metafilter fpp post --tags "google, commandline, unix" --title "GoogleCL" "Google makes Picasa ... "

June 29, 2010 12:42 PM

Google makes Picasa, YouTube, Blogger, and Google Documents, Calendar, and Contacts available to command-line geeks with GoogleCL, a new, official command-line tool. How to install: Mac OS X, Windows, elsewhere. Google's examples of what you can do; Lifehacker's "five nifty GoogleCL tricks."

Why should non-command-line geeks care? As some commenters are pointing out, this will also allow developers to build frontend applications using this tool in new and neat feature-expanding ways.

posted by WCityMike (26 comments total)

Do they tuck that god forsaken Google updater into the package?

That is the make or break for me, with Google.
posted by Sukiari at 12:47 PM on June 29, 2010

Whoa. I'm having a hard time thinking of neat & novel uses for this, but we can probably expect some really neat stuff to happen when somebody starts playing with ImageMagick and the Picasa commands.
posted by usonian at 12:56 PM on June 29, 2010

Seems kind of contrived, though I will grant that uploading videos to YouTube from the command line sounds much more appealing than having to use YouTube's site to, you know, upload videos to YouTube.
posted by a small part of the world at 12:58 PM on June 29, 2010

Do they tuck that god forsaken Google updater into the package?

It appears to be a tar file or a debian archive, so I doubt it. Somewhat yawn inducing from me, because they don't have a command line for the actual search engine of google.

As far as new apps, this relies on the gdata python library, so coders could have easily used that to make interesting new apps. Good for people who don't want to use python I guess.
posted by zabuni at 1:01 PM on June 29, 2010 [1 favorite]

I'm having a hard time thinking of neat & novel uses for this

Well, it uses the Gdata python library, but what if you're not coding in python? Sure, you could write little stub programs, or call web services directly, but this will basically make using Google services from inside a traditional program really easy.

Basically any program can start other programs with command line parameters. So if you want to write a program that publishes stuff to blogger, all you have to do is write your post to a file, then run the googleCL command to upload it. You don't need to deal with web service calls or whatever yourself.

Some other ideas:

*Post blog entries from any program (like system loggers)

*For a video production company, this could be great. They could integrate youtube publishing right into their workflow with just a simple shell script.

*You could upload a directory of pictures to picasa with just a simple command from the command line, or even set it up to upload as soon as you load pictures off a camera

posted by delmoi at 1:12 PM on June 29, 2010 [1 favorite]

Sukiari: Do they tuck that god forsaken Google updater into the package? That is the make or break for me, with Google.

Er, as far as I can tell, no.
posted by WCityMike at 1:15 PM on June 29, 2010

I feel like this should be useful for me but none of the suggested use cases appeal. If anyone has other ideas I would love to see them.
posted by grouse at 1:21 PM on June 29, 2010

rm -rf /
posted by wcfields at 1:46 PM on June 29, 2010 [1 favorite]

The first example on lifehacker sold me. I love the idea of having all of my documents on a server. I'm usually frustrated with the editor google provides.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 1:54 PM on June 29, 2010

Or heck, as a Mac head, this means you can now use Automator to create folder actions to upload files into google's space.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 1:58 PM on June 29, 2010 [3 favorites]

zabuni -

If you're looking for a command line google (or any other search engine, really), check out surfraw. Although it looks like installing googleCL messed up the "google" elvi.
posted by azarbayejani at 1:59 PM on June 29, 2010 [1 favorite]

But not Search. Uhh....hello?
posted by DU at 2:06 PM on June 29, 2010

You could feed the output of this into a JSON-parsing script of your choice:

$ curl 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&q=mySearchTerm'
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:23 PM on June 29, 2010 [2 favorites]

rm -rf /

I always wanted to get ~>sudo rm -rf on a t-shirt. Just so when someone asked me what it meant, I could say it was suicide in command line form.

Because I'm a big nerd.
posted by quin at 2:46 PM on June 29, 2010

/
posted by quin at 2:46 PM on June 29, 2010 [1 favorite]

But not Search. Uhh....hello?

Search is supported by the library, but not the command line tool. You could whip up a CL search thing pretty quickly.
posted by delmoi at 2:50 PM on June 29, 2010

delmoi: “Search is supported by the library, but not the command line tool. You could whip up a CL search thing pretty quickly.”

lynx -dump http://www.google.com/search?q=your_search_term_here
posted by koeselitz at 3:06 PM on June 29, 2010 [2 favorites]

No "googleCL" required
posted by koeselitz at 3:08 PM on June 29, 2010

quin: “I always wanted to get ~>sudo rm -rf / on a t-shirt. Just so when someone asked me what it meant, I could say it was suicide in command line form. Because I'm a big nerd.”

It occurs to me suddenly that if you were a really huge nerd you could get an awesome shirt made that said

let me / / / for the ~ team

... but then, of course, I'm sure this shirt already exists.
posted by koeselitz at 3:15 PM on June 29, 2010 [1 favorite]

“I always wanted to get ~>sudo rm -rf / on a t-shirt. Just so when someone asked me what it meant, I could say it was suicide in command line form. Because I'm a big nerd.”

Heh, that t-shirt exists
posted by delmoi at 3:25 PM on June 29, 2010

> rm -rf /
Since this is google, surely:
 rm -rf http://
oops i just deleted the internet
posted by scruss at 5:37 PM on June 29, 2010 [2 favorites]

lynx -dump http://www.google.com/search?q=your_search_term_here

Except what you actually get is the stupid google-mediated "links". Instead, try:

lynx -dump http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/nbbw.cgi?Gw=your_search_term_here
posted by DU at 6:58 PM on June 29, 2010

Yeah, that's true. (Don't have lynx on my work computer, so I couldn't try it out - I just figured it should work.)

Actually, now that I can play around with this, it looks like the best way to hack this is to curl the html/css and then run it through the html2text parser, like so:

curl -A Mozilla http://www.google.com/search?q=your_search_term_here | html2text | less

The curl / html2text combo is pretty awesome for checking websites, because curl can do server authentication. For example, since Google automatically sticks Gmail on a secure atom feed, you can check your Gmail on the command line like so, although this is a really simple, hacky way that I'm kind of fudging:

curl -u your_gmail_username_here --silent "https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom" | html2text | grep @

That asks for a password, then just grabs the headers and spits out a list of the email addresses you have new mail from; not really pretty, but functional. I've seen better. But this doesn't require any additional command-line tools (beyond curl and html2text) so it's kind of cool.

Also, this is silly, wonky, and probably pointless, but still fun:

curl http://www.metafilter.com | html2text | tail -n +66 | less

(You'd probably have to adjust the -n +66 bit based on how long the sidebar is on a given day.)
posted by koeselitz at 10:56 PM on June 29, 2010 [1 favorite]

I have no idea what this is but I like watching you guys go.
posted by elemenopee at 12:09 AM on June 30, 2010

DU: Except what you actually get is the stupid google-mediated "links". Instead, try: lynx -dump http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/nbbw.cgi?Gw=your_search_term_here

Sadly enough, Scroogle looks like it might be dead.
posted by WCityMike at 10:45 AM on July 2, 2010

For people who are looking for a command-line Google search, you really need to go over to goosh.org. Using Firefox keywords in combination with the URL "http://goosh.org/?q=%s", you can even essentially turn your address bar into a Google search command line.
posted by WCityMike at 11:30 AM on July 2, 2010