Google Command Line Tool Announced - GoogleCL

Google recently announced the availability of a new tool called GoogleCL that will allow users to interact with the company's Web services directly from a command line. GoogleCL was developed in the programming language, Python, on top of the gdata-python-client library. It's an open-source software project that's hosted on Google Code and distributed under the Apache license. Anyone who tries it and wishes to contribute fixes and improvements can submit patches through the project's issue tracker.

Although current desktop computing is dominated by GUI's (graphical user interfaces), command line tools are still really useful for rapid interaction, simple programmatic automation, and remote system management. Google's new tool will make Google-hosted data more accessible to common command-line workflows. The GoogleCL tool offers a quick and easy way to pipe your Gmail contact list into sed and awk, or use a shell glob to specify which photos and movies to batch upload to Picasa and YouTube, with support for Blogger, Google Calendar, and Google docs.

The tool can be downloaded from the project page on the Google Code Web site. A tarball with the source code and an installable DEB package will also be available by Google. After testing it from the DEB package on an Ubuntu 10.04 desktop computer, the first time you access each individual service, it prompts you for your username and then it will supply an OAuth link that you can copy and paste into a Web browser to complete the authentication process. Once the initial account configuration is finished, the tool can be used in pipelines and the other non-interactive command line workflows. After testing several of the features, we came to a conclusion that it works well with Google Apps accounts. The supported services and operations are documented in the projects user manual. An assortment of sample uses can also be found on the project's wiki for reference.Some of the features in GoogleCL, such as Google Docs editing, require at least version 2.0 of the gdata-python-client library. Unfortunately Ubuntu repositories only have version 1.2.4. The tool works with the older version of the library, but will display an error message when the user tries to use a feature that isn't supported.

If you want more information about the tool, you can refer to the release announcement that has published this morning in Google's open source blog.