

Irc in bash - sdegutis
https://github.com/sdegutis/irc.sh

======
Volscio
Out of curiosity, how many hackernews folks still IRC? I do, and IRC
periodically gets in the news (usually through chatlogs posted from hackers,
LulzSec, etc.), but what do y'all use?

~~~
sixtofour
I have never been able to "get" IRC. I've tried to like it a number of times,
but it always ends up as nothing but a distraction.

My experience: start a client, join a channel, and watch it go. Meanwhile, try
to get work done. I'm either watching IRC in case something interesting goes
by (and then not working), or I'm working and then miss whatever was
interesting on IRC. Or I try to do both and accomplish neither.

To me, IRC feels exactly like those twitter update widgets that people put on
their blogs. I usually end up opening a terminal window and putting it over
the widget, otherwise it distracts me like a "look at me!" advertisement.

I get much better value and results from googling; someone has always had
whatever problem I'm trying to solve, and if I can't figure it out on my own,
I can usually find a thread where someone else has.

I'm not complaining, and I'm not saying IRC has no value (to others). I
sometimes wonder if I'm doing it wrong, but I think IRC, among many other
things, is just not for me.

~~~
initself
In certain help channels, for complicated questions, you would be amazed with
the quality of the responses you get from people just hanging out in channel.
Being able to paste code and work with someone in real time to troubleshoot
bugs has saved my bacon probably hundreds of times by now. Great examples of
this are #jquery, #postgresql and #perl on freenode.

~~~
gnosis
Maybe I've just been unlucky, but I've run in to a lot of obnoxious, self-
righteous, and close minded people on #perl, both on freenode and efnet.

I've had excellent experiences with the rest of the technical channels I've
tried on freenode, however.

As far as non-technical chat goes, I prefer undernet. Efnet has slowly moved
to the bottom of my list as it seems to be an asshole magnet.

------
kragen
I wrote an IRC client in ash a while back:
[http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-
hacks/2008-Febru...](http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-
hacks/2008-February/000480.html)

It supports a more traditional IRC UI, where you can say "yes" on your current
channel just by typing "yes" and hitting return, but its output is not
formatted nicely. It's about half as much code.

------
a3_nm
I had started doing something similar, but in C, and with no daemons or
additional sockets (ie. the program outputs what happens on the channels on
stdout, and says what arrives on stdin). It works fine enough for me to use it
on trusted channels to write easy bots, show off some programs or whatever,
but it's not finished, clean, robust or secure.

See <https://gitorious.org/irctk/irctk/blobs/master/README> for some examples,
and <https://gitorious.org/irctk> for the actual program (but you probably
don't want to use it yet).

------
chx
I wonder about the <> never saw such a redirection for bash before. Is this a
Mac trick? What should I RTFM?

~~~
sdegutis
It's a bash thing... <http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/io-redirection.html>

~~~
james2vegas
Actually it's an sh thing:
[http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/xcu...](http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/xcu_chap02.html#tag_02_07_07)

~~~
sdegutis
I stand corrected.

------
mtogo
I had the same idea a few years ago but decided not to go through with it
because of the sheer uselessness. Looks like i made the right choice.

------
zyfo
Similiar to Simple IRC Client from suckless: <http://tools.suckless.org/sic>

~~~
xnxn
Seems closer to ii (<http://tools.suckless.org/ii/>) in that they both create
FIFOs for communication.

~~~
icebraining
ii is great, with a single line of bash I had each line piped to festival -
audio based IRC!

~~~
fps
and in a single line of bash I had nagios alerts piped into IRC. I'm amazed I
never knew about ii until a few weeks ago. It's amazingly useful.

------
Kwpolska
This makes no sense at all. I'd rather use telnet.

------
leon_
heh, we have a shell script that acts as a bot in our channel. it's an ugly
mess :)

