twic_script

A bash script to maintain an update SCID database of chess games downloaded from The Week In Chess (TWIC)

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This simple bash script helps maintaining an updated database of chess games for SCID, based on the famous "The Week In Chess" game collection made available at

http://www.theweekinchess.com/

Games are distributed as zipped png files, which are uploaded weekly on http://www.theweekinchess.com/zips/ (Should that URL change at some point in the future, you will just need to update the ADDR variable below)

SYNOPSIS

 ./twic_script.sh --help

 ./twic_script.sh [<start_issue> [<end_issue> [<pgnfile>]]]

When called with "--help" as first argument, the script outputs a minimal help.

Otherwise, if called with a start_issue (an integer, default to the first issue to be downloaded, as specified into ${IDFILE}, or to the first known online issue of TWIC, number 210, if ${IDFILE} does not exist), it will start downloading the TWIC issues from start_issue up to the latest (or up to end_issue, if provided). The zips are stored into ${ZIPDIR} (default to "./zips"), while the png database is maintained into ${PNGFILE} (default to ${DBDIR}/twic.png), or into the file provided by the user as third argument.

The new pgn files are concatenated at the end of ${PNGFILE}, and then the SCID database is rebuilt (this can take a while...).

The script maintains a record of the last downloaded issue, into the file ${IDFILE} (default to ${ZIPDIR}/.last_id), so that it is sufficient to call it regularly (e.g., as a user cron job) with no arguments in order to have an updated DB of chess games.

DEPENDENCIES

twic_script.sh depends on:

• wget (to download the zip files)
• unzip (well, what do you think we are using it for?)
• pgnscid (a program provided by scid to convert a pgn file into a SCID .si4 game DB)

**** IMPORTANT NOTE ****

BEWARE!!! IF YOU REMOVE ${PNGFILE}, THE CORRESPONDING SCID DB FILE WILL BE OVERWRITTEN BY THE FIRST RUN OF THIS SCRIPT!!!