flickr and unix is awesome

I've been toying around with flickr and downloading random images based on tags. I just wrote a one-liner that grabs a random popular flickr tag, it looks like this:

GET http://flickr.com/photos/tags/ | grep '/photos/tags/[a-z]' | cut -f4 -d/ | random -f - | head -1

note: the random command is something I've only found in FreeBSD. it could easily be replaced with a perl one-liner to shuffle.

this prints out a single, random, popular tag from flickr. used in combination with my perl script that picks a random picture based on tag, I can get some randomly awesome pictures:

slather -t `randomtag`

perhaps soon I'll post slather.