Now that I’ve got steam, I get to be constantly pestered by e-mails sending me keys with which to identify that I am myself. To save a few steps in this annoying, repetitive process I wrote a tiny bash script which finds the key in an e-mail from steam and uses zenity to pop it up on my screen, then added a filter in Evolution Mail to mark these “steam verification” messages as read and pipe them to the pop-up script. This allows me to copy the key with a double-click and paste it into steam with a middle-click, without having to poke around in my mail client for the e-mail and the place where the key is mentioned in it.

In the hope that it saves someone else from this irksomeness, here’s the code for the script:

#/bin/bash

# Displays a pop-up showing a Steam activation key piped to it by a MUA.
# In the e-mail the steam key is wrapped in <h2> tags
# Author: Sion Le Roux <sinisterstuf@gmail.com>

# read e-mail from pipe
while read -r line; do
    # find <h2>
    buffer=$(echo $line | grep 'h2')
    if [[ ! -z $buffer ]]; then
        #strip surrounding <h2> tags
        steamkey=$(echo $buffer | sed -e 's/<\/\?h2>//g')
    fi
done

# display the steam code in a pop-up
zenity --info --title="Steam Key" \
    --window-icon="/usr/share/pixmaps/steam.png" \
    --text="<tt><big><b>$steamkey</b></big></tt>"