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.

