Execure a random command from .txt file?

Question

I have a Ubuntu server, and I'm trying to print a Twitter quote using the app "twidge". So I made a list of tweets on a .txt file. I want to print one tweet (per line) from that file and send it to Twitter via twidge (or what ever other method was possible).

I can print a random phrase with shuf:

shuf -n 1 /var/www/tweets.txt

and it works. It sends me back one of the tweets, but, it does not send it to Twitter, even if the "in line" phrase is a command. i.e:

twidge update "bla bla bla"

It just prints on the screen, but don't send it to Twitter. I tried turning the .txt to .sh, but don't work... any idea?

by the way, i want to use it with crontab, something like this:

15 * * * * shuf -n 1 /var/www/tweets.txt

Answer 1

You should write a short script which performs the operation, eg /var/www/post.sh

#!/bin/bash
shuf -n 1 /var/www/tweets.txt | twidge update

Make it executable with chmod +x post.sh, and add it to crontab.