Using a bash script to read my external ip address

[plr4ever]

Hello all,

I have a webserver running on my home network, and I am trying to find the best way to have my dynamic IP address constantly updated to afraid.org. I am currently trying to use the fdclient php script in order to update my ip address. however, it wants to read the external ip address from the output of another script.

It suggests using a script called getmyip.php, but this only outputs my local ip address.

I know that dyndns.org has "checkip.dyndns.com", but this doesn't output solely the ip address, which fdupdate requires. I am new to bash scripting, so does anyone know how i could take the page at checkip.dyndns.com and print only the ip address to a file that can be read by the fdupdate script?

Sorry if this is a very obvious thing to do. If someone could point me to a good tutorial or would care to explain it, i would be very thankful.

Thanks!

[Freston]

Ugly, but it works

#!/bin/bash
wget http://checkip.dyndns.com/ 2>1 /dev/null
cat index.html | awk '{print $6}'|cut -d"<" -f1
#rm index.html

I commented out the `rm` because it removes things. The `wget` command creates a file called 'index.html' is the current directory, and appends a number if another index.html already is in the current directory. `rm`, if uncommented, would remove that and unless that is what you wanted, it would not be very nice. And you can direct `wget` to use another file as output. But it's not '-o outputfile' and I'm to lazy to look further

[flakblas]

Another good method is to use the curl command. It basically dumps the HTML of the web page. Then you can use a regex to find the IP address within the code. Eg:

curl -s URLHere | grep -Eo "[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+"

[the_ultimate_samurai]

ooo i like that....imma use curl more often...

[plr4ever]

Another good method is to use the curl command. It basically dumps the HTML of the web page. Then you can use a regex to find the IP address within the code. Eg:

curl -s URLHere | grep -Eo "[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+"

What do i insert in the [0-9] spaces?

[Silverfish]

What do i insert in the [0-9] spaces?

You don't change the 0-9 section, that is just a regular expression to search for the IP address in the text. Just need to change the URLHere bit to something.
ie

curl -s checkip.dyndns.com | grep -Eo "[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+"

So if you paste that into command line it should just give you your IP address.

Just make sure you don't schedule it more often than once every 10 minutes, otherwise you might end up being blocked.

PS I like the curl version thanks flakblas!

[ghostdog74]

Ugly, but it works

#!/bin/bash
wget http://checkip.dyndns.com/ 2>1 /dev/null
cat index.html | awk '{print $6}'|cut -d"<" -f1
#rm index.html

I commented out the `rm` because it removes things. The `wget` command creates a file called 'index.html' is the current directory, and appends a number if another index.html already is in the current directory. `rm`, if uncommented, would remove that and unless that is what you wanted, it would not be very nice. And you can direct `wget` to use another file as output. But it's not '-o outputfile' and I'm to lazy to look further

use -O- -q of wget to not create a temp file and then pipe to awk, without cat or cut

# wget -q -O-  http://checkip.dyndns.com/| awk '{gsub(/.*Current IP Address:|<\/body>.*/,"")}1'

[plr4ever]

@FlakBlas

Another good method is to use the curl command. It basically dumps the HTML of the web page. Then you can use a regex to find the IP address within the code. Eg:

curl -s URLHere | grep -Eo "[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+"

Thank you so much! this works perfectly. Now i will just pipe the output into a text file that the php script can read.

[hugortega]

Just FYI, there is a service that does not requires grep:

curl http://www.whatismyip.com/automation/n09230945.asp

Technically, it is safer than try to detect the IP string, because if the dyndns page includes some strange HTML code to render the IP string (e.g. some span tag on each digit), the grep solution will fail.