Bash: Display Web Page Content In Terminal

H

ow can I fetch HTML web page content from bash and display on screen using shell utilities?

 

You can use any one of the following tool or combination of all of them to get the contents of a webpage in a shell:

[1] curl command – It is a tool to transfer data from or to a server using http/https/ftp and much more.

[2] lynx command – It is a fully-featured World Wide Web (WWW) client/browser for users running terminals.

[3] wget command – It is a free utility for non-interactive download of files from the Web. It supports HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP protocols, as well as retrieval through HTTP proxies.

[4] w3m command – It is a text based Web browser and pager.

Installation

Above tools may not be installed on your Linux or Unix like operating systems.

Note: You need to login as root user to install required tools.

Debian / Ubuntu Linux install curl, wget, lynx, and w3m

Open a terminal and and then type:

$ sudo apt-get install curl wget lynx w3m

Fedora / RHEL / CentOS Linux install curl, wget, lynx, and w3m

Open a terminal and and then type:

$ sudo yum install curl wget lynx w3m

FreeBSD Unix install curl, wget, lynx, and w3m (binary package)

Open a terminal and and then type:

$ sudo pkg_add -v -r curl lynx w3m wget

Examples

You can use curl command to download the page:

curl http://www.cyberciti.biz/

curl http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/bash-for-loop/

Use curl and store output into a variable as follows:

page= $(curl http://www.cyberciti.biz/)

page= $(curl http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/bash-for-loop/)

To display content use echo or printf command as follows:

echo  $page

printf  %s  $page

lynx command examples

Use the lynx command as follows:

lynx -dump www.cyberciti.biz

lynx -dump www.cyberciti.biz/faq/bash-for-loop/

The -dump option dumps the formatted output of the default document or those specified on the command line to standard output. Unlike interactive mode, all documents are processed.

wget command examples

The syntax is as follows:

wget -O – http://www.cyberciti.biz

wget -O – http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/bash-for-loop/

OR use wget command to grab the page and store it into a variable called page:

page= $(wget -O – http://www.cyberciti.biz)

display page ##

echo  $page

or pass it to lynx / w3m ##

echo  $page  | w3m -dump -T text/html

echo  $page  | lynx -dump -stdin

w3m command examples

The syntax is as follows to dump web page content in terminal using the w3m command:

w3m -dump http://www.cyberciti.biz/

w3m -dump http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/bash-for-loop/

OR use w3m command to grab the page and store it into a variable called page:

page= $(w3m -dump http://www.cyberciti.biz/)

echo  $page

Practical examples

Get the definition of linux from a dictionary:

$ curl dict://dict.org/d:linux

 

Sample outputs:

220 pan.alephnull.com dictd 1.12.0/rf on Linux 3.0.0-14-server  <21853866.27331.1375614736@pan.alephnull.com>

250 ok

150 1 definitions retrieved

151  linux  wn  WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006)

Linux

n 1: an open-source version of the UNIX operating system

.

250 ok [d/m/c = 1/0/30; 0.000r 0.000u 0.000s]

221 bye [d/m/c = 0/0/0; 0.000r 0.000u 0.000s]

Backup your del.icio.us bookmarks:

$ wget –user=Your-Username-Here –password=Your-Password-Here https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all -O my-old-bookmarks.xml

$ more my-old-bookmarks.xml

 

Grab all .mp3s from url:

mp3=$(lynx -dump http://server1.cyberciti.biz/media/index.html  | grep  http://  | awk  /mp3/{print $2} )

for i in $mp3

wget $i

done

See also

See man pages for more info – curl(1),w3m(1),lynx(1),wget(1)

 

 

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