simon

Are you also love artworks of Simon Stålenhag but tired to keep searching all over his site to find any updates because it's heavy and organize not well enough? The project is for you! It ships with simon.sh script that helps to detect any changes on a home page of the site and tries to download all images it's able to find.

Getting Started

Go to Releases page and download a ZIP archive from the latest release. Extract the archive, e.g. with unzip tool as shown below:

unzip simon-1.0.0.zip
cd simon-1.0.0

Prerequisites

The script should run fine on a GNU/Linux distributive in any POSIX® compatible shells like BASH, Zsh or DASH, although the script itself is'nt entirely POSIX®-compliant. Either curl or wget required to be installed as well as sed. The script additionally requires diff utility (versions 3.4 or later are recommended). If you are not sure whether or not these utilities are installed, the script will generate descriptive messages about which of the programs you missed.

Installing

Installation is not required. But you can place the script under /usr/local/bin/ like this:

# cd to the repo's folder
sudo install -m 0555 -o root -g root simon.sh /usr/local/bin/simon

Note that the last command uses sudo as it has to have root privileges in order to be successfully executed.

Usage

There are two modes implemented in the script: interactive and automatic (non-interactive). The former mode is the default. It allows you to manually walk through all prompts and decide whether to do something or not.

For now, let's assume that you installed the script so it's possible to just run simon from a command line (if not, use ./simon.sh instead of just simon while in the project's directory).

Common Options

The script keeps a snapshot of the site in order to compare a new snapshot with the old one. The snapshot is stored as SNAPSHOT_OLD, but you can specify another path to the file:

simon -s ~/.cache/simon/simon.old

You may want to set a directory where all downloaded images will be stored:

simon -i ~/Pictures/Simon

Use -c option to disable color output and text formatting. Note that if your terminal doesn't support colors, the script assumes that some other capabilities are not available as well. This causes turning off pretty-printing, i.e. use of simplified output and lack of colors.

Interactive Mode

As previously mentioned, this is the default mode. You don't need to provide any special options here.

If this is the mode you want to use regulary and don't want to specify -i and -s options with their arguments, create an alias as the following:

alias simon='simon -i <your_dir> -s <your_path>'

Refer to your shell documentation to find out where the alias should be placed in order to use it not only for a current shell session.

Use -p option if the pretty-printing is not desired, or the feature causes problems.

It may be helpful to use -h option to show a short summary of all the options.

Non-interactive Mode

This mode is useful if you want to run the script at scheduled times using cron daemon of your choice or using systemd timers. The script does not produce any outputs except for errors (stderr).

To enter the mode, specify -a option. If you want to disable errors outputs, use -q option. If you want to see not only errors, use -v option that enables regular messages (stdout), i.e. the command below will produce almost the same output as it does in the interactive mode:

simon -av

In interactive mode, you are able to see diff output between the snapshots. To enable the output in the automatic mode use a combination of -v and -d options, e.g.:

simon -avd

Now, last but perhaps not least, it makes sense to disable the use of colored output with -c option.

See the Wiki page for a brief guide on how to use the mode to set up a cron-job or systemd timer.

Contributing

Feel free to open an issue with any questions or problems related to the project. Any ideas or pull requests would be welcomed.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to all of you who starred the project and hit the subscribe watch button.