The only problem I find with using these sites is that it takes quite a lot of steps to actually send a message. Open Firefox, load the website, login, navigate to the webtext page etc… This is where o2sms steps into the equation. It acts like a specialised browser that automates the actions taken by the user to send SMS messages and provides the functionality through a CLI (command line interface), reducing the process to a single terminal command. The one problem I faced with o2sms was getting it to work on Mac OS X. While there is the option of installing with CPAN it just did not work for me and it was constantly complaining that dependencies were not being met. While the cpan install worked for me on numerous other systems it just failed to install everything on OS X, and so I was left with the task of manually installing it.

The fix turned out to be easier than I expected. When I ran the broken install of o2sms it gave a warning that certain modules could not be found. While I tried installing them individually with CPAN it still wouldn’t work and so I decided I’d build each one individually and install them one by one. To do this I had to get the source from CPAN and build each one from the source code.

When all was said and done I was left with a working install, which looks something like this

patrick@Odysseus0% meteorsms 1234567890                                   < ~ >
[ recipient : +353234567890 ]
lorem ipsum...
.
[ logging in to 0987654321@meteor.ie ... ]
[ login successful ]
[ message sent to +353234567890, 229 remaining this month ]
patrick@Odysseus0%                                                        < ~ >

Its even possible to send messages using a single command using the -m command line argument.

patrick@Odysseus0% meteorsms 1234567890 -m "lorem ipsum"                  < ~ >
[ recipient : +353234567890 ]
[ reusing last login for 0987654321@meteor.ie ... ]
[ message sent to +353234567890, 228 remaining this month ]
patrick@Odysseus0%                                                        < ~ >

Hopefully this article will help others who have been having troubles with getting o2sms to work on their own OS X installs, or enlighten other people to the brilliance that is o2sms.

Enjoy,

Patrick