Bash scripting 20a – weather
Another useful program is ANSI weather. We can use this to get a weather forecast or current weather conditions for a specified location, for example
This can be installed with
sudo apt install ansiweather
ansiweather -l torquay
Weather in Torquay: 11 °C - UVI: 4.19 - Wind: 5.81
By default, the output uses ansicolour, and as per man page this can be turned off by using -l
ansiweather -a false
Which is useful., as we have been looking at loops and generating data we can do combine some of this and generate current date / time and then the output of the weather forecast
echo "date" "data" # for reference, not written to file
for ((i = 0 ; i < 10 ; i++)); do
echo $(date), $(ansiweather -l Paignton -a false) # echo to screen (stdout)
echo $(date), $(ansiweather -l Paignton -a false) >> weather.csv
done
#sources of help
#https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40175868/how-to-create-csv-file-using-shell-script
#https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1194882/how-to-generate-random-number-in-bash
#https://linuxhandbook.com/bash-loops/
#https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25242626/bash-redirect-output-to-log-file-with-day-date-in-the-name
Which produces
date data
Sat 19 Apr 20:52:54 BST 2025, Weather in Paignton: 11 °C - UVI: 4.19 - Wind: 5.52 m/s NE - Humidity: 79% - Pressure: 1006 hPa
Sat 19 Apr 20:52:55 BST 2025, Weather in Paignton: 11 °C - UVI: 4.19 - Wind: 5.52 m/s NE - Humidity: 79% - Pressure: 1006 hPa
Sat 19 Apr 20:52:56 BST 2025, Weather in Paignton: 11 °C - UVI: 4.19 - Wind: 5.52 m/s NE - Humidity: 79% - Pressure: 1006 hPa
Sat 19 Apr 20:52:56 BST 2025, Weather in Paignton: 11 °C - UVI: 4.19 - Wind: 5.52 m/s NE - Humidity: 79% - Pressure: 1006 hPa
Sat 19 Apr 20:52:57 BST 2025, Weather in Paignton: 11 °C - UVI: 4.19 - Wind: 5.52 m/s NE - Humidity: 79% - Pressure: 1006 hPa
Sat 19 Apr 20:52:58 BST 2025, Weather in Paignton: 11 °C - UVI: 4.19 - Wind: 5.52 m/s NE - Humidity: 79% - Pressure: 1006 hPa
Sat 19 Apr 20:52:59 BST 2025, Weather in Paignton: 11 °C - UVI: 4.19 - Wind: 5.52 m/s NE - Humidity: 79% - Pressure: 1006 hPa
Sat 19 Apr 20:52:59 BST 2025, Weather in Paignton: 11 °C - UVI: 4.19 - Wind: 5.52 m/s NE - Humidity: 79% - Pressure: 1006 hPa
Sat 19 Apr 20:53:00 BST 2025, Weather in Paignton: 11 °C - UVI: 4.19 - Wind: 5.52 m/s NE - Humidity: 79% - Pressure: 1006 hPa
Sat 19 Apr 20:53:01 BST 2025, Weather in Paignton: 11 °C - UVI: 4.19 - Wind: 5.52 m/s NE - Humidity: 79% - Pressure: 1006 hPa
Which is probably not all that helpful. But it will produce a CSV file of that data.
However, if we put the command to produce output, in a script and then run this script as a cron job, we should be able to generate a weather report on a daily basis for a specific location.
I have made a post (scheduled for later today) on cron and used this as an example of using cron, a script to produce a CSV file of date, time, weather info over time.
This is clearly more useful than what it produces above.
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