Get my computer's current city and state from terminal

Question

How can I get my computer's location to the granularity of city and country using the command-line?

I know I could get the IP of the correct network interface and do an IP lookup but I wonder if the system has a quicker way to access this. The system clock has the location so I am wondering if it's possible to get it that way.

Answer 1

Command line tool

I've made quick modification to an excellent robmathers app WhereAmI. You can find it on my github.

Once You compile it and run, that's the output:

Latitude: 40.714232
Longitude: -73.9612889
Accuracy (m): 65.000000
Timestamp: 30.04.2015, 11:37:45 CEST
Location: 277 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11211, United States

If You want only the city and the country - changes in parsing json should be made (or grep the output). Sample json data can be found here.

_{Note: This is very quick implementation, but there shouldn't be any errors}

Info from preferences

You can get info from preferences by running:

defaults read /Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist com.apple.preferences.timezone.selected_city

You'll need to parse the output, because it looks like:

{
CountryCode = PL;
GeonameID = 3081368;
Latitude = "51.1";
LocalizedNames =     {
    pl = "Wroc\\U0142aw";
};
Longitude = "17.03333";
Name = "Wroc\\U0142aw";
Population = 634893;
TimeZoneName = "Europe/Warsaw";
Version = 1;
}