How To Find The Best Answer To Your Question (Ubuntu) In 1Second

A couple of days ago, I’ve been trying to figure out how great it’s the howdoi script and what if I could modify it in a certain way to work along with AskUbuntu.com – yes it works only in Ubuntu. After several hours of studying its source code, I finally found what modifications I had to do and truth be told the results were absolutely satisfying.

How it works, you may ask. Simply put, just type your question (query or just a phrase or anything) like being in Google, but in terminal. Here, some examples:

How to change my desktop background ?

change desktop

Install chrome?

install chrome

How to download music from Youtube?

music from Youtube

How can I install nvidia drivers proprietary?

nvidia drivers

How to uninstall a program?

uninstal_a_program

The script will search using Google engine to find the appropriate AskUbuntu’s links and then throw away the irrelevant ones. Then, it will pick up the first one (use the -n <number> parameter to specify how many answers do you want to see), browse into the code tab, grab the first top voted-reply and throw away the garbage. If you want just the links, use the -l parameter.

Take a look and admire the power and the simplicity of the Linux shell altogether …

Download my script from Github and feel free fork and play with it. Extract it into a folder and make it executable (eg chmod +x filename) and the can run it.

chmod +x ask.py
./ask

It is not a bash script but it is written in Python, so you are going to need some Python bindings. Do not worry, the script will automatically install them for you. For example if you don’t have python-pygments installed:

pygments_not_installed

In case you are curious to know the required libraries the script needs Python, python-pygments, python-pyquery, python-requests, requests-cache. Again , if you do not have them installed, this is what it should normally do:

sudo apt-get install python-pygments
sudo apt-get install python-pyquery
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chris-lea/python-requests -y
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python-requests
git clone git://github.com/reclosedev/requests-cache.git
cd requests-cache
python setup.py install

Take a look at my script’s source code over here (GitHub fork)