14 DAY TRIAL // Most people don’t even know what a command line is, certainly those young enough to have grown up after the Windows 98 era. But for the more tech-savvy folks, the command line has proven a huge time-saver in plenty of cases. Still, it’s only for the more eccentric and it’s not usually associated with web services, certainly not with pure web services. But command-line devotees would want to do everything from it and it looks like Google has a couple of them working for the company. That would explain GoogleCL, a command-line tool for accessing Google services like Picasa, Blogger, Docs, YouTube, and so on.
“Ever wanted to upload a folder full of photos to Picasa from a command prompt? We did, a lot, last summer. It made us want to say:
$ google picasa create --title "My album" ~/Photos/vacation/*.jpg “So we wrote a program to do that, and a whole lot more.GoogleCL is a command-line utility that provides access to various Google services. It streamlines tasks such as posting to a Blogger blog, adding events to Calendar, or editing documents on Google Docs,” Jason Holt, Street View Team, and Tom Miller, former Street View intern, wrote.
It’s a pretty powerful tool once you get the hang of it and it greatly simplifies a number of tasks. Downloading an entire Picasa album, or even all of your photos stored online, is as simple as $ google picasa get --title “Album Title” “local folder” and, without any overhead from the browser, it takes seconds for smaller albums, if your Internet connection can handle it, of course.
The possibilities aren’t exactly endless, but you can do quite a lot of things with GoogleCL. You can upload a post to Blogger or edit a Docs document with your text editor of choice. You can even add contacts or an event to Google Calendar with simple language such as $ google calendar add “dinner with Andrew today at 7 pm.” You can check out all of the available commands on the project’s wiki page.
GoogleCL is available for download here.