Lately I’ve been on a bit of a shell scripting craze. I wanted to create a simple GitHub Gist client which enabled me to save snippets easily. After finding a simple tutorial about using curl with GitHub’s Gist API I discovered that creating a simple shell script (gist) was suprisingly easy.

The script uses a piping “hack” that I borrowed from Julian Gruber’s vipe.sh. This means that it enables us to pipe a file directly into it, like this:

gist < index.js
<command> <...> | gist

We can also rename the gist to something a bit more useful than the default gist.txt:

gist <filename> < index.js
<command> <...> | gist <filename>

Note that the script will prompt you for your password. You could change username="USER" to username="USER:PASS", but if you only use it once every couple of days or so I suggest you to not save your password in plain text, especially if you store your scripts in a git repository.