Update: Found out twitter ``tinifies'' your URLs for you...
I've been twittering for 2 hours now, and thought it would be nice to detail how one can update their status from the command-line without displaying their password. A few pages helped me along:
- Dave Taylor wrote a fine article on how to tweet using the command line,
- Duane Odom writes about his solution to encrypting passwords, which got me on the right track for that,
- User Heller_Barde wrote a script, tinify which is excellent for shrinking the links you'll want to add to your tweet.
- defcon posted a guide to getting started with GPG in Ubuntu, which I mostly followed line by line.
So now to my solution, a mashing of all the bits from the articles above:
- Create GPG key, remember what you put for your full name as you'll need it for the next step
gpg --gen-key - Create encrypted twitter `username:password' string.
echo "<user>:<pass>" | gpg -e -r "Your Full Name" >~/.twitter.gpg - Download the tinify script (and xclip and curl, if you don't have them already)
- Tweet away! (Don't forget to copy the link you want tinified before running)
TWITTERPASSWD=`gpg -d -r "Your Full Name" ~/.twitter.gpg` \
curl --basic --user "$TWITTERPASSWD" --data-ascii \
"status=I think #TED is pretty, pretty good: `tinify`" \
http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json
Disclaimer: I've played around with GPG and Twitter for two hours or so, and haven't yet fully thought out the security consequence of storing the plaintext username:password string as an environment variable. A shell script to encapsulate the command above would be nice too! Next post perhaps?
Peace /nzroller
