A couple of days ago, I’ve been trying to figure out how great it’s the howdoi script and what if I could modify it in a certain way to work along with AskUbuntu.com – yes it works only in Ubuntu. After several hours of studying its source code, I finally found what modifications I had to do and truth be told the results were absolutely satisfying.

How it works, you may ask. Simply put, just type your question (query or just a phrase or anything) like being in Google, but in terminal. Here, some examples:

How to change my desktop background ?

Install chrome?

How to download music from Youtube?

How can I install nvidia drivers proprietary?

How to uninstall a program?

The script will search using Google engine to find the appropriate AskUbuntu’s links and then throw away the irrelevant ones. Then, it will pick up the first one (use the -n <number> parameter to specify how many answers do you want to see), browse into the code tab, grab the first top voted-reply and throw away the garbage. If you want just the links, use the -l parameter.

Take a look and admire the power and the simplicity of the Linux shell altogether …

Download my script from Github and feel free fork and play with it. Extract it into a folder and make it executable (eg chmod +x filename) and the can run it.

chmod +x ask.py ./ask

It is not a bash script but it is written in Python, so you are going to need some Python bindings. Do not worry, the script will automatically install them for you. For example if you don’t have python-pygments installed:

In case you are curious to know the required libraries the script needs Python, python-pygments, python-pyquery, python-requests, requests-cache. Again , if you do not have them installed, this is what it should normally do:

sudo apt-get install python-pygments sudo apt-get install python-pyquery sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chris-lea/python-requests -y sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install python-requests git clone git://github.com/reclosedev/requests-cache.git cd requests-cache python setup.py install

Take a look at my script’s source code over here (GitHub fork)