Bash

Introduction

Let’s say we want to change our git username to another one. Instead of checking manually if the username is already taken, we can automate this process by writing a script named fgitusr. The content of the script looks like this:

Code

# Check regex rules
if [[ !("$1" =~ ^[0-9a-zA-Z]{1}[0-9a-zA-Z\-]*[0-9a-zA-Z]{1}$) ]]; then
    echo "$1 DOESN'T MATCH REGEX"
    exit 1
fi

# Check if usersname exists
curl --output /dev/null --silent  --head --fail "https://github.com/$1"
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
    echo "USER $1 EXISTS";
else
    echo "USER $1 DOESN'T EXIST";
fi

The main idea is that we use curl to look if the url https://github.com/<username> is a valid link. If it is, then the user exist.

This can be done by using curl and pandoc. The command looks like this:

curl <url> | pandoc -f html -t plain | less

After that you can go up and down with j and k keys. With this command you can read directly in the terminal. If you want to store the information in a text file, you could use this command:

curl <url> | pandoc -f html -t plain > file.txt

Where file.txt is the name of the file where the information is stored.