I’ve recently started playing with twitter. A nice way to use it via the command-line (using curl) was suggested here. I have taken that and improved slightly on it.
Here is the result:
#!/bin/sh
echo -n “twitter> “
read text
while [ ${#text} -gt 140 ]; do
echo
echo “Message too long; used ${#text}/140 characters."
echo
echo -n “twitter> “
read text
done
echo
echo “Message is ${#text}/140 characters. Press enter to post, or Ctrl+C to cancel."
read
curl –basic –user “username:password” –data-ascii “status=echo $text|tr ' ' '+'” “http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json" &> /dev/null
To use the script, copy all of that into a file somewhere in your path, then make the file executable (e.g.,
chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/twitter). Now you can type ’twitter’, type in your tweet, and you’re done!I even set up fluxbox so that mod4+t launches a terminal with the script running. To do that, I added this to ~/.fluxbox/keys:
Mod4 t :Exec xterm -e “twitter”
If you’re not familiar with ‘mod4’, it is the Windows key on most PC keyboards.
I’ll eventually get around to writing a slightly more full-featured twitter updater in c or c++. Until then, enjoy this script!