Twitter from the terminal

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I wrote a small script, I named it "tw" to update twitter from terminal:

#!/bin/bash
echo "Your message please..."
read MSG
echo $MSG > characters
echo "Message length"
wc -c characters
echo "Password please..."
read -s PW
wget --keep-session-cookies --http-user=your.email@address.here --http-password=$PW \
    --post-data="status=$MSG" \
    http://twitter.com:80/statuses/update.xml
echo "Message posted."

This can also be used to update identi.ca (the open twitter alternative) by replacing the twitter url with 'http://identi.ca/api/statuses/update.xml'.

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Shell-fu

Both of these commands should also work with https, just update the URLs to:

https://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml
https://identi.ca/api/statuses … update.xml

Posted 2009-04-30 10:07:41

bart9h

You should include a " || exit" after wget, so the "Message posted." won't be printed if wget fails.

Posted 2009-04-30 12:03:31

Cambell Spong

Could strip out:

echo $MSG > characters
echo "Message length"
wc -c characters

and replace with just:

echo "Message Length: ${#MSG}"

Reduces line number and removes need for 'characters' file.

Posted 2009-05-03 12:59:09

oxygen2

if i wanted to skip the prompt for the message and tweet right from the command line, would i use $@ in place of $MSG?

ie, calling tw this is my tweet would then only ask for the password?

Posted 2009-05-04 06:56:38

Cambell Spong

It would work but you would have to escape some special bash characters. ie \' \" \`, etc.
Otherwise bash would interpret them.

Posted 2009-05-04 17:59:03

hashmonkey

Is there a way to verify that the wget worked? Wanted to show a message only if it didn't work, ie the password was wrong.

Posted 2009-05-16 15:38:06

John

hashmonkey: You can check for success of the previous command with '$?' so something like this will work right after the wget:

wget ...
if [ $? = 0 ]
then
echo success
else
echo fail
fi

Posted 2009-05-18 09:18:44

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