Yankees Best / Worst

records.sh

#!/usr/bin/bash

START_TIME=$SECONDS

# erase file so it can be re-run
> results.txt

get_record() {
    record=$(curl --silent http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/NYY/$1.shtml | ack -o 'content="\d+-\d+' | sed s/content=\"//g | uniq)
    echo "$i: $record" >> results.txt
}

for i in {1901..2014}
do
    get_record $i &
done

wait

echo -e "Best Seasons"
cat results.txt | sed '/ $/d' | sort -t"-" -k2 -n | head -5

echo -e "\nWorst Seasons"
cat results.txt | sort -t"-" -k2 -n | tail -5

ELAPSED_TIME=$(($SECONDS - $START_TIME))

echo $ELAPSED_TIME

Edit: Making it multi-threaded makes it run in about half the time.