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Google Gets Geeky – New Google Command Line Tool

21 Jun 2010 by Graham Lyons - News , , No Comments


Are you a geek? Do you want to feel like a geek? Then Google’s new command line tool is for you! What this tool does, is allow you to make changes and updates to your Google services from a command line. Woo!

For those who don’t know, a command line (the green text in the picture) is a computer interface which allows users to interact with their system, much in the same way we are used to interacting via a mouse, pointer and graphical interface. The difference is that a command line is a text only interface, requiring users to type specific commands into a text terminal and hit enter to send the command to the system. This system has been entirely replaced by the more user friendly graphical interfaces we are used to now. However, it is still used by computer scientists, programmers and other technically advanced computer users.

What this new Google tool does, is provide a simpler and faster way for people to automate tasks which would take a lot longer to do by using the traditional point and click technique. Google CL is a Python application that uses the gdata Python client library to make changes to Google Data APIs.

For the uninitiated, the only thing you need to do if you want to make use of this new feature is to learn what you have to type on the command line. To give you an idea of what this involves Google provides some examples:

  • google blogger post –tags “GoogleCL, awesome” –title “Test Post” “I'm posting from the command line”
  • google calendar add “Dinner party with George today at 6pm” # add event to calendar
  • google contacts add “J. Random Hacker, jrandom@example.com”
  • google docs delete –title “Evidence”
  • google picasa create –title “Vermont Test” –tags Vermont vermont.jpg
  • google youtube post –category Education –devtags GoogleCL killer_robots.avi

If you look closely at each of these lines, you can see that from the command line you can make changes to Blogger, your Google Calendar, Contacts, Google Docs, Picasa and even YouTube. Google say they would like to support more of their services but are held up by the availability of their gdata APIs. You can read more about the ins and outs on the GoogleCL project page and find out how to get your very own command line.

This new tool is aimed almost directly at coders and developers, who love this sort of thing, as Google like to placate those who help them produce their user collaborative services. So getting to grips with the text interface and all the syntax may be a bit beyond the average user. But with a bit of effort you too can get your geek on.

Does this new tool make you jump out of your seat with glee? Or does it leave you scratching your head? Either way, let us know what you think…



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