Question

In Bash programming, I’m trying to set up a script to generate a specific link. Subsequently, i’m trying to get that script to open said link if it does not 404. curl and other programs exist on my system, but apparently i can’t get the links to autoopen, without defining a command explicitly, such as firefox [generatedLink]. What can i use to do the following:

(1) Analyze the output of curl to determine whether the generated link is valid (i.e. does not return a 404), and
(2) prompt the user whether they want to open the link in a browser, and if they say yes, open the default browser on their system to that generated link?

If you believe I should do this in some other language (C++, Python, etc.), please let me know.

NOTE i only want this to work on Linux. It does not need to be cross-platform.

Answer 1

if HEAD "${URL}" >/dev/null; then
    printf '%s' 'URL ok, open browser? [y/n] '
    read -n 1
    echo

    if [ "${REPLY}" = y ]; then
        xdg-open "${URL}"
    fi
else
    echo 'URL not ok.'
fi

Now a short explanation:

1. HEAD is a quick script coming with libwww-perl. I used that because it’s straightforward. It just does a HEAD request, so it’s lightweight, and it exits with error if the URL gives one;
2. The asking part is not really important here. It’s just one of many solutions;
3. xdg-open is a nice script which detects whichever Desktop Environment you are using and opens the URL using the preferred application there. In other words, it tries hard to make sure that browser chosen by user will be used.