Wikidig is a simple Shell script for fetching a short summary about anything from Wikipedia and display it nicely on your terminal.
In the following example, the given queries will lead you to a summary about the best comedy group EVER.
$ wikidig monty python # plain
$ wikidig 'monty python' # single quotes
$ wikidig "monty python" # double quotes
$ wikidig monty_python # spaces replaced by underscores
$ wikidig The Pythons # another keyword
Query: monty python
Summary:
Monty Python (sometimes known as The Pythons) was a British surreal comedy group who created Monty Python's Flying Circus, a British television comedy sketch show that first aired on the BBC on 5 October 1969. Forty-five episodes were made over four series. The Python phenomenon developed from the television series into something larger in scope and impact, spawning touring...
If wikidig couldn't find any summary, the summary and source field will be left empty.
Sometimes, the wikipedia DNS might be too busy, leaving you with an empty summary, you can re-run the command again to ensure if there wasn't such a summary with the given queries found.
To install wikidig, you can use make, wich is by default already provided on
most Unix systems. There's no build target, so you can immediately install it
by passing:
$ [sudo] make install
Optionally, you can override several variables:
===========================================================================
| EXE | The name of the installed executable, useful if you have |
| | already an executable called snippy and want to rename this |
| | executable to something different (such as qwiki or so). |
+--------+----------------------------------------------------------------+
| PREFIX | The prefix for installation, this defaults to /usr/local/, so |
| | the content of the bin/ directory will be then copied to |
| | /usr/local/bin/ and so on. This is useful if you want to |
| | install it under virtual environment. |
===========================================================================
For example, if you want to install it under prefix /usr/, just pass:
$ [sudo] make install PREFIX=/usr/
You can also install it under 'development mode', this is mainly useful if you want to debug the program:
$ [sudo] make develop
After debugging, you might want to re-install the program. To do so, you'll have to uninstall it first (even if it was installed under development mode), this can be done with the uninstall target:
$ [sudo] make uninstall
This software is licensed under WTFPL, so do whatever the fuck you want.