strimble

Recently, I’ve created a new Twitter account. The reason for this is that I’m thinking of having a public account instead of, or maybe along side of, a private account. So, I’m testing it out to see if having a public account is something I really want to do or not.

So, I created a new account. After adding my design and icon, I realized that I had to follow people. So, I started following the people I’m following on my private account. This quickly became a task that I did not enjoy. So, I decided to write a script for it to make it a bit easier.

Below is the Perl script I created to handle this.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Net::Twitter;
use Getopt::Long;
use strict;

# set your own username and password here
my $namefrom = '';
my $passfrom = '';
my $nameto = '';
my $passto = '';
GetOptions('namefrom=s' => \$namefrom, 'passfrom=s' => \$passfrom, 'nameto=s' => \$nameto, 'passto=s' => \$passto);

my $twitfrom = Net::Twitter->new(username=>$namefrom, password=>$passfrom);
my $twitto = Net::Twitter->new(username=>$nameto, password=>$passto);

# establish friends
if($twitfrom->friends()) {
  foreach my $friend (@{ $twitfrom->friends() }) {
        $twitto->follow($friend->{'id'});
  }
}

print "friends are synced between accounts\n";

I saved this file as sync_following.pl. So, now all I have to do is call the script with the options for my two accounts.

$./sync_following.pl --namefrom strimble --passfrom redacted --nameto _strimble --passto redacted

You can download it here. You’ll also need Net::Twitter and Getopt::Long.

Perl scripts make my twitter accounts much simpler to deal with. Let me know if you end up using this script too, and if it was helpful or not.