HOWTO: Tweet from the Command Line Like a Pro With Curl

I recently stumbled across this awesome post via Twitter that explains how to Tweet from the command line like a pro using curl.  I tried it, and sure enough, it works!  If you want to Tweet a message from the command line using curl, here's how:

#/> curl -u mytwitterusername:mypassword \
            -d status="from the cmd line!" \
            http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json

Even cooler, if you want to pipe output into a Tweet (like your system uptime from the "uptime" command), you can run the following:

#/> curl -u mytwitterusername:mypassword \
            -d status="my uptime:`uptime`" \
            http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json

Note that if you are behind a corporate firewall at work, you will need to tell curl to use an HTTP web-proxy to communicate with the outside world.  This can be done using the -x option like so:

#/> curl -u mytwitterusername:mypassword \
            -d status="from the cmd line!" \
            -x web-proxy.example.com:8088 \
            http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json

Or, if you wanted to pipe the output of a command into a Tweet, you can do so using the -d @- arguments which asks curl to read the POST input from <STDIN>.  Here's an example of piping the output of "df -h /" into a Tweet (to Tweet the usage of my root disk):

#/> echo "status=`df -h /`" | \
        curl -u mytwitterusername:mypassword \
                -d @- \
                -x web-proxy.example.com:8088 \
                http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json

For the HP-UX Tweeps out there (@HP_UX) ...

If you happen to be using a system without curl, you can easily install it.  On HP-UX, curl can be installed using the HP-UX 11i Internet Express package available from hp.com (HP-UX 11i v2 or HP-UX 11i v3).  As root on your HP-UX box, use the swinstall command to install your freshly downloaded .depot ...

swinstall -s /path/to/depot/internet_A.12.00.013_HP-UX_B.11.23_IA_PA.depot

Enjoy!