Using it is as easy as typing:

mail -s “Subject” receipt@domain.com

Then enter the message and end it with [ctrl]+[D].

However, if your ISP s!#$% like mine, you’ll discover that no mail was really sent.

To work around this, I wanted to configure my mail program to use Gmail’s SMTP server.

After a little Googling I found this howto. (Tested on Ubuntu).

1. First, you will need the postfix package:

sudo apt-get install postfix

2. Now configure it: Append the following to /etc/postfix/main.cf  (you need super user privileges):

relayhost = [smtp.gmail.com]:587
smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
smtp_sasl_security_options = noanonymous
smtp_tls_CAfile = /etc/postfix/cacert.pem
smtp_use_tls = yes

3. Next, add your username and password to /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd (create the file if it isn’t already)

[smtp.gmail.com]:587      user.name@gmail.com:password

4. Change permissions of sasl_passwd:

sudo chmod 400 /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd

5. Translate sasl_passwd into “db” file so postfix will be able to read:

sudo postmap /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd

6. Create a certificate:

cat /etc/ssl/certs/Thawte_Premium_Server_CA.pem | sudo tee -a /etc/postfix/cacert.pem

7. Restart postfix:

sudo postfix stop

sudo postfix start

8. Try it:

mail -s “Test” my.email@domain.com

(Then enter the message if any, and terminate with [ctrl]+[D])

That’s it. You’re done.

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Send Email from the Command Line using Gmail Account

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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A Bash Script To Decode TinyURLs

In this post I’ll introduce a very simple and basic Bash script, which uses VLC and a plain text file to let you watch Live TV streams of your favorite channels.

First of all, make sure you have VLC installed in your system.

Now to the script:

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#!/bin/bash

#a script to watch TV streams with vlc

list_file=~/.tvlist

channel=$1

channel_url=`grep -w "#$channel" $list_file | cut -f3 -d#`

vlc -f "$channel_url" 2> /dev/null  #run vlc in Full Screen mode and don't display warnings

Save the file (I’ll assume you’ll call it wtv) in /usr/local/bin/ (or anywhere else. saving it in /usr/local/bin/ will allow you to call it from anywhere).

Make the file executable: chmod +x wtv

The script assumes you have the file .tvlist in your home directory, with the following format:

#channel_name  #channel URL  #comments

A line per channel.

Here is an example file:

#bbc  #mms://a1482.v373745.c37374.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/1482/37374/498f5ea4/clipdownloads.bbc.co.uk/windowsmedia-acl/news/n5ctrl/summaries/world/bb/video/world_bb.wmv

#jazeera #mms://88.191.45.161/channel13 #arabic

#cnn #mms://a779.l2584224778.c25842.g.lm.akamaistream.net/D/779/25842/v0001/reflector:24778

#jazeera_en #mms://skinkers-livestation-client-d0ac-aljazeer-en.wm.llnwd.net/skinkers_livestation_client_d0ac_aljazeer_en

#islam_channel #mms://webcast.islamchannel.tv/IslamVideo

#haroon #mms://ib2.islambox.tv/harunyahyatv #haroon yahia tv

Save this file as .tvlist in your home directory (or wherever you want, but remember to modify the script).

Now you can run the script like this:

wtv cnn

The script is very basic, it assumes that the user gives it legal input. I may modify it in the future, but this is good for my needs for now. Any ideas will be appreciated.

P.S.

I’m thinking of making a large database of such streams and providing a script/program which will fetch the channels from this database. I don’t know if I’ll have time to do and maintain this alone, so please let me know if you’re interested to help. (It can be a Bash,  Python, CSh script, or a C, C++ program).

Enjoy

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A Bash Script To Watch Live TV Streams

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.

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Query Google Finance From the Command Line

Here is a list of the command line tools I use most of the time:

1. vim: A very powerful text editor, which runs directly inside your terminal/console. At the beginning I couldn’t find a reason why to use it, but after I started using it (for coding / general text editing) I can state that I rarely touch any other text editor.

2. todo.txt: A nice and easy TODO list manager. See my post about it.

3. define: A script which allows you to query Google for a definition right from your shell.

4. wikipedia.sh: Query Wikipedia right from your shell.

5. twit: A simple script to update your twitter status from the command line.

I’m sure I missed a few, it’s also not easy to decide which tools to include here, for example, is this the right place for “tools” like gcc or ssh? Anyway, This post may be updated from time to time.

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Command Line Tools I Like

Open a new file with your favorite text editor, and add this:

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#!/bin/bash

curl --basic --user USERNAME:PASSWORD \

--data status="$*" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml -o /dev/null;

Save the file as twit (or any other name you choose).

Of course, we don’t like our password inside an accessible plain text file. So this is what I did:

sudo mv twit /usr/local/bin/.

sudo chmod 551 /usr/local/bin/twit

sudo +s /usr/local/bin/twit

sudo chown root /usr/local/bin/twit

Now, only root can read the file, but a regular user can execute it. Maybe my solution is not the best possible, but it works.

Anyway, now, you can use this to twitter from the command line:

twit “This was posted from the command line”

That’s it. Enjoy

This post was based on a post from LinuxJournal.com

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Twitter from the Command Line