Utility for checking if Twitter usernames are available or not.
$ ./twitsquat.sh [username1 username2 username3 ...] [email address]
eg
$ ./twitsquat.sh geoff jenny user13190238d nancy_spungeon [email protected]
A summary of available usernames will be sent to the email address specified. Should work out of the box, but you may need to set up mail on your machine/server. I can't help you with that, sorry.
Open your crontab
$ crontab -e
Check four times an hour
0,15,30,45 * * * * /bin/bash /path/to/twitsquat.sh username1 username2 [email protected]
Check every minute
*/1 * * * * /bin/bash /path/to/twitsquat.sh username1 username2 [email protected]
The script basically just sends a GET request to twitter.com/[username]. If it returns a 404, then we assume the username is available. False positives will occur when Twitter is borken and throwing 404s for all requests. This happens from time-to-time, but just take it as reassurance that twitsquat is working ^.^