Show the first 3 steps that google maps tells you to take.

./getpath.sh "atlanta to nyc" | head -3
Head southeast on Trinity Ave SW toward Washington St SW        0.2mi
Slight left at Memorial Dr SW   0.3mi
Turn left at Martin St SE       361ft

Pipe that to lpr and you've got printed directions on under 5 seconds.

Why not just do this with plain page scraping? Because there's lots of javascript in google maps that presents the user with the directions. Firefox (Gecko, really) already parses it, so why bother reinventing the wheel? Let's use the wheel that already works.

Download jquery-20070623.1828.tar.gz. The download of jquerycmd comes with the xul app, 'jquerycmd.sh' and 'getpath.sh'.

For the lazy who just want to see the scripts:

• jquerycmd.sh
• getpath.sh

I've been working on the jquery commandline tool. The base features work, now all that remains is endlessly interating over adding features.

% ./jquerycmd.sh --url http://www.google.com --query img
<IMG width='276' height='110' src='/intl/en_ALL/images/logo.gif' alt='Google' />
% ./jquerycmd.sh --url http://www.technorati.com/ --query form
<FORM method='post' action='/query.php'>
        <div class="controls">
            <a href="/search?advanced">advanced search</a>
        </div>
... < remainder cut > ...