NAME
blt - bash loves twitter - command-line client for twitter
SYNOPSIS
blt eating ice-cream and loving python
blt "It's all in a day's work when you protect apostrophes"
blt --check --public --sync
DESCRIPTION
blt is a command-line client for twitter.com, designed to integrate
helpfully with bash(1). It makes sending messages simple, and receiving
them as simple as with the old biff(1) program which told you when you
had new mail.
WHAT IS TWITTER?
Twitter is a blogging system which limits posts (known as "tweets") to
140 characters. This means that users can receive them easily over text
messaging, instant messaging, and so on.
Twitter allows you to send three kinds of messages:
Public The ordinary kind, directed at everyone, to tell them what you're
currently doing or thinking.
Directed which are pointed at one particular user, but still public.
These contain "@username". A user can opt to not be told about directed
messages not aimed at people they know.
Private These are only seen by the sender and the recipient. blt can
send these using the "d" notation (see the -s mode below) but does not
yet show them when you ask it to check.
MODES
These are all lowercase letters, and you may have exactly one of them.
The default mode is s. You may "bundle" the short forms of modes and
switches together.
-s, --set
Send a message to Twitter. The rest of the line is the message to
send. If this begins with "d" and a space, and then a username and a
space, this will send a private message to that user. This is a
Twitter convention and not part of the design of blt.
-c, --check
Checks whether recent messages have come in for you.
-a user, --as=user
Uses the given user's details rather than the default user. This
makes no difference on the public timeline.
-v, --version
Prints the current version number and exits.
-h, --help
Prints some basic help and exits.
SWITCHES
These are all capitals; you may combine as many as you wish.
-F, --force
Check even if we checked recently. Overuse of this option may
transgress Twitter's acceptable use policy. This is silently ignored
if we're reading the public timeline, because there is no cache
requirement there anyway.
-S, --sync
Don't return until all the information has been gathered and
printing (see ASYNCHRONICITY below).
-P, --public
Read the public timeline, and not a user's timeline. This may only
be combined with checking, not setting; an attempt to set on the
public timeline causes an error.
No caching is required. Nor is any authentication; hence this is the
only instance when ~/.bltrc.xml need not exist, and blt will not
attempt to create it if it is not found.
THE PUBLIC TIMELINE
The public timmeline is a list of all public posts made to twitter
in the last few seconds. Unlike all other modes, the public timeline
does not require any authentication on your part.
You can read the public timeline with no configuration file. This
will mean that the minimum time between fetching each new set of
information from Twitter is 60 seconds.
ASYNCHRONICITY
If you are checking a timeline on Twitter, you can run blt either
synchronously (with -S) or asynchronously (without -S). If you run
it synchronously, it will go away and fetch the information from
twitter.com and not return until it's done.
If you run it asynchronously, though, one of three things will
happen:
* There can be twitter information stored in blt's cache; if so,
it will print this and exit.
* Otherwise, if no blt background process is running, blt will
start one and exit. The background process will get the
information from twitter and then exit.
* Otherwise there b<is> a background process running, so blt
leaves it alone and exits.
Asynchronous mode exists because Twitter can be very slow to respond
sometimes, although this has been improving recently.
HOW BASH CALLS BLT
bash(1) calls the program given in the variable PROMPT_COMMAND every
time you press return. When you create a ~/.bltrc.xml, blt also
attempts to insert a line into ~/.bashrc setting this variable so
that blt will be called every time you press return.
THE CONFIGURATION FILE
The configuration file is a simple piece f XML called ~/.bltrc.xml.
Its root node is bltrc, which has one attribute, interval. This is
the minimum time that must pass between fetching information from
Twitter. (The Twitter acceptable use policy requires this to be at
least 52 seconds.)
Within this root element are a number of ac elements, each
representing an account, with id and pass elements. On initial
creation, only one account exists. You may add new accounts in the
same format and select them using the -a switch; see above under
SWITCHES.
BUGS
* It can send but not receive private/direct messages.
* blt is pretty fast, but you still might not want to run blt from
~/.bashrc on a particularly slow computer.
AUTHOR
Thomas Thurman, tthurman at gnome dot org.