San Francisco — As of today, true nerds, geeks, and Internet trolls can perform their Googling tasks straight from their Terminal window with a new program called GoogleCL. Mountain View, Calif., search engine behemoth Google has just released a tool to let command-line aficionados use several of the seb giant’s services with the full glory of a text-based interface.
The tool called GoogleCL, a command-line interface that empowers users to control the contents sites of YouTube, Blogger, and Picasa to adding appointments to Google Apps sites of Docs, Calendar, and Contacts. Furthermore, it is fully supported by Windows, Linux, and Mac.
For example, users can organize a photo album, alter a document in a text editor, delete all blog posts stating a specific word, list all videos, or add a calendar appointment.
Command-line tools are not for most people — do you enjoy the prospect of typing “google youtube post — category Education — devtags GoogleCL killer_robots.avi”? Nevertheless, they are useful in many contexts–notably automation. Sysadmins love to write scripts that ease their lives, and command-line tools could, for example, periodically upload a graph of a server’s performance characteristics to Picasa. Or a technically sophisticated person could automate the internationalization of phone numbers by adding “+1” in front of appropriate entries.
Google CL is a Python application that makes Google Data API calls through the command line. GoogleCL was formulated in Python on top of the gdata-python-client library. The concept is based on open-source software project that is hosted on Google Code and distributed under the Apache license. Users who want to contribute fixes and improvements can submit patches through the project’s issue tracker.
Here is an example command:
$ google calendar add “Social Media Day SF Party at 7pm”
For computer nerds out there, this tool is going to deliver greater efficiency and a big time saver. There are many instances where a user just wishes to skip using the web interface because the command line is often faster.
A command-line interface (CLI) is a program where the user can instruct the computer to perform particular tasks by typing commands. You have probably seen them before, most likely via the MS-DOS command-line interface. The CLI is in contrast to the mouse-based interface that we all use today, known as the graphical user interface (GUI). Google has provide a list of sample scripts to get started, but we bet that page will expand with more commands and more based on Google services over time. It’s a great combination of the command line and the cloud. If you want to get started, you can download GoogleCL and the necessary Python library client here and here.
LifeHacker has posted instructions for installing GoogleCL on Unix- or Linux-based systems, but this is how I went about installing it on Windows Vista (presumably these instructions will work on Windows 7).
For more information about the tool, you can refer to the release announcement that was published this morning in Google’s open source blog.