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Title: YAUIB : Yet another useless IRC Bot !
---

After 2 years of... non blogging... I'm back! This time I stopped C\#
(Oh yeah !) and I'm writing a lot of Python! (Oh YEAH !) So to say
HELLO I'll present something useless: My Python IRC Bot. But this
article should be usefull, so I'll speak about the Unix Philosophy: As
Doug McIlroy said:

> This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do
> it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle
> text streams, because that is a universal interface.

So my Python Bot is wrote like this, only \~200 lines of Python it has
only two interfaces, and they are simple. The first step is to start the
bot:

    :::bash
    ./ircbot.py connect 'server' '#chan' 'nickname'

Ok the bot is connected to a chan, now you have to write some hooks, in
yauib every action raise a hook in the 'hooks' directory, you can write
a hook in any language you want. As a good start point I wrote a default
hook for received messages in hook/pubmsg, simplified like this:

    :::bash
    #!/bin/sh -f
    s_login="$(echo "$1" | sed 's#/#__SLASH__#g')"
    s_host="$2"
    t_login="$3"
    t_host="$4"
    shift 4
    arguments="$*"
    command=$(echo "${1%% *}" | sed 's#/#__SLASH__#g')
    if [ -x "commands/$command" ]
        then
        args=$(echo "$1" | sed 's/^ *[^ ]* *//g' )
        commands/$command $args
    fi

You should read : "When a message is received, the command in
commands/\[1st word of the message\] is executed." So now you can start
to write simple commands in the commands folder, like the command say:

    :::bash
    #!/bin/sh
    echo "$*"

This command is 17 chars long, and now, without restarting your bot, try
to make it say something on the channel : you> say hello bot>
hello An now you can start to write dauting ones .... like ... display a
readeable calendar of the current month like:

         March 2011
    Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
           1  2  3  4  5
     6  7  8  9 10 11 12
    13 14 15 16 17 18 19
    20 21 22 23 24 25 26
    27 28 29 30 31

Ready ?

    :::bash
    #!/bin/sh
    cal

As the binary cal is installed on you machine, (windows user, you can
leave, now), that's all, your're done ... sorry, it just work :p Et
voilà ! You have to keep the UNIX philosophy in mind : - Everything is a
file - Write programs that do one thing and do it well And you'll be
happy developers ! PS: You can download / contribute to Yauib on
https://github.com/JulienPalard/yauib