The Linux Society

A Twitter Command for Your Terminal

Well Twitter seems to be getting popular now, and it's pretty we documented that it can be used via the command line terminal if CURL is installed.  The below is how to make a twitter command for your terminal.  You will obviously need to have a Twitter account registered, and you can do that by going to this web address https://twitter.com/signup

The first thing to do is to install curl if it isn't already installed

sudo aptitude install curl

The we need to make a file which we will make executable, and store it in /usr/bin
I have used gedit but you can use any text editor you choose

sudo gedit /usr/bin/twitter

and place the following code into the newly formed file

curl --basic --user "yourusername:yourpasswd" --data-ascii "status=`echo $@|tr ' ' '+'`" "http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json" -o /dev/null
echo Message Sent!

You will need to replace "yourusername:yourpasswd" with your twitter username and password, save the file, and exit the text editor.

Then you will need to make the file executable by placing the following code into the command line terminal

sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/twitter

To use the newly created command you can type

twitter WHATEVER YOU WANT TO POST TO TWITTER

if your using a gnome desktop, you can press ALT+F2 and in the Run Command Box that appears type

twitter WHATEVER YOU WANT TO POST TO TWITTER

Most of the above was taken from this web site http://www.ubuntu-unleashed.com/2008/03/howto-twitter-from-command-line-...

and all though it was used for Ubuntu it should work on nearly all distributions, remember if you change your Twitter password then you'll need to update you /usr/bin/twitter file

Finux

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