tweet using bash

#!/bin/bash
#BashtweetScript
#@lihashgnis

email='' #email or user name
password=''
tweet='' #text to tweet


cookies='cookie.txt'
user_agent='Firefox/10.0.2'

curl -X GET 'https://www.twitter.com' --verbose --user-agent "${user_agent}" --cookie $cookies --cookie-jar $cookies --location

curl -X POST 'https://twitter.com/sessions?phx=1' --verbose --user-agent "${user_agent}" --cookie $cookies --cookie-jar $cookies  --data-urlencode "session[username_or_email]=${email}" --data-urlencode "session[password]=${password}" --data-urlencode "return_to_ssl=true"

curl -X GET 'https://www.twitter.com' --verbose --user-agent "${user_agent}" --cookie $cookies --cookie-jar $cookies --location

rethtml=$(curl -X GET 'https://twitter.com/#!/lihashgnis' --verbose --user-agent "${user_agent}" --cookie $cookies --cookie-jar $cookies)

echo "####################################################################"

#do read next two comments
<<comment1
 IMP- at this stage we have the cookies that we can use to authenticate ourselves However twitter also expects one more parameter for submitting stutus , postAuthenticityToken... which can be obtained by parsing the html ofpostAuthenticityToken
user,s profile page
comment1

<<comment2
what ret2=${rethtml##*\"postAuthenticityToken\":\"} does is that it strips
 all content from the rethtml variable till last place where it finds
 postAuthenticityToken and then line following that code strips text till
 ","deciderFeatures" , so now we are left with only the value of
 postAuthenticityToken ... looking at the source of users page and finding
 these two words will give a better understanding of how this works...
 details about how striping is done using pund and percent symbols can be
 found at http://linuxgazette.net/issue18/bash.html
comment2

ret2=${rethtml##*\"postAuthenticityToken\":\"}
post_authenticity_token=${ret2%%\"\,\"deciderFeatures\":*}

curl -X POST 'https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/update.json' --header "X-Requested-With:XMLHttpRequest" --header "Host:api.twitter.com" --header "X-PHX:true" --verbose --user-agent "firefox/3.5" --cookie cookie.txt --cookie-jar cookie.txt --data-urlencode "include_entities=true" --data-urlencode "status=${tweet}" --data-urlencode "post_authenticity_token=${post_authenticity_token}"