Your xpath invocation breaks on ubuntu 11.10. Also, I would've gone with a slightly shorter solution:

curl -s lipsum.com/feed/xml | xpath -e '//lipsum' 2>&- | sed -e's/<\/*lipsum>//'

Or even better (man is your friend when saving bytes):

 curl -s lipsum.com/feed/xml | xpath -q -e '//lipsum' | sed -e's/<\/*lipsum>//'

But thanks for the post in the first place - I wouldn't have gotten such a useful one-liner (and learned about xpath) right now :-)

Hi Brett

I get the following content from running the snippet

/tmp/temp_textmate.rac4EC: line 4:  : command not found

Does this mean xpath isn't doing something correctly?

Oops, sorry for the confusion. Glad you found the right link.

Maybe I'm over-daramtizing the "frontmost app"-thing, but I'm currently investigating how I possibly could rid out TextMate of my workflow.

Looking forward to the calculator stuff. (As useful as my punch-card implementation? https://gist.github.com/808...

Brett, you got to stop posting such stuff, because you're not only harming your productivity, you're harming others as well.
I know there are probably tons of scripts out there that do the same thing, but I wanted to take your example and make it more flexible with interactive input.
https://gist.github.com/gis...

Nice idea, by the way, thanks.