HACKER Q&A
📣 jamiehall

How would you improve this bash oneliner for deleting tweets?


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 Accepted Answer ✓
I feel like this is normally the content you see in Stack Overflow
👤 toomuchtodo
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.

👤 Pirate-of-SV 

    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'
👤 t0astbread
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
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
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

👤 jamiehall
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
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
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.

👤 ksherlock
You could improve it by not tweeting in the first place.
👤 cosmiccatnap
Make it delete the account instead.
👤 staktrace
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.