scriptable/non curses IM clients

Question

Just something I've been curious about. I've been messing a fair bit with some of my own scripts, and in some cases, getting sent an IM would be useful to let me know when a task is done.

So, here's what I need:

1. the ability to set account information in a text file
2. It'd be okay if I can designate only a single recipient, or set recipients in the config file
3. at the very least, jabber support
4. Be able to be controlled via standard shell commands - for example I should be able to pipe a message output into the program for example

sh foo.sh|climprog -recipient

should send the output of foo.txt via the I'm programme to a set recipient on the account's contact list.

Anything that fits the bill?

Answer 1

I'm thinking bitlbee and ii maybe.

My idea is basically that you have a setup of bitlbee running,which connects to a series of IM services and presents a IRC-server for you to connect to. Then you use ii, which is a fs-based IRC-client, it creates a directory structure with all channels, queries and so on that you are connected to. I haven't used it myself but I'm guessing you get a structure similar to:

Bitlbee
  |  (this is the control channel where you communicate with the IM-connections)
  |- #bitlbee.out (this is where you read)
  |- #bitlbee.in (this is where you write)
  |
  |  (this is the IM-presence you want to communicate with, for example yourself)
  |- nickname.out (when you send commands to your bot they end up here)
  |- nickname.in (when the bot is saying something to the user it should be append to this file)
  |
  |  (some other user you want to notify about things)
  |- othernick.out
  |- othernick.in

Then you just have a script in whatever language that just reads and writes from those files. echo "Hello World" >> bitlbee/nickname.in