Bash Lotto Lookup
Thursday, December 28th, 2006My dad likes to play the NJ Lottery. He usually buys Mega Million tickets, and then forgets to check if he won anything. So every once in a while, he asks me to look up the numbers for a certain date. After doing this couple of times for him, I ended up hacking this simple bash script to automate the process:
#!/bin/bash
if [ "$1" = "" ]; then echo "usage lotto [ mm/dd/yyyy ]" ; exit; fi
lynx -dump "http://www.state.nj.us/lottery/games/1-1-3_mega_history.shtml" | grep "$1"
Note that since I’m using grep, I can do all sorts of fancy regexp stuff when calling this script. For example:, to get all the drawings from Jan-May 2006 I can simply do:
lotto 12/../.*
will find all the results from December
lotto 0[1-5]/../…6
will find all the results from the Jan-May 2006 period
Note that I can also use this for searching other fields - not just the date. For example, if I want to see all the winning number combinations that are archived on the page I can simply do:
lotto ,0
Alternatively I can do:
lotto [^0]0.00$
to see all the numbers that did not win. And of course, I can just search directly for the number sequence to see if a given number won.
I don’t know how useful is this to anyone, but I figured that I might as well put it out there, since I have been using it for a while now.



