Ask HN: How would you improve this bash oneliner for deleting tweets?

32 points by jamiehall 6 years ago | 22 comments

Many people use tweet deletion services, which periodically remove everything from their Twitter timeline; I wondered if it could be done from a Bash command line.

I wrote up my experiences as an explainer for nontechnical people: https://jamiehall.cc/2020/03/10/delete-all-your-tweets-with-...

TL;DR, here is the oneliner I've been using:

  $ twurl "/1.1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=YOUR_TWITTER_HANDLE&count=200
    &max_id=$(
      twurl '/1.1/statuses/user_timeline.json?screen_name=YOUR_TWITTER_HANDLE&count=200&include_rts=1'
     | jq -c -r '.[] | .id_str' | head -10 | tail -1)
    &include_rts=1"
   | jq -c -r '.[] | .id_str' 
   | parallel -j 10 -a - twurl -X POST /1.1/statuses/destroy/{1}.json
   > /dev/null

[Edit: I've put line breaks in there to make it more legible.]

I'm curious if it's possible to do better. In particular: could this be more elegant? Is it possible to do it using common built-ins, instead of twurl and jq?

Any suggestions or improvements would be very welcome!

rhacker 6 years ago |

I feel like this is normally the content you see in Stack Overflow

ollien 6 years ago | |

Probably best for the code review StackExchange forum, actually.

rococode 6 years ago | | |

Might be pretty fun for the code golf stack exchange too!

toomuchtodo 6 years ago |

You might consider putting this in a GitHub Gist, sharing the link for it, and accept comments and improvements within the Gist comments functionality.

This would also allow others to fork your code to improve upon or keep a copy for themselves.

jamiehall 6 years ago | |

Great idea, thanks! https://gist.github.com/nerdcha/3e811ef28d04561f73337e46267a...

toomuchtodo 6 years ago | | |

Did you get the feedback you were looking for?

benburleson 6 years ago | |

(Security risks aside,)

That can even allow people to curl and pipe to run in the terminal direct from github.

Pirate-of-SV 6 years ago |

    jq -c -r '.[] | .id_str'
    # Can be rewritten to
    jq -r '.[].id_str'

    jq -c -r '.[] | .id_str' | head -10 | tail -1
    # Can be rewritten to
    jq -r '.[9].id_str'

jamiehall 6 years ago | |

Ah, nice. Thanks! :D

t0astbread 6 years ago |

What are the rate limits on the /statuses/destroy endpoint? I've checked the docs and the docs say it is limited but the actual limit is not specified.

Other than that, thanks for writing this! I've been thinking about a tool like this and this might come in handy. The code looks fine to me although I would probably spin this out into a script and add some logging, as others have already pointed out.

viraptor 6 years ago |

I don't think there's a good reason to calculate the max_id every time. If you want to delete all tweets, you could skip it.

a-wu 6 years ago |

I've tried this before in a Python script but quickly got rate limited by the 300 tweet update limit [0]. Does this get around that?

[0] https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/basics/rate-limits

darepublic 6 years ago | |

It's hard to imagine that it would

jamiehall 6 years ago |

Thank you to everybody who commented! The suggestions to use something more sensible than a oneliner (and to post on Stack instead) are well taken. A big motivation of this project was "just because", for shits and giggles, so I hope it's amused you for a minute or two. Cheers!

jlelse 6 years ago |

Not answering your question, but I found a way to mass delete tweets without creating an app: https://jlelse.blog/posts/mass-delete-tweets/

mirimir 6 years ago |

Not a Twitter user here, but would this delete retweets by others of your tweets?

Those might include tweets that you'd most want to delete. As well as ones that you'd most want to retain, for that matter.

jamiehall 6 years ago | |

Yes, it takes care of that; if someone has retweeted you with a comment, the thing they're commenting on is replaced with "This tweet is no longer available." (Obviously, it's no defence against people screenshotting your tweet, manually copy-pasting what you said, etc etc.)

ksherlock 6 years ago |

You could improve it by not tweeting in the first place.

cosmiccatnap 6 years ago |

Make it delete the account instead.

staktrace 6 years ago |

You could improve it by making it not a one-liner! Usually making it a multiple-liner can improve readability. And unless you're typing it into the command line directly everytime you run it (as opposed to putting it in a file that you invoke) it doesn't really matter how many lines it has.

Normal_gaussian 6 years ago | |

It's not just readability.

One day the code breaks. For a one liner I have to pick it apart, add logging / diagnostics, fix it, and reassemble. The two most time consuming and error prone parts of that are dealing with the 'one liner'

wespiser_2018 6 years ago | |

I came here to say this. In addition, searching through bash history is a terrible "save and fetch" interface