You need to obtain your personal API key from the OMDb API website in order to be able to use the tool. Once you have it, you can either pass it via --apikey argument, or if you don't wish to pass it every time, you can set it as an environment variable OMDB_API_KEY.

First set up an alias for the command:

alias omdbtool="python /path/to/omdbtool.py"

Or for the gui:

alias omdbtool="python /path/to/omdbtool-gui.py"

Note: in order to use the gui you will need to install Gooey

pip install Gooey

Show all info about the movie 'Cars'

omdbtool -t Cars

Show all info about the series 'Firefly'

omdbtool -t firefly --type series

Show all info about season 1 episode 1 of 'Firefly'

omdbtool -t firefly --season 1 --episode 1

Show all info about the series 'Firefly', in JSON format

omdbtool -t firefly -r JSON

Show all info about latest 'True Grit' movie

omdbtool -t "True Grit"

Show all info about 1969 version of 'True Grit'

omdbtool -t "True Grit" -y 1969

Print movie's rating only

omdbtool -t Cars | sed -n '/^imdbrating/{n;p;}'

Download movie's poster

omdbtool -t Cars | wget `sed -n '/^poster/{n;p;}'`

Include full plot summary (not available for some movies)

omdbtool -t "True Grit" --plot full

Include additional data from Rotten Tomatoes

omdbtool -t "True Grit" --tomatoes

Show info by IMDb id

omdbtool -i tt0103064

(it will use directory and file names as movie titles)

Save following code to file get_ratings.sh (make sure to update the path in line 3):

ls -1 |
while read title; do
  res=`python /path/to/omdbtool.py -t "$title"`
  rating=`echo "$res" | sed -n '/^imdbrating/{n;p;}'`
  restitle=`echo "$res" | sed -n '/^title/{n;p;}' | sed s/*//g`
  year=`echo "$res" | sed -n '/^year/{n;p;}'`
  echo "$title  *  $restitle  *  $year  *  $rating"
done

then execute the saved command to fetch all the ratings: ./get_ratings.sh > ratings.txt (it'll take a while to retrieve all the data). Then you can open the ratings.txt file to see the movie ratings, or you can sort the movies by ratings to pick the best one to watch: < ratings.txt sort -t* -k4 -r.

(This used to be more useful when the API worked with inexact movie titles)

• works with Python 3 and Python 2.7 or earlier with argparse package installed
• thanks to the creator of this great site called OMDBAPI

This tool is licensed under GNU Lesser GPL license.