A compact perl script for gisting files from the command line.

gist.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Getopt::Long;

#Parse flags using Getopt::Long.
my $desc    = '';
my $public  = 0;
my $user    = '';
my $verbose = 0;
GetOptions ('desc:s'  => \$desc,
            'public'  => \$public,
            'user:s'  => \$user,
            'verbose' => \$verbose);
            

#Convert $public to a boolean string.
$public = ($public == 1 ? 'true' : 'false');

#Check number of commandline args. Print usage if wrong number.
if (@ARGV != 1) {
  print "Usage: gist [--public] [--verbose] [--desc \"description\"] [--user \"username\"] <file-to-upload>\n";
  exit 1;
}

#Load file contents into $document. Replace newlines with \\n.
my $file = "$ARGV[0]";
my $document = do {
      local $/ = undef;
          open my $fh, "<", $file
                  or die "could not open $file: $!";
                    <$fh>;
                  };

#Converts a string into an array.
sub str2ary{
  return split //, $_[0];
}

#Converts an array into a string.
sub ary2str{
  my $str = "@_";
  $str =~ s/(.)\s/$1/g;
  return $str;
}

#Converts an ascii character into its unicode equivalent.
sub char2hex{
  my $newchar = "\\u00" . sprintf("%x",ord($_[0]));
  $newchar = ($newchar cmp "\\u00a" ? $newchar : "\\u000d\\u000a");
  return $newchar;
}

$document = ary2str(map char2hex($_), str2ary($document));

#Make sure $filename doesn't contain path to file.
my @xs = split(/\//, $ARGV[0]);
my $filename = $xs[@xs-1];

#Append description field to $desc.
$desc = ($desc cmp '' ? ('"description": "' . $desc . '", ') : '');

#Append '--user' to $user if defined.
$user = ($user cmp '' ? ('--user "' . $user . '" ') : '');

#Submits a gist. Returns entire gist response if verbose, only html_url otherwise.
sub submit_gist{
  $response = `curl -s -X POST \\
                $user--data-binary '{$desc"public": $public, "files": {"$filename": {"content": "$document"}}}' \\
                  https://api.github.com/gists`;
  my @group = $response =~ /"html_url": "(https:\/\/gist\.github\.com\/(.+?))",/;
  print ($verbose ? $response : "$group[0]\n");
}

&submit_gist();