Twitter CLI is a wonderful tool for automatically sending tweets. Very simply, after installation, you just need to run ‘t update “message”‘ and it would tweet your message. I wanted to do some tweeting randomly via cron, but since cron runs regularly at an interval, it’s not very random. Just adding a couple of lines to the script will make it random.
Here’s how to do it.
First, download and install Twitter CLI from here: https://github.com/sferik/t
Afterwards, make a copy of the t script and call it what you want. I call it randomt:
cp /usr/local/bin/t /usr/local/bin/randomt
Finally, just make a change to the script. Here, I’m setting a variable called time and making it a random number between 1 and 1000. From there, I’m multiplying it by 60 to convert it to minutes.
#!/usr/bin/ruby2.0 # # This file was generated by RubyGems. # # The application 't' is installed as part of a gem, and # this file is here to facilitate running it. # require 'rubygems' version = ">= 0" time = 1 + rand(1000) * 60 sleep(time) if ARGV.first str = ARGV.first str = str.dup.force_encoding("BINARY") if str.respond_to? :force_encoding if str =~ /\A_(.*)_\z/ version = $1 ARGV.shift end end gem 't', version load Gem.bin_path('t', 't', version)
Now, my tweets go out at some random time between 1 and 1000 minutes later. Thanks for reading!