commandliners

In this time of crisis perhaps we need to pay more attention to financial issues. I am interested in converting some currencies so I have written a script that given two currencies, converts on to the other. The script searches the info on Google Finance’s page.

An example of its usage is:

$ ./currencies.sh EUR USD
1 EUR = 1.316 USD

The available currencies are:

  EUR - Euros
  USD - United State Dollar
  GBP - British Pound
  JPY - Japanese Yen
  CHF - Swiss Franc
  CAD - Canadian Dollar
  AUD - Australian Dollar
  INR - Indian Rupee

You only have to copy & paste the code below into a file named currencies.sh (or whatever)

#!/bin/bash

# currencies.sh
# 2009 - Rafa Casado - rafacas@commandliners.com

toUpper() {
        echo $@ | tr "[:lower:]" "[:upper:]"
}

numargs=$#

if [ $numargs -ne 2 ]
then
        echo "Usage: $0 currency1 currency2"
        echo "Ex: $0 EUR USD"
        echo "Available currencies:"
        echo "  EUR - Euros"
        echo "  USD - United State Dollar"
        echo "  GBP - British Pound"
        echo "  JPY - Japanese Yen"
        echo "  CHF - Swiss Franc"
        echo "  CAD - Canadian Dollar"
        echo "  AUD - Australian Dollar"
        echo "  INR - Indian Rupee"
        exit 1
fi

CURRENCY1=$(toUpper "$1")
CURRENCY2=$(toUpper "$2")

CONVERSION=`wget -nv -O - "http://finance.google.com/finance?q=$CURRENCY1$CURRENCY2" 2>&1 | \
        grep " 1 $CURRENCY1 " | \
        sed -e "s/^.*<span class=bld>&nbsp;\(.*\)&nbsp;$CURRENCY2.*$/\1/"`
if [ ${CONVERSION:-1} == "1" ]
then
        echo "Network error"
else
        echo "1 $CURRENCY1 = $CONVERSION $CURRENCY2"
fi

exit 0

If you want to know a specific currency conversion everyday (at 5 pm, for example) you can change the last line of the script:

echo "1 $CURRENCY1 = $CONVERSION $CURRENCY2"

for this one:

mail -s "1 $CURRENCY1 = $CONVERSION $CURRENCY2" your@mail.com

and add a cron job like this:

0 17 * * * /path_to_script/currencies.sh EUR USD