w3rdf — Validate a RDF URL with the w3c RDF validator (validator.w3.org)
wayback — Search The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for a URL (archive.org)
webster — Look up word in Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary (www.m-w.com)
wetandwild — Real time weather information (many sources)
wikipedia — Search the free encyclopedia wikipedia
woffle — Search the web using Woffle (localhost:8080)
worldwidescience — Search for science with www.worldwidescience.org
yahoo — Search Yahoo categories (www.yahoo.com)
yandex — Search the web using Yandex (yandex.ru)
youtube — Search YouTube (www.youtube.com)
yubnub — Use the social command-line for the web (yubnub.org)
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