Can I send Twitter updates from the command line?

Actually, there are a number of interesting Linux apps for Twitter, now that you mention it. Check out both the Twitter Fan Wiki and the Twitter download page for some of your options.

Since Twitter has a nice, albeit simple, API, there are also some methods that you can use to access Twitter from the command line, as you seek. Of course, monitoring the twitterstream, public or otherwise, is difficult because the output formats are all a bit tricky to parse, but certainly adding your own Twitter status updates is straightforward.

The trick is to use the terrific utility curl. Let me show you the basic command line invocation:

Obviously, you'll need to set your Twitter username and password in the script (which means that the script won't be secure) which you can do like this:

Then the sequence of "$@" is simply the command arguments you've specified to the script. So if it's called "send-twitter" you could send an update on the command line as simply as:

That should get you going with the scripting. In terms of how to script monitoring the Twitterstream itself, that's a topic I'll be tackling in my Linux Journal shell scripting column in a month or two. Keep an eye out for it at the newsstand!

Finally, please be aware that I have a variety of twitter help here, and you can also monitor my twitterstream if you'd like too! Tip o' the hat to Binny, who originally presented this basic script idea on his blog.