Tweeting from the command line
This week’s TechMail is Tweeting from the command line. Basically it discusses using a shell script to send out tweets to Twitter. Interestingly enough, one of the comments posted on that tip from a TechRepublic member discusses how he setup a private twitter account so he can control who watches and has setup a similar script to tweet system information like uptime and how large the mail queue is. I never thought of using twitter that way but now that he brought it up, I think it’s genius. What a great way to get system information on the road or whatever so you can keep a proactive eye on your system. Certainly cheaper than sending SMS messages to a phone, and with the abundance of twitter clients out there and Internet-on-the-phone, that seems like a really cool idea.
Mark T. Kennedy
this raises the (ancient) question of how to suppress file globbing for shell command lines that are meant to be interpreted as plain old text. given how far bash completion has come, it seems like it would be an easy and nice addition to add an option that says “when X is the first token on a line, don’t do anything with the rest of teh command line but just pass it as one string”.
Aug 18, 2009 @ 13:49:53