Fetch the latest spot prices for precious metals, from the command line.
sp fetches the latest precious metal spot prices by way of an undocumented API provided by a popular retail website. The API only updates every 2 minutes, so when using sp to automate requests, it is inadvisable to request any faster than this limit. Unfortunately, the details preceding means that sp is inherently unstable, and liable to break at any moment in time. Use caution as appropriate.
sp consists of a single POSIX compliant shell script, and is written in a portable manner - save for the small list of dependencies:
Despite the size of the project, and its narrow purpose, sp comes with a comprehensive man page, as all good tools should.
To provide a way of fetching precious metal spot prices from the command line, so the data may be stored/used for further processing.
The output of sp is purposefully designed to be as easy as possible to pipe to
other unix tools - i.e., awk, jq, cut, etc. - and tries to follow the
Unix Philosophy.
Without any arguments, sp should output something similar to:
01/06/17 18:58 gold 983.04 gbp toz
01/06/17 18:58 silver 13.388 gbp toz
01/06/17 18:58 platinum 723.29 gbp toz
01/06/17 18:58 palladium 641.45 gbp toz
- Store ajax token to file for saving bandwidth when making repeat requests.
sp is released into the public domain.