haliphax

I had been looking for a small, simple utility for Windows that could send XMPP messages from the command line for use in various automated tasks and notification processes. I came across sendxmpp as part of the CygWin installation, but could not successfully install its dependencies with CygWin's CPAN port. I've been playing around with the Net::XMPP Perl library, and in spite of its poor documentation, I decided that I was going to hack away with it until I got something usable. I'm a programmer, after all—if a utility I need doesn't exist, why not make it myself?

The following Perl script has been tested with ActiveState Perl on Windows 7, Vista, and XP, as well as the standard apt-installed Perl 5 distribution for Debian Linux.

Perl code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use Net::XMPP;

my ($recip, $msg) = @ARGV;

if(! $recip || ! $msg) {
	print 'Syntax: $0 <recipient> <message>\n';
	exit;
}

my $con = new Net::XMPP::Client();
my $status = $con->Connect(
	hostname => 'jabber.org',
	connectiontype => 'tcpip',
	tls => 0);
die('ERROR: XMPP connection failed') if ! defined($status);
my @result = $con->AuthSend(
	hostname => 'jabber.org',
	username => 'username',
	password => 'password');
die('ERROR: XMPP authentication failed') if $result[0] ne 'ok';
die('ERROR: XMPP message failed') if ($con->MessageSend(to => $recip, body => $msg) != 0);
print 'Success!\n';

You will want to modify the script to use your own account's credentials, of course. Additionally, the script can easily be modified to work with XMPP providers other than jabber.org (i.e., Google Talk or even your own Jabber/XMPP server).

To use it, simply call it like so:

perl xmpp.pl recipient@hostname "Hello!"

Note: Before getting started, make sure you've installed the Net::XMPP library from CPAN. Also, you will want to change the tls option in the connection string from 0 to 1 if you plan on using TLS for secure transmissions.