How to send text and files to other devices in Linux command line via Telegram

If you work on Linux command line very often, sometimes you may want to send text, files to your devices. telegram-send is such a tool to allow you sending messages across devices. Here is how to do it on Ubuntu 16:

Install telegram-send

To install telegram-send, run this command:

pip3 install telegram-send

Configure telegram

Assuming you already have a telegram account. If not, you need to register a telegram account: https://telegram.org/

Then run command:

$ telegram-send --configure

You will see the output like:

Talk with the BotFather on Telegram (https://telegram.me/BotFather), create a bot and insert the token

Now you need to create a telegram bot to deal with your requests. Open: https://telegram.me/BotFather, click "OPEN IN WEB"

Enter ‘/newbot’ then ‘YOUR_BOT_NAME’ to create a bot. Once you finish, you will see the response from BotFather:

Copy the token given by the BotFather and paste it to the command line window and you will see a message from command line window like:

Please add YOUR_BOT_NAME on Telegram (https://telegram.me/XXXX_bot)
and send it the password: YYYYYY

Follow the above instruction and enter the password in your browser, you will eventually see the message:

Congratulations XXXX!
telegram-send is now ready for use!

Now you may want to install Telegram to your devices. Actually, Telegram has native app on every device:

Test

To send a text to Telegram, just enter:

telegram-send "Hello, telegram"

To send an image, enter:

telegram-send --image 1.png --caption "optional image title"

To send a file, enter:

telegram-send --file FILENAME

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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