Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) last Friday released a new tool for programmers to access its web services from the command line. Called the Google Command Line Tool or GoogleCL for short, the powerful set of utilities is based on Python and available on Windows (NASDAQ: MSFT), Linux, and the Mac (NASDAQ: AAPL) platforms. As it is, the Google Data Python Library is a prerequisite in order to access the tools.

GoogleCL allows for a number of relatively complex tasks from the command line, such as uploading video into YouTube, or editing documents stored on Google Docs. Other services that are supported would be Blogger, Calendar, Contacts and Picasa. GoogleCL is an open-source project licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

When used for the first time, the tools will apparently prompt a Google username and password to generate a URL, which is used to activate the command line service for the first time. More information can be found on the Google CL project page, though programmers and system analyst will want to take a look at the various GoogleCL example scripts here.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at ITProPortal
- check out this article at PCMag
- check out this article at InformationWeek 

Related Articles:
Google to offer encrypted search, future of web analytics uncertain
Google unleashes geolocation security feature for Gmail
Google shuts down Google Gears for now
Harmony lets you share Google Docs in Outlook
Google to begin opening up Google Wave for testing