Mouse? We don’t need no steenkin’ mouse!

That’s what CLI jockeys, as in the geeks that do everything from a terminal prompt, would say. They do anything and everything from the command prompt because GUIs are for squares, and you always can get things done faster from the CLI. Script this, script that, script everything.

Well, now you can script Google.

GoogleCL is short for "Google Command Line". It is a CLI provided by Google that can access the services Blogger, Calendar, Contacts, Docs, Picasa and even YouTube if you can believe it.

You can download the tarball, or if you’re in a Debian way you’re in luck because there’s also a .deb right there for the taking. Be also sure to check out the source page which provides further information.

Why would anyone want to use a CLI version of Google services?

When you can access an API from the command line (in this case Google’s "gdata"), this means as said above that you can script, as in automate, tasks that would otherwise require several if not many GUI clicks. Such an example would be transferring photos to the Picasa service. If you had 20 photos to send, that would take a fair amount of clicks to get done via the GUI way. With CLI, it’s nothing but a single line of code which is faster than the GUI even if you typed out the full line each time you wanted to do it.

On the CLI it’s all about speed and convenience, and Google now has that covered.

One can only hope that GoogleCL is set to include the Gmail service in the future. How cool would it be to download a complete backup of your entire Gmail account with a single line? Very cool, I’d say.

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