Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Some Google command line tools

googlecl is a command line tool (written in Python) that lets you use some Google services, such as Blogger, Calendar, Contacts, Docs, Finance,Picasa and YouTube.

googlecl - Command line tools for the Google Data APIs - Google Project Hosting

You can use it to add a post to your blog, add a calendar entry, edit a document (the editor to use is a configurable option), download your contacts, upload a video, etc. For those used to the command line, it can be faster than accessing the corresponding service via the web interface.

gsutil allows you to manipulate your data on cloud storage providers such as Google Storage and Amazon S3. It uses the boto Python library, written by Mitch Garnaat, which I had blogged about earlier.

code.google.com/p/gsutil/

https://github.com/boto/boto#readme

bq is a Python command line tool to access Google BigQuery, which I had also blogged about before.

https://developers.google.com/bigquery/docs/cli_tool

If you are interested in creating command line tools for Unix or Linux systems, you may like to read my tutorial article on the topic, published on IBM developerWorks:

Developing a Linux command-line utility:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-clutil/

Though it uses the C language, many of the concepts discussed in the article are applicable to writing command line tools in Python as well, because, when writing such tools, you will basically be using the C library and Unix features such as standard input, standard output, pipes and I/O redirection, but via Python.

- Vasudev Ram
www.dancingbison.com