Consolation is intended to bring the web into your console in a form suitable for consumption by UNIX scripts. This is hardly an original idea, of course. Surfraw, for example (http://surfraw.alioth.debian.org/) provides a one-way street from the command-line to web search engines and other Internet data sources. Consolation will close the loop by also returning nicely-parsed results in a form suitable for either piping to other scripts or simply viewing as quiet text in your terminal window.

In its present form, Consolation is pre-pre-release software, executable notes written in order to feel out the design space. There is only a single rudimentary script at the moment, google.rb, that accepts search terms as arguments and returns the first ten URLs from Google, one per line.

Consolation depends on Hpricot, which should be installed using gem or your operating system's package management system.

Copyright (c) 2011 Paul L. Snyder ([email protected])

Consolation is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Consolation is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.