The output consisted of a blank line (apparently lynx always ends it's dumps with a blank line Oo), "back later" and the solution…
My box is up 24/7 anyway so I had no problem with letting the script run all night
maybe i am a lucky man ...i solve this challenge without writing script...i just opened that page yesterday (10:52 AM)..and i surprised the page tell me the answer ..
i'm just lucky...
Created a loop bash script that output the Curl to a file, and since Curl would rewrite the file i then Cat the output and appended it on another file, got a long list like that
<html><body>back later
<html><body>back later
<html><body>back later
with the answer in the middle, could replace the <html><body>back later with a blank space, but i just scroll it down it was a lot longer and very easy to spot....
Did it in Groovy. Getting the text from the Website and comparing it to the previous result.
If there is a difference it is shown on the console. The programm ran for 514minutes
def url = new URL('http://www.hacker.org/challenge/misc/minuteman.php')
def data = url.getText()
def result = data
def i = 0;
while(result.equals(data)) {
println i++
sleep(60000)
data = url.getText()
if(!data.equals(result)) {
println data
}
}
I basically did what everyone else did: I wrote a script (php) that checked the page every minute for the content to be different than "back later". Further, I had it send me a text message when this was the case! Finally got the text at 11:52 eastern time and it was very exciting. I wrote the script last night around the same time so I must've JUST missed it. Was getting really worried that something was wrong with my code and that I'd have to test another whole day, but no, it just waited til 8 minutes before midnight to increase the suspense haha.
It seems php is the most popular language, but I did it in ruby and it worked as well:
#one minute man
def checkPage()
require 'open-uri'
while true
answer = open('http://www.hacker.org/challenge/misc/minuteman.php') {|f| f.read }
if !answer.include? "back later"
return answer
end
sleep 59
end
end