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Abusing the command line







Abusing the command line

Abusing the command line 04/09/2004 04:08 PM

If you're running OS X, try this:

say -v Kathy `curl --silent http://api.technorati.com/getinfo?username=simonwillison | grep '<inbound' | sed -e 's/ <//' | sed -e 's/inboundblogs>/Simons blog has /' | sed -e 's/<\/inboundblogs>/ inbound blogs and /' | sed -e 's/inboundlinks>//' | sed -e 's/<\/inboundlinks>/ inbound links/'`

Your computer should read out to you my Technorati inbound blogs and inbound links, extracted from the Technorati web API. Parsing XML using sed is a nasty trick I picked up from this O'Reilly article; speaking the output of a command using the 'say' and the backtick shell operator was my moment of inspiration for the day.




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Just over a year ago, I started blacklisting domain names from links featured in comment spam. My idea then was that these blacklists could become a shared resource: people would publish their own blacklist and subscribe to those of people they trust, thus making it much harder for spammers to operate. While the sheer volume of spam domains meant that the technique was much less useful than I originally anticipated, I've continued to maintain my blacklist ever since as a preventative measure against repeat spammers.

I have a confession to make: all of my blog administration (with the exception of adding entries and blogmarks) is performed using phpMyAdmin. The trouble with writing your own software is that it's very easy to skimp on the backend tools, since you're the only person who will ever see them. Incidentally, this is the main reason I plan to switch to WordPress just as soon as I find the inspiration to write the necessary import scripts. Comments are deleted in phpMyAdmin, and domains are blacklisted by manually editing the blacklist.txt file via FTP.

This has been really bugging me, especially since I have so little other use for FTP that my only installed client is an unregistered version of Transmit (closes after ten minutes, won't save passwords along with account details). I've been muddling along with that for longer than I care to admit, but today I decided to take 10 minutes out to solve the problem once and for all. I could have put together a web interface for adding new domains but I wasn't really in the mood, so I decided to put time spent reading The Art of Unix Programming to good use and knock out a simple command line application.

The result (minus my login details) can be found here. Sample usage: ./blacklist.py www.domain.org www.domain2.com. It follows the Unix ideal of being the simplest-thing-that-could-possibly-work, and ended up taking longer to write than I expected thanks mainly to the craziness of Python's ftplib . I've seen complaints about this before, and it thoroughly deserves its bad reputation.

Here's one example: retrlines is the method used to retrieve ascii text from the server. Bizzarely, it doesn't actually return the text receieved; instead, it expects you to provide it with a callback function that will be fed each line in turn, minus the newline. Sounds like a job for Stri ngIO, but StringIO objects don'y have a writeline method (required to add the newline back on). I ended up writing my own extension of the StringIO2 class and adding a writeline method just to preserve the newlines returned from the server!

Strange APIs aside, I'm pretty pleased with the final result. It follows a bunch of Unix design patterns (and skips others such as those related to configuration, but I'm not overly bothered about those) including the following:

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Abusing the command line

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