AmirWatad.com

A Bash Script To Decode TinyURLs

This is a simple bash script, intended to decode tinyurl URLs, i.e. to revret a tinyurl into the original URL.

It’s always a good practice checking where a URL will send you to before actually visiting it.

For the implementation, I the “Preview” service supplied by tinyurl themselves.

The script is short so I won’t bother explaining it. If you have questions please feel free to comment.

We’ll call the script: deurl     (stands for: Decode URL). You might rename it as you want

It gets as its first argument the url you want to decode.  It can be the complete URL, or just the “unique” part. All these are legal inputs:

http://tinyurl.com/d5j5b7

http://www.tinyurl.com/d5j5b7

tinyurl.com/d5j5b7

d5j5b7

etc..

so you can call the script, for example, like this:

deurl d5j5b7

And you’ll get output similar to this:

http://amirwatad.com

Here is the code:

Add this into a new text file:

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#!/bin/bash

url=$*

url=`echo "$url" | sed -e 's/.*tinyurl.com\///'`

url="preview.tinyurl.com/"$url

wget -O - $url 2> /dev/null | grep redirecturl | sed -e 's/.*href=\"//g' | sed -e 's/">.*//g'

Now, save the file as deurl.

Make the file executable:

chmod +x deurl

Move the file to /usr/local/bin  (optionally).

That’s it. Now you can use it as explained above.

Enjoy

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Tags: Bash, Command Line Interface, Linux, Shell Scripts