MWQuery
About
MWQuery is a Perl command line tool to query the Merriam-Webster Online dictionary.
Features
- Color highlighting of displayed information
- Interactive mode with possibility to follow lookup links
Check out a screenshot of MWQuery being used in a GNOME Terminal.
Release history
0.2 (2004-05-30)
- Support for pronunciation audio files (threaded background download queue)
- Added a new LINKS command in interactive mode that displays all currently available links.
- Workaround for a bug in the MW website, where sometimes links contain a trailing space, as in:
<a href="...va=word+">WORD </a> - Bugfix: Removed the prompt timeout of 10 minutes
0.1 (2004-05-02): Initial release
Installation
You'll need a working installation of Perl and the following modules:
- Getopt::Mixed
- HTML::Entities
- LWP::UserAgent
- Term::ANSIColor
- Term::Interact
- Term::ReadKey
- SDL::Mixer, SDL::Music (starting from version 0.2; in Debian Linux simply install the libsdl-perl package)
Most of these modules should already be installed, you can install the missing ones using CPAN.
Starting from version 0.2 you also need ithreads support compiled into Perl. This is usually the case with current Perl distributions. You can verify this by scanning the output of perl -V for USE_ITHREADS.
Usage
Enter mwquery --help to see an overview of accepted options. In interactive
mode you can also enter help to see a list of available commands.
Download
This software is published under the GPL license and is free of charge.
Current version: 0.2 (2004-05-30) [Download]
Old versions:
0.1 (2004-05-02) [Download]