What's the fastest way to display the block height with a shell script?

Question

What's the fastest way to display the current Monero block height with a shell script? Doesn't matter which scripting language. The idea is to call this script or block from other scripts, so it should just return the value.

Answer 1

I propose the following with simple bash scripting using curl and jq.

---

First, install jq (to parse json)

• macOS: brew install jq
• Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install jq
• Others at https://stedolan.github.io/jq/download/

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Then, write a simple bash script

Using the moneroclub public node:

#!/bin/bash

INFO=($(curl -sS -X POST http://node.moneroclub.com:8880/json_rpc -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":"0","method":"\
get_info"}' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' | jq '.result.height'))

echo $INFO

Alternatively, using moneroblocks.info:

#!/bin/bash

INFO=($(curl -sS -X GET http://moneroblocks.info/api/get_stats/ | jq '.height|tonumber'))

echo $INFO

Answer 2

Currently, I am using ruby to parse the JSON returned from moneroblocks.info:

ruby << END_OF_RUBY
require 'open-uri'
require 'json'
open ("http://moneroblocks.info/api/get_stats/") { |src|
      puts JSON.parse(src.read)["height"]
}
END_OF_RUBY

Which right nows returns: 1140328

Answer 3

If you have a daemon running on your own machine, use:

height=$(monerod print_height)

This will save the height as the shell variable $height.

I see now that the question was for using a block explorer. Oh well.