A Twitter Bot in One Line of Code

noodle · on Sept 25, 2009

if the only qualifier for "one line" is that its a big chunk of code with no line breaks, i think i could do more than just a twitter bot on one line.

jsteele · on Sept 25, 2009

I've also seen too many blog posts trumpeting the amazing ability to do something-or-other in three lines of Ruby -- one or two of which are loading some library that does all the work. Not impressed. It's nice that you can get something done with minimal work, but the emphasis should be on ease of use, not on number of lines.

10ren · on Sept 25, 2009

oblig. challenge: twitter bot in 140 chars...

BTW: great twitter API, and demo of bash as a JSON webservice server implementation language. It repays careful study. Also "bash" has got to be the best name for a hacker's language.

idm · on Sept 25, 2009

Here's what I have so far:

o=onelinebot;u=$o:one.$o;t=twitter.com;h=http://;alias a=alias;a w=while\ read;a c="curl -u$u -d";c track=$o ${h}stream.$t/track.json>t&tail -f t|w t;do echo $t|grep -Eo '"screen_name":"[[:alnum:]]+"'|cut -d\" -f4|w s;do c '' $h$t/friendships/create/$s.json?follow=true;done;done

It's two tweets (280 chars, down from 417) and it's not quite functional... This one will track "onelinebot" instead of "one line." It's basically the same as the original post, but with lots of nasty substitutions.

I figured I'd share, because I really need to get back to some other work - if you can get it working, please share.

dominiek · on Sept 25, 2009

Nice!

amalcon · on Sept 25, 2009

For bonus points, make a twitter-quine: as some part of its operation, have the bot tweet its own source code.

tesseract · on Sept 25, 2009

    curl -F"status=$BASH_COMMAND" -utq_:pass12 -HExpect: 'http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml'

_b8r0 · on Sept 25, 2009

I've tried, but the lowest I could get is around the 230-240 mark for something that tweets hi $n (where $n is the name of the person tweeting something you're interested in) for bash. It seems the URLs are the killer. URL Shorteners would help but bleh security. Any ideas for different languages?

InclinedPlane · on Sept 25, 2009

In APL that just might be possible.

tzury · on Sept 25, 2009

Give me a break. Once you put ';' it cannot be consider as one line, otherwise, minified-jQuery is also a one line library.

http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3/jquery.min.j...

0xbadcafebee · on Sept 25, 2009

Obligatory perl example, pretty messy:

U="onelinebot:one.onelinebot";curl -d 'track=obama' http://stream.twitter.com/track.json -u$U|perl -ne'/\"screen_name\":\"([^"]+)\"/&&`curl -d "" http://twitter.com/friendships/create/$1.json?follow=true -u$U`'

jrockway · on Sept 25, 2009

"one line" -- the most meaningless software metric to date.