Twitter status from the shell

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 twitterid

It needs:

• wget


• xmlstarlet

---

The Twitter API...for lulz

Quick Twitter status

Just a quick little script modified from the one found here http://cutup.org/anize/?twitter_bash_curl

I hardcoded the username/password and stripped out the “friends” statuses. For my purposes (http://appliedresearchwi.com headline) I only need “my” current status.

The script is run from crontab as follows:


*/5 * * * * /home/zachpeters/appliedresearchwi.com/etc/twitter.sh > /home/zachpeters/appliedresearchwi.com/etc/twitter.status


Code - note the “username” and “password” need to be changed:




#!/bin/bash
# Originally from - http://cutup.org/anize/?twitter_bash_curl
function getlastpost {
    curl -u username:password 3 --connect-timeout 5 -s -n $1 | awk '
        { sub(/^[^>]*>/,”",$0) }
            /text/ {
                sub(/<[^<]*>$/,”",$0)
                m=$0
            }
            /relative/ {
                sub(/<[^<]*>$/,”",$0)
                at=$0
            }
            /_name/ {
                sub(/<[^<]*>$/,”",$0)
                #print $0 ” : ” m ” [" at "]”
                print $0 ” :: ” m
            }
    '
}
getlastpost http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.xml?count=1