How to get my geolocation in bash

Question

I am looking for a good geolocation api to use from bash. I want this call to return at the very minimum the name of the city I am in, and the state.

I imagine that there must be some site I can curl, or some scripting language that has a package that works. The machine does not have a GPS, but it does use wireless internet most of the time if that is needed.

Answer 1

Wireless internet meaning WiFi, CDMA2k, UMTS, EDGE... ? And your carrier? Not that it matters.

Really. I'd start investing in a GPS dongle.

Answer 2

Scraping the first Google hit result for "geoip" seems to work easily enough.

$ curl http://www.maxmind.com/app/locate_my_ip |
> awk '/<table>/{RS=RS RS}/tblProduct1/'

I haven't checked their EULA to see if using their service this way is okay, but they do also provide GeoIP libraries for C, Perl, Python, etc. with a "lite" database that you can distribute (with conditions).

Answer 3

I was looking at this problem again recently and found whereami, a geolocation bash script for Mac OS X Snow Leopard, which takes advantage of Core Location. This will tend to be much more precise than IP geolocation, and it works well in my tests.

Answer 4

geolocate-cli is still in alpha but should do the job.