Let's get poking - (facebook poke with bash / perl)

facebook, bash, curl, poke..poking... that about covers it. This is neither elegant nor complete. Call it a "hack" if you will. Please keep in mind that facebook does not look favourably on browser side scripting so this is technically against their TOS. Having said that, unless you go all spammy on your friends, you should remain under the radar. As far as requests go, they'll think you're doing it manually..which is ok... (unless like I said you over do it..)

copy code below to new file
chmod it +x
the script take three args - email,password and UID of the person you wanna poke.
it will try to reuse any cookies left over from a previous session so if you have problems, delete the cookie file /tmp/email.fbcookie

have fun. don't spam!

update
This here is a new modified version running on Perl. working as of 26/03/2010

#!/usr/bin/perl
#---------------------------- #
# facebook poke script        #
# c2010 - KudaNai             #
# http://kudanai.blogspot.com #
# --------------------------- #
# use with caution.you may    #
# get banned for violation    #
# of facebook ToS.            #
# good luck.                  #
# --------------------------- #
use strict;
use WWW::Mechanize;
use HTTP::Cookies;

my $username = 'yourusername'; #change these values.
my $password = 'yourpassowrd';

die "invalid number of arguments" unless (scalar @ARGV)==1;

my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();$mech->cookie_jar(HTTP::Cookies->new());
$mech->get("http://www.facebook.com/login.php");
$mech->submit_form(
form_number => 1,
fields =>
{
email=>$username,
pass=>$password
}
);

$mech->content() =~ /post_form_id\"\svalue=\"(\w+)\"/;

foreach my $uid (@ARGV)
{
$mech->post("http://www.facebook.com/ajax/poke.php?__a=1",
{
uid=>$uid,
pokeback=>"1",
post_form_id=>$1,
post_form_id_source=>"AsyncRequest"
}
);
#print $mech->content();
}

and the old version for reference.

#!/bin/bash

email=$1
pass=$2
uid=$3

cookie="/tmp/${email}.fbcookie"


login()
{
echo "logging in..."
curl -L --silent -A "MOZILLA/5.0" -b ${cookie} -c ${cookie} \
-d "email=${email}" -d "pass=${pass}" -d "login=Log+In" \
http://m.facebook.com/login.php > /dev/null
}

poke()
{
gfid=`curl -L --silent -A "MOZILLA/5.0" -b ${cookie} -c ${cookie} \
"http://m.facebook.com/profile.php?id=${uid}" | \
awk '{FS="gfid=";RS="\">";if (NR!=1 && $2!~/^$/) {print $2}}'`


curl --silent -G -A "MOZILLA/5.0" -b ${cookie} -c ${cookie} \
-d "id=${uid}" -d "gfid=${gfid}" -d "poke=${uid}" -d "refid=17" \
"http://m.facebook.com/a/profile.php" > /dev/null
}

if [ ! -e "${cookie}" ];then login;fi
poke