[Tfug] Checking for updated webpage

[Jeff Breadner]

> I'm looking for an app that will monitor a specific webpage and inform
> me when it's been updated (the site doesn't provide a feed).  I found
> specto, but it wants to pull in the whole GNOME infrastructure.  For
> my purposes, a daily cronjob that runs wget and diffs the page might
> be the simplest way.  Any suggestions?
>
>   

Here's a quickie, untested bash script.  It will notify you whenever 
something changes, then update the reference point so you won't get 
notified again until things change again.  It doesn't test for 
connectivity, you might want to put a ping test "if" statement around 
this, or save the wget output to a file and check if the file size is 
zero or something if you need it to be more robust.

cheers
  Jeff


#!/bin/bash

OLDMD5SUM="$(cat md5sum.old)"
NEWMD5SUM="$(wget -q - http://myurl.com | md5sum)"

if ! [ "$OLDMD5SUM" = "$NEWMD5SUM" ]
then
  echo "$NEWMD5SUM" > md5sum.old
  echo "http://myurl.com modified on $(date)" | mail -s 
"http://myurl.com modified!" me at mydomain.com
fi