Take the Tweetable Script Challenge

Twitter limits posts (“tweets”) to 140 characters. This constraint makes sending updates to your friends challenging, but it makes programming more interesting.  I just tweeted this 105 character shell script:

s="-<";while true;do echo -ne "$s\r";s=`sed 's/->$/-<-/;s/^/;s/-<-/;s/>-/->/;'<<<$s`;sleep 0.1;done

Cute, huh? But you can probably do better. Tweet your one-liner, and then send a @natfriedman message on Twitter so that I notice it. Best tweetable script posted today wins. All the basic shell languages are allowed, but your script has to be pastable into the shell, i.e. “perl -e” is ok.

Update: check out the results in Ten Tweetable Scripts and More Tweetable Scripts!