The sys admin's daily grind: TTYtter

Twittering Machine

Article from Issue 105/2009
Author(s):

Twitter, so everyone says, is modern, fun, sociologically illuminating and otherwise useless. Even Charly feeds a budgie – but at the console, it's a question of style.

I like graphical clients – in fact, I would be lost without Thunderbird – but because I often spend hours in front of machines without X11, I keep on top of the good old command-line tools. For example, I love using the Mutt mail client, and both slrn for Usenet and Irssi for IRC run on a small root server in a screen session.

Recently, I added another animal to my console zoo: TTYtter [1]. As you might guess from the hybrid name, TTYtter is a non-graphical Twitter client. The Perl script uses either cURL [2] or Lynx [3] to connect to the Twitter API. TTYtter's author, Cameron Kaiser, who also happens to be a doctor, deliberately avoided special Perl modules like Net::Twitter so that he could run the tool on systems that are not allowed to download modules from CPAN.

I normally start my TTYtter with the following command:

[...]

Use Express-Checkout link below to read the full article (PDF).

Buy this article as PDF

Download Article PDF now with Express Checkout
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
Print Issues
Digital Issues
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Print Subscriptions
Digital Subscriptions

Related content

comments powered by Disqus
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters

Support Our Work

Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

Learn More

News

Tag Cloud

Administration Community Desktop Events Hardware Linux Mobile Programming Security Software Ubuntu Web Development Windows free software open source