A simple Perl script that grabs the currently-playing track from iTunes and displays the artist and track name in plain text.
Written by Thomas Upton
This code uses a function conceived by John Gruber that is used to tell if the iTunes application is currently running. More information can be found on Daring Fireball.
This code is licensed under a BY-NC-SA Creative Commons license.
Make the script executable before using it.
$ chmod +x now-playing.pl
Usage:
$ ./now-playing.pl
When using this script on OS X, it may be useful to pipe this command through iconv for Unicode character support.
$ ./now-playing.pl | iconv -f utf-8 -t ucs-2-internal