Aaron Bockover

Dumping to the Internets

I am constantly uploading files and pasting people URLs to said files hosted on some web server. After many years of typing the scp command and then manually transcribing the resulting URL, I finally made my life easier.

I shared it with some friends on IRC and everyone seemed to find it the most revolutionary script of 2008, so maybe it’s useful to the rest of the world.

In addition to printing the URL on the terminal, it also copies the URL into the primary X clipboard. This allows me to run the command upload foo and then quickly middle click the URL into IRC or a browser.

#!/bin/bash
user=username
host=host.org
[[ $# -lt 1 ]] && { echo "Not sure what to do..." 1>&2; exit 1; }
scp -r $* $user@$host:public_html && {
	URL="http://$host/~$user/$(basename $1)"
	echo "$URL"
	xselection -replace PRIMARY "$URL"
}

It assumes you have your ~/public_html directory on the server being shared over HTTP at /~username. In openSUSE 11.0, the xselection command is provided by, you guessed it, the xselection package.

Enjoy!