Lazy Man's Twitter Updates via CLI

While the various twitter apps around are nice for reading tweets, I'm too lazy to want to fire up the browser or reach for a desktop menu when I just want to twitter. After a pointer from coworker Sean Stoops to a Lifehacker article, Send Twitters from Command Line in Any OS, I kicked up this little shell script to make it even that much easier.


#!/bin/bash

if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
	echo 'Usage: twit "STATUS IN QUOTES"'
	exit 1
elif [ $# -gt 1 ]; then
	echo 'Usage: twit "STATUS IN QUOTES"'
	exit 1
fi

STATUS=$1
TWITUSER=yourusername
TWITPASS=yourpassword

curl -u $TWITUSER:$TWITPASS -d status="$STATUS" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

Now it's just -- twit "MY STATUS UPDATES" -- and I'm done.

Posted by deryck on March 7, 2008

Comments

Alex Kritikos March 7, 2008 at 3:28 p.m.

If you remove the [ $# -gt 1 ] check and use STATUS=$* instead of STATUS=$1, you can omit the quotes around multi-word tweets.

So, you can say:
twit MY STATUS UPDATES

instead of:
twit "MY STATUS UPDATES"

deryck March 7, 2008 at 10:16 p.m.

For some reason, I liked requiring the quotes. It seemed to make me think more about the whole message, and with having to close the quotes, I'm not as worried about sending a stray word I didn't mean to send.

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