Today’s post is a code challenge.

Because I like self-inflicted pain, I decided to solve the Wikipedia:Getting to Philosophy challenge in pure bash with no outside libraries.

The biggest hurdle was figuring our how to parse HTML using bash and it became a workout in sed and grep.

I considered using some type of parsing technology like xpath but in the end I wanted to challenge myself and my bash skills.

Read all about it and check out the source code on my github: wikipedia:getting to philosophy

example usage:

./getting_to_philosophy.sh "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Music"

getting to philosophy sample output1 getting to philosophy sample output2 getting to philosophy sample output3