Wandering Thoughts archives

A trivial script: wcat

Here's wcat, which is short for 'web page cat':

#!/bin/sh
exec wget -q -O - "$@"

(At some point I may need to add '-e robots=off' to this, but I haven't needed it yet.)

I have a flaw when it comes to my little scripts: often, I think that sometime is too small and trivial to bother turning into a script, so I don't for ages. And then when I give in and make the script, I rediscover that automation promotes action, because I start using the new script all over.

This is exactly what's happened with wcat; now that I have it, I've been discovering all sorts of situations where it is just what I want, and I can't imagine how and why I lived without it for so long.

(I suspect that pretty soon I am going to find myself writing wless, which will just be something like 'wcat "$@" | less'.)