This is a short but extensible script to allow text messaging (to verizon customers) straight from the commandline.
Setup requires simply a means to send email from the commandline
along with a small script to pass the message off to
<number>@vtext.com.
If you already have a CLI mailing solution you can just copy the script and go ahead and change the mail command to mutt, ssmtp, mailx, or whatever you’re using.
Email from CLI 🔗
I use msmtp to send mails in mutt so it was easy for me to adapt that into a CLI mailing solution.
Here’s a ~/.msmtprc for gmail:
# msmtp config file
# gmail
account gmail
host smtp.gmail.com
port 587
protocol smtp
auth on
from username@gmail.com
user username@gmail.com
password gmail_password
tls on
tls_nocertcheck
account default : gmail
Right now, as-is, it’s possible for you to
echo "Some text" | msmtp someone@somewhere.com and it’ll email
just fine. I’d like to make things a little more flexible.
By dropping a file in ~/.mailrc we can change the mail command
to use whatever binary we want instead of the default
/usr/bin/sendmail. It should have the following contents:
set sendmail=/usr/bin/msmtp
Now, anytime your system mails anything on your behalf, it’ll use
msmtp.
The Script 🔗
The script started out very simply, here it is in its original form:
#!/bin/bash
if [[ $# -lt 2 ]]; then
echo "usage: $0 [number] [some message]"
exit 1
fi
number="$1"; shift
echo "$*" | mail "$number@vtext.com"
With this little sendtext.sh script in your back pocket, you can send yourself texts from remind, cron, rtorrent, or any other script to notify you (or other people) of whatever you want.
sendtext.sh 1234567890 'This is a test text, did it work?'
Sure did.
Now, at some point, Ghost1227 got bored again.
He took my sendtext script and ran with it. Added loads of carriers and some new option handling.
I took his update of my script and re-updated it myself. Mainly syntactical changes and minor options handling, just to tailor it to my needs.
The new version with my and ghost’s changes can be downloaded from my git repo.
I also added simple phone book support. When sending a message to
someone, pass -s <number> <name> and the contact will be saved to
a text file. After that, you can just sendtext <name> and the
most recent match out of this text file will be used. The service
is saved as well (either the default or the one passed as an
argument at the time of -s).