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Comment by tsm | Hacker News Reader

I'm always fascinated when something like this appears on HN and it turns out to be a dozen lines of bash. I could easily imagine writing a hundred lines of a "better" language (Python, CL, Ruby...)to do the same thing. I guess it just speaks to the unreasonable effectiveness of Unix tools for certain classes of problems.

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Half of the code is dealing with the command line and options. Since you're working in the command line anyway, it makes sense.

But the gist of it is dead simple.

For this author (hodgesmr) you just go to:

https://api.github.com/users/hodgesmr

... and if it's not shown there (author doesn't want to make it public?) then you look for it here:

https://api.github.com/users/hodgesmr/events/public

Aaaaand this is why I have a dozen different mail accounts.

It could be better bash, e.g. using [[ instead of [. Also,

    curl -s https://api.github.com/users/$2/events/public |
    grep "\"gravatar_id\":" |
    sed -e's/[,|"]//g' |
    head -n 1 |
    awk '{print $(NF)}'

can be

    curl -sS https://api.github.com/users/$2/events/public |
    sed -n '/"gravatar_id":/!d; s/",//; s/.*"//p; q'

and so on.

Pull requests are always welcome :)

  | I could easily imagine writing a hundred lines
  | of a "better" language

You could easily do much of the same things (probably in a similar number of lines) using system calls in other languages.

Ruby uses `` to execute installed programs, which is the best part of bash. I'd say Ruby rivals bash in this sense.

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