Command-Line Comes to the Web

Whoever would’ve thought that the Web would get a command-line interface? Whoever would’ve thought that such an interface could be so gosh-dang useful?

Yubnub bills itself as a “social command line” for the Web. Users are allowed to assign command-line type abbreviations to Web addresses and Web-based apps. There are, of course, hundreds of already assigned CL codes, many of them in familiar command-line syntax (“ls” for a list of available commands, “man” for the “manual” to the site (okay, it’s a lame little FAQ, but still…), “who” for a “whois” search, etc). Then there are Web-centric commands, like “g [search string]” for a Google search, “login [site URL]” to return a bugmenot site password, “torrentspy [name of media]” to search for matching bittorrent files). This software gets seriously useful when you install the Firefox search box plugin for it.