Type the program into a garden-variety text editor: Notepad on Windows, TextEdit on Mac OS X, vi or Emacs on Unix/Linux, or anything else of the sort. Save the file as directed—usually as scriptname.pl (the pl bit stands for Perl, the predominant programming language used in Google Hacks).

Alternatively, you can download the code for all of the hacks online at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/googlehks2, a ZIP archive filled with individual scripts already saved as text files.

Get to the command line on your computer or remote server. In Mac OS X, launch the Terminal (ApplicationsUtilitiesTerminal). In Windows, click the Start button, select Run..., type command, and hit the Enter/Return key on your keyboard. In Unix ... well, we'll just assume you know how to get to the command line.

Navigate to where you saved the script at hand. This varies from operating system to operating system, but usually involves something like cd ~/Desktop (that's your Desktop on the Mac).

Invoke the script by running the programming language's interpreter (e.g., Perl) and feeding it the script (e.g., scriptname.pl) like so:

$ perl  scriptname.pl

Most often, you'll also need to pass along some parameters—your search query, the number of results you'd like, and so forth. Simply drop them in after the script name, enclosing them in quotes if they're more than one word or if they include an odd character or three:

$ perl  scriptname.pl '"much ado about nothing" script' 10

The results of your script are almost always sent straight back to the command-line window in which you're working, like so:

$ perl  scriptname.pl '"much ado about nothing" script' 10



1. "Amazon.com: Books: Much Ado About Nothing: Screenplay ..." 

[http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0393311112?v=glance]

2. "Much Ado About Nothing Script" 

[http://www.signal42.com/much_ado_about_nothing_script.asp]

...

The elllpsis (...) bit signifies that we've cut off the output for brevity's sake.

To stop output scrolling off your screen faster than you can read it, on most systems you can "pipe" (read: redirect) the output to a little program called more:

$ perl  scriptname.pl | more

Hit the Enter/Return key on your keyboard to scroll through line by line, the space bar to leap through page by page.

You'll also sometimes want to direct output to a file for safekeeping, importing into your spreadsheet application, or displaying on your web site. This is as easy; refer to the code shown next.

$ perl  scriptname.pl > output_filename.txt

And to pour some input into your script from a file, simply do the opposite:

$ perl  scriptname.pl < input_filename.txt

Type the program in to a garden-variety text editor: Notepad on Windows, TextEdit on Mac OS X, vi or Emacs on Unix/Linux, or anything else of the sort. Save the file as directed—usually as scriptname.cgi (the cgi bit reveals that you're dealing with a CGI—that's common gateway interface—script).

Alternatively, you can download the code for all of the hacks online at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/googlehks2, a ZIP archive filled with individual scripts already saved as text files.

Move the script over to wherever your web site lives. You should have some directory on a server somewhere in which all of your web pages (all those .html files) and images (ending in .jpg, .gif, etc.) live. Within this directory, you'll probably see something called a cgi-bin directory: this is where CGI scripts must usually live in order to be run rather than just displayed in your web browser when you visit them.

You usually need to bless CGI scripts as executable—to be run rather than displayed. Just how you do this depends on the operating system of your server. If you're on a Unix/Linux or Mac OS X system, this usually entails typing the following on the command line:

$ chmod 755 

scriptname.cgi

Now you should be able to point your web browser at the script and have it run as expected, behaving in a manner similar to that described in the "Running the Hack" section of the hack at hand.

Just what URL you use once again varies wildly. It should, however, look something like this: http://www.your_domain.com/cgi-bin/scriptname.cgi, where your_domain.com is your web site domain, cgi-bin refers to the directory in which your CGI scripts live, and scriptname.cgi is the script itself.

If you don't have a domain and are hosted at an ISP, the URL is more likely to look like this: http://www.your_isp.com/~your_username/cgi-bin/scriptname.cgi, where your_isp.com is your ISP's domain, ~your_username is your username at the ISP, cgi-bin refers to the directory in which your CGI scripts live, and scriptname.cgi is the script itself.