Recently, I stumbled upon an OCR tool for Linux. However, I didn’t like the idea of needing a GUI app, so I wrote a shell script connecting the right CLI tools instead. This article dissects “grab-text”, a simple POSIX-compatible shell script I wrote for grabbing text from your screen.

As developers, we perform many repetitive tasks, big and small. Many of these tasks might be made easier by using an appropriate tool instead. So let’s build them ourselves!