Re: [newbie] a program to email upon website changes?
On Tue, Aug 03, 2004 at 01:47:00PM -0400, g2 wrote: Clint, Todd, Thanks for the suggestions. I will check out the scripting tools you mentioned, however they will probably be beyond my skill level. Regarding Mozilla's ability to watch a website, yes I have explored that feature. BTW, my interest in this has to do with a passion for windsurfing and a related interest in information about weather conditions. While there are many weather related services available on the internet, I have the best forcast for me is my local NOAA forcast, which you can see here: http://www.srh.noaa.gov/data/BTV/RECBTV It is a text only page, as I said the web based services I have seen so far don't seem to be able to deal with anything except html pages. NOAA updates this forcast once or twice a day, as conditions change. I check it at home, but wanted to see if I could get it emailed to me when it changes. That way I could recieve the email as a text message on my cell phone. Thanks again for your help. Your first email got me curious so I tried it out as a sort of proof of concept. Here's the really rough script, modified to take into account the URL of the page you're looking at. Copy and paste into your editor, make it executable (chmod +x filename) and run it with filename url Just modify the second line--you should point to a non-existing directory or an empty one. The idea is to later be able to add more than one site, but I haven't thought that far ahead yet :) The email part is left to you for homework. You could add it to cron and have it run every x minutes. (I wrote a similar script awhile back to monitor our Blackboard server when we had issues with it; I just grepped for a phrase that signified the server needed restarting and ran it every 15 minutes and got emails if there was a problem and nothing if it was OK.) Todd #!/bin/bash myRoot=/home/todd/.changefiles # --change this!! myDist=original myUrl=$1 # make sure this directory is empty (or non-existent) mkdir -p $myRoot #get page wget -P $myRoot -U Mozilla $myUrl cd $myRoot # ignore next line; but needed for files like index.html #rootFile=`ls *.*` rootFile=RECBTV echo rootFile is $rootFile rootName=`echo $rootFile|cut -d . -f 1` echo rootName is $rootName myOrigName=$rootName-$myDist if [ ! -f $myOrigName ] ; then mv $rootFile $myOrigName else # compare files, use exit status from cmp cmp -s $rootFile $myOrigName if [ $? == 0 ] ; then echo files are identical elif [$? == 1 ] ; then echo files are different else echo there was an error fi rm $myOrigName mv $rootFile $myOrigName fi Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
Re: [newbie] a program to email upon website changes?
On Thu, Jul 29, 2004 at 11:41:52PM -0400, g2 wrote: folks, does anyone know of a program, hopefully, appropriate for a linux/mandrake newbie, that will send an email with the text content of a website I specify. I know there are various web based services that do this, however none that I have found meet my needs. Specifically, the site that i need to track is a simple text page, which some of the web services can't seem to deal with, and I want to check it for changes often, like every 15 minutes, many only offer hourly or even daily checking. Any thoughts? I can't help with an program that will email you, but did you know that Mozilla/Firefox has a feature that will notify you if a bookmarked site you specify is updated? Go to Manage Bookmarks, click the bookmark you're interested in, click Properties, and check out Schedule and Nofify. Also, it should be easy to write a bash script to do what you want--retrieve the page with wget, compare it to the last version by running diff or something, if there's no change do nothing, if there is email yourself an alert. Todd -- Name that tune #13: When they said come down I threw up. Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
