All I wanted was the number of emails in my inbox with nothing else. And I also found a way to let the script pull the username and password from keychain so you don’t have to type your password/username into a shell script — a rather serious security flaw.

I don’t have a website, but if you want the full script let me know (mosius-at-gmail). The key lines for working with key chain are here. You’d have to adjust for your own keychain, but it’s fairly intuitive. I just used the keychain item for Google Notifier (what I used to use) because it was there. But it’d be equally easy to just create your own keychain item in LOGIN and use that information too.

password=`security 2>&1 >/dev/null find-generic-password -gl “Google Service: Google Notifier” | grep -m 1 “password” | sed -e ‘s/password: “//’ | sed -e ‘s/”//’`

username=`security find-generic-password -l “Google Service: Google Notifier” | grep -m 1 “acct” | sed -e ‘s/ “acct”=”//’ | sed -e ‘s/”//’ | sed -e ‘s/@/%40/’`

The 2>&1 deal in the first line has to do with the issue that when “security” outputs the password it does it to STDERR instead of STDOUT. Who knows why? Everything else around it is just parsing and stripping stuff out of the way so you just get what you need.

Replace them with ‘ (shift+2) and ” (shift+#) and you should be fine.

I’m just wondering how to pull the email authors off the atom feed?