Script to check aur status

Question

I'm trying to write a script to check the status of a package on aur; ie, to see if its been updated since I've installed it.
Here's what I have so far:
#!/bin/sh
PACK=$1 #package name
PACKID=$2 #package ID on AUR
#grab last updated of package on AUR
LUPD=`elinks -source http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=$PACKID | grep "Last Updated" | awk -F : '{print $2}'`
LAST=`grep -c $PACK /var/log/pacman.log` #number of instances of package
INST=`grep $PACK /var/log/pacman.log | sed -n ${LAST}p` #get last instance
echo -e "Package: $PACK \n $INST \n Last Update: $LUPD"
This basically works fine for manually inputting a package name and AUR ID (though it needs to be prettied up):
[mike@esme abs]$ aurcheck rxvt-unicode-256color 13060
Package: rxvt-unicode-256color
[2008-04-18 20:01] installed rxvt-unicode-256color (9.02-1)
Last Update: Sun, 04 May 2008 14
but what I envision is having a two column file with the first column the package name and the second the ID but I can't figure out how to make this loop around for each line of such a file.  If anyone can provide some help/pointers I'd greatly appreciate it.
PS Perhaps yaourt can do this for you, but I don't use yaourt and would like to learn how to do this even just to improve my scripting abilities
Thanks!

Answer 1

Daenyth wrote:Oh wow, I had no idea such a thing existed... Very cool!
Expanding on my suggestion, here's the bash/js-script I use to find packages in AUR:
wget="/usr/bin/wget -q -O-"
aurrepo="http://aur.archlinux.org/rpc.php?type=search&arg="
js="/usr/bin/js"
aur() {
local iam="${FUNCNAME[0]}:"
local cmd="${1}"
local what="${2}"
local aurresult=""
[[ -z "${cmd}" ]] && {
echo "${iam}: use ${iam} (cmd) searchstring"
return 1
aurresult="$(${wget} ${aurrepo}${what})"
${js} -e "
var out = ${aurresult};
var res = out.results;
var i, j, len;
var tabs = ' ';
var tabstop1 = 13;
var oneline1 = {
'ID':true, 'CategoryID':true, 'NumVotes':true,
'OutOfDate':true, 'License':true
var oneline2 = {'Name':true, 'Version':true};
var line1='', line2='';
var others = {};
function tabto(string) {
return tabs.substring(1, tabstop1 - string.length);
if (out.type === 'error') {
print(res);
quit(1);
for (i in res) {
others = {};
line1 = '';
line2 = '';
for (j in res[i]) {
if ((typeof oneline1[j] !== 'undefined')
&& (typeof res[i][j] === 'string')) {
if (line1.length > 0) line1 = line1 + '; ';
line1 = line1 + j + ': ' + res[i][j];
} else if ((typeof oneline2[j] !== 'undefined')
&& (typeof res[i][j] === 'string')) {
if (line2.length > 0) line2 = line2 + '; ';
line2 = line2 + j + ': ' + res[i][j];
} else {
others[j] = res[i][j];
print(line2);
print(line1);
for (k in others) {
print(k + ':' + tabto(others[k]) + others[k]);
print('---');
quit(0);
return $?
Note that js(1), which has no man-page or other documentation, is part of "spidermonkey", which in turn is part of "firefox".  It makes sense to assume that people have this browser installed.  If at all possible, the javascript shell should have the file-methods compiled in to be able to use it like many other scripting languages, especially with JSON code.  The scriptlet above works with an unmodified standard install.