Send message to IRC channel from bash

Question

I have installed ircd-hybrid on my Ubuntu Server (192.168.1.2, example.com).
We use #teamchannel to communicate inside the team.

The question is: how can I send some short message from example.com to #teamchannel from the bash script? e.g. example.com: Alert! The server is rebooting now

Edit:

I have found a perl script which does exactly what I needed.

Link to perl script https://web.archive.org/web/20100125223219/http://www.javalinux.it/wordpress/2009/10/15/writing-an-irc-bot-for-svn-commit-notification/ — epatel, Oct 17 '15 at 19:19

Ondra Žižka · Answer 1 · 2018-07-17T21:08:23.660

12

IRC is a simple text and line oriented protocol, so it can be done with the basic linux tools. So, without installing ii:

echo -e 'USER bot guest tolmoon tolsun\nNICK bot\nJOIN #channel\nPRIVMSG #channel :Ahoj lidi!\nQUIT\n' \
| nc irc.freenode.net 6667

In this command, nc does the network connection, and you send a login info, nick, join a channel named "#channel" amd send a message "Ahoj lidi!" to that channel. And quit the server.

edited Jul 17 '18 at 21:08

answered Apr 14 '11 at 22:18

Ondra Žižka

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2
5
14

add \nQUIT at the end of the list of commands to quit right after sending the one message – Walter Heck Dec 23 '11 at 10:10

score 9 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 21 '10 at 13:25

9

use console irc client

apt-get install ii
ii -i /tmp -s 192.168.1.2
echo "/PRIVMSG #teamchannel example.com: Alert! The server is rebooting now" > /tmp/irc/in

answered Sep 21 '10 at 13:25

bindbn

5,153
2
26
23

Thanks, but this does not work for me. After `ii` the shell waits, when I end the command with `&`, the second command executes but without message. – takeshin Sep 21 '10 at 13:50
red the 'out' file to debug problem: find irc directory(/tmp/SERVERNAME),cd /tmp/SERVERNAME and cat out,then echo message and read out. – bindbn Sep 21 '10 at 20:49

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 21 '10 at 13:15

2

One solution would be to use expect to script communication with the IRC server using a telnet client.

answered Sep 21 '10 at 13:15

Crankyadmin

332
1
5

Do I need `expect` when I want to send the message from the same machine where the IRC server is installed? – takeshin Sep 21 '10 at 13:24
you do.. the above solution would work well with expect. – Crankyadmin Sep 21 '10 at 14:22

atsa · Answer 4 · 2014-10-24T22:47:01.000

1

#!/bin/bash
exec 3>/dev/tcp/example.com/6667
echo "NICK nickname1234" >&3
echo "USER nickname1234 8 * : nickname1234" >&3
echo "JOIN #teamchannel" >&3
echo "PRIVMSG #teamchannel Alert!" >&3
echo "QUIT" >&3
cat <&3

edited Oct 24 '14 at 22:47

answered Oct 24 '14 at 19:49

atsa

61
3

2

A bit of text around the shell script would go a long way to making this a better answer. – HBruijn Oct 24 '14 at 20:08

score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Dec 11 '14 at 15:23

If you need to supply a password and use ssl you can do something like this.

#!/bin/bash -e

USER=$1
MYPASSWORD=$2
IRC_SERVER=$3
IRC_PORT=$4
CHANNEL=$5
MSG=$6

(
echo NICK $USER
echo USER $USER 8 * : $USER
sleep 1
echo PASS $USER:$MYPASSWORD
echo "JOIN $CHANNEL"
echo "PRIVMSG $CHANNEL" $MSG
echo QUIT
) | ncat --ssl $IRC_SERVER $IRC_PORT

The script should be run like this:

./post_to_irc.sh your_user your_pass irc_server 6667 "#target-channel" "Your message"

This is similar to an earlier example using nc but I found I had to use ncat to get it working with our IRC server which has been set up with SSL.

Send message to IRC channel from bash

Edit:

5 Answers5