The Helpful Hacker

Here is a quick shell script i whipped up to pull twitter status from the command line. The eventual plan is to pop this in a cron job, pipe it into a file and include this in a php page. Easy status updates for a website headline

#!/bin/sh
USER=$1
wget -qO-
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/$USER.xml?count=1 |
xmlstarlet select -T -t -v '//text'

Call it like…

./twitter-status.sh <em>twitterid</em>

It needs:

• wget
• xmlstarlet

So do you have any interesting uses for twitter?

This shell script was mostly for proof of concept  and playing with the twitter api.  I find the ease of use and hack-abilty to be excellent whenever I can quickly and easily get data to and from a simple script.  Do you have any other neat shell scripts for twitter?

Related posts:

1. Updating Your Twitter Status From a Script
2. A Status Board for your Crontab
3. Checking Your Reddit Karma with Common Lisp