Send yourself latest XKCD comic as email.

xkcd-emailer.sh

#! /bin/bash

# We'll keep the ID of last sent comic here
logFile='./xkcd-last-sent.log'

toEmail='your_email@example.com'
function getJsonVal() {
    python -c "import json,sys;sys.stdout.write(json.dumps(json.load(sys.stdin)['$1']))"; 
}

echo $(date)

# if logfile exists, its content is the id of last sent comic
lastSent=0
if [ -f $logFile ]; then
    lastSent=`cat xkcd-last-sent.log`
fi

# get comic json data
jsonStr=$(wget -qO- https://xkcd.com/info.0.json)

if [ "$jsonStr" == "" ]
then
    echo -e "Failed pulling JSON data.\n";
    exit;
fi

currentNum=`echo $jsonStr | getJsonVal num`
# if id from json is bigger than our id, it means the comic is new to us, and we will send email
if [[ $currentNum -gt $lastSent ]]
then
    echo "Sending $currentNum"
    # prepare HTML content
    title=`echo $jsonStr | getJsonVal title`
    img=`echo $jsonStr | getJsonVal img`
    alt=`echo $jsonStr | getJsonVal alt`
    htmlContent="<h2>${title:1:-1}</h2><br><img src=$img><br><p>${alt:1:-1}</p>"

    # prepare headers
    mailContent="Subject: XKCD #${currentNum}\r\n"
    mailContent=$mailContent"MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n"
    mailContent=$mailContent'Content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8\r\n\r\n'
    mailContent=$mailContent$htmlContent

    # if you're using ssmtp uncomment the next line, and comment the line after that
    #echo -e "$mailContent" | ssmtp $toEmail
    echo -e "$mailContent" | sendmail -t $toEmail
    # update our log file with the latest id
    echo $currentNum > $logFile
else
    echo "Already sent $currentNum"
fi

echo # just to put a blank line after all output. 
#Useful when you use crontab to append the output into a file.