Up until January 2002 many people could still use the finger utility to obtain the most recent listing of earthquakes located by the USGS National Earthquake Information Center. For security reasons, however, the finger port (number 79) has now been blocked for all USGS computer systems.
Wget is an alternative to finger that can use the http port (number 80) or the telnet port (number 21) to obtain files to download.
To retrieve the "finger" list of the most recent 21 events, use one
of these choices:
wget -N http://neic.usgs.gov/neis/finger/quake.asc
wget -N ftp://hazards.cr.usgs.gov/cnss/quake
To retrieve a list of events from the past 7 days that combines NEIS
locations with locations from the U.S. ANSS regional seismic networks, use:
wget -N ftp://hazards.cr.usgs.gov/cnss/cnss_14.fing
Wget is available below. A more recent version is available from: http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/
To use wget on a Windows Win9x/ME/NT computer you will need these three files:
fingneic.txt (Download and then
wget.exe (Part of the free GNU package: wget-1.8.1b.zip)
unix2dos.exe (Part of the free GNU package: uddu.zip)
Running fingneic.bat will create a file named quake that contains the current list of events. If fingneic.bat is run again before the list has changed, then no download will take place.
For Sun Solaris systems, you may be able to use this executable file: wget. If not, you'll need to download and compile the wget source in wget-1.8.tar.
See this post from Doug Ierna.