Twitter API command-line utility
This is a tool for performing some Twitter API functions from the command-line. It's not very comprehensive yet, so far only three things are supported: statuses/followers, statuses/friends, statuses/update.
cltw is written in Haskell. It's known to build under GHC 6.12.1
This project was started really for two specific problems I had:
First, I got tired of paging through followers in the website to figure out if somebody specific is following me. And one day thought "Would be great if I could just grep through a plain ascii list of these people." Easy to do now with cltw.
Second, I wanted to be able to issue a very simple shell command to make a status update. Perhaps even script something to automate making an update.
Could this have been done as some kind of website or web service like so much of the Twittyverse? Yes, but I'm a shell kind of person. These kinds of tools make the most sense to me.
Could this have been mostly done with curl and simple shell script wrappers? The update feature, yes, pretty easily. The followers/friends, not so much as it's necessary to parse XML or JSON data.
Finally, the screen-name/password basic authentication this program uses is deprecated and is supposedly going away in the future. I have been around the block with Twitter people talking about their proposed alternatives. Unfortunately, to use newer authentication (xAuth), one has to first make software that uses the web-dependent OAuth system (as a means to register with them at all). I'm not really sure how to go about this with shell-based software that may be running on a system that doesn't even have X running.
last modified 2010-04-19