It reclaims google, altavista, babelfish, dejanews, freshmeat, research index, slashdot and many others from the false-prophet, pox-infested heathen lands of html-forms, placing these wonders where they belong, deep in unix heartland, as god loving extensions to the shell.
Wowow, glad to know I can still search freshmeat from the command line!
More seriously, I wonder how well it interacts with Google these days.
edit: oh, well. I tried installing it from each of Nix and Homebrew, and it fails to start with:
surfraw ERROR: couldn't find global config in /nix/store/bjwd6hv3pym3bxhh9drxs0m5a38zrnj7-surfraw-2.3.0/etc/xdg/surfraw/conf or $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS
or
surfraw ERROR: couldn't find global config in /opt/homebrew/etc/xdg/surfraw/conf or $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS
even though both of those files do exist! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think it’s because it doesn’t like my XDG_CONFIG_DIRS, so I try XDG_CONFIG_DIRS= surfraw google debian ports:
/opt/homebrew/bin/surfraw: line 488: https://www.google.com/search?q=debian%20ports&num=30: No such file or directory
O..kay. How about the Nix version again?
/nix/store/bjwd6hv3pym3bxhh9drxs0m5a38zrnj7-surfraw-2.3.0/bin/surfraw: line 488: https://www.google.com/search?q=debian%20ports&num=30: No such file or directory
Hrm. I’m sure I’m missing something. At any rate, I remember enjoying using this back in the early 2000’s!
I just tried your query on surfraw on Fedora 40 from the repos, and it works for me.
Looking at the code, on line 488:
if ok SURFRAW_graphical_remote && test $mode = graphical; then
# ...
if test $SURFRAW_browser_args = "none"; then
$SURFRAW_browser "$@" # HERE <--
else
$SURFRAW_browser $SURFRAW_browser_args "$@"
fi
You might try to set the BROWSER environment variable as a workaround.
what does it do when google gives you a captcha?
Not sure, it hasn’t happened to me so far.
Wowow, glad to know I can still search freshmeat from the command line!
More seriously, I wonder how well it interacts with Google these days.
edit: oh, well. I tried installing it from each of Nix and Homebrew, and it fails to start with:
or
even though both of those files do exist! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think it’s because it doesn’t like my
XDG_CONFIG_DIRS, so I tryXDG_CONFIG_DIRS= surfraw google debian ports:O..kay. How about the Nix version again?
Hrm. I’m sure I’m missing something. At any rate, I remember enjoying using this back in the early 2000’s!
I just tried your query on
surfrawon Fedora 40 from the repos, and it works for me.Looking at the code, on line 488:
You might try to set the
BROWSERenvironment variable as a workaround.