Finding Best Linux Distribution

We can find ranking of Linux distributions (distros) at site distrowatch.com. This ranking is based on Page Hits Per Day.In order to find best Linux distro, I have written a Perl script:


#!/usr/bin/perl -w
#===============================================================================
#
# FILE: best_distro.pl
#
# USAGE: ./best_distro.pl
#
# DESCRIPTION: Finds best distro from distrowatch.com
#
# OPTIONS: ---
# REQUIREMENTS: ---
# BUGS: ---
# NOTES: ---
# AUTHOR: Mitesh Singh Jat (mitesh)
# VERSION: 1.0
# CREATED: Tuesday 04 November 2008 04:05:19 IST
# REVISION: ---
#===============================================================================

use strict;
use warnings;

my $ndistro = 1;

if (@ARGV >= 1)
{
$ndistro = $ARGV[0];
if ($ndistro > 100)
{
$ndistro = 100;
}
}

my $lynx = `which lynx`;
chomp($lynx);
if ($lynx eq "")
{
print STDERR "$0: please install lynx\n";
print STDERR "sudo apt-get install lynx\n";
exit(-1);
}

open(LYNX, "lynx -source http://distrowatch.com/ |") or die("$0: cannot open lynx: $!\n");

my $i = 1;

while ($i <= $ndistro)
{
my $line;
my $distro;
my $rank = "";
while ($line = <LYNX>)
{
chomp($line);
$line =~ s/<th class=([^>]*)>(.*?)<\/th>/$2/i;
$line =~ s/(\s+)//g;
if ($line eq "$i")
{
$rank = $line;

unless ($line = <LYNX>) {last;}
chomp($line);
$line =~ s/<td class=([^>]*)><a href=([^>]*)>(.*?)<\/a><\/td>/$3/i;
$line =~ s/(\s+)//g;
$distro = $line;

print "$rank\t$distro\n";
last;
}
}
++$i;
}

close(LYNX);

Sample runs of above program:
$ ./best_distro.pl
1 Ubuntu
$ ./best_distro.pl 5
1 Ubuntu
2 openSUSE
3 Mint
4 Fedora
5 Debian

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