AmirWatad.com

Query Google Finance From the Command Line

This is a one line bash script I wrote to query a stock’s price from Google Finance. It uses wget to get the HTML page from Google Finance and then grep and cut to extract the stock’s price. The script is based on the current HTML format of the Google Finance pages and might not work if Google decide to change this format (It’s easy to modify, though).

To have the script:

Open your favorite text editor (mine is vim), and type/paste this:

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#!/bin/bash

wget -nv -O - "http://finance.google.com/finance?q=$@" 2>&1| \

        grep "class=\"pr\"" | cut -d">" -f2 | cut -d"<" -f1

save the file as (say) gfinance.

(A short explanation about the command:
wget gets an html page and return the output. the -nv flag is for “no-verbose”, so the wget command won’t display the progress bar and other unneeded stuff (unneeded for our purpose). the “-O -” flag tells wget to print the output to stdout (instead of saving it in a file).
the $@ includes all the arguments that the script received. so, if you type for example “gfinance a b”, then $@ includes “a b”.
2>&1 means: “Redirect file descriptor 2 (STDERR) to the same place where file descriptor 1 (STDOUT) is redirected”.
grep looks for the string class=”pr” in the stream passed it through the pipe and displays only the lines of the stream including this string.
cut -d”>” -f2 is to say: Divide the stream into separate strings according to the delimiter “>” and show only the second field.
That’s it. If it’s not obvious, try building the command one pipe stage at a time, and see the output, then you’ll see why wee need the next pipe.)

Now, to make it executable type this in the terminal (after you make your current directory the one which includes the script):

chmod +x gfinance

To use it from anywhere I usually move my scripts to /usr/local/bin/ :

sudo mv gfinance /usr/local/bin/.

That’s it. Now to query a stock just use something similar to:

gfinance MLNX

or:

gfinance Intel Corporation

Of course, this script can be optimized and extended to print more info, but it’s 3:40 AM and I want to sleep

Enjoy.

Related posts:

1. Edit The Command Line With Vim
2. Create Cool Charts With Google Charts API
3. Share Code Snippets Easily From the Command Line

Tags: Command Line Interface, Productivity, Shell Scripts