How To Automatically kill your Twitter client every night at work..

If your like me, you leave your work computer on when you go home.  Most of the time its just easier and faster to leave it turned on then to suffer through a cold boot the next morning.

Your also probably slightly forgetful - every now and then I forget to close my Twitter and IM clients before leaving work... which allows it to sit there all night long eating my precious Twitter API requests.

Changing your Twitter password once you get home works, but is a little drastic.

I use a Windows batch file that is scheduled to run every night at 6PM on my work computer that kills both the process for my Twitter client (Twhirl) and my IM client (pidgin).

Here's a quick tutorial.

• First you want to create a new file in your favorite text editor, call it anything you like.  I named mine "nightly.bat"


• Paste the following into the new file (assuming you are using Twhirl as your Twitter client)

taskkill /F /IM twhirl.exe

• Save this file anywhere you like, I saved mine to "My Documents"

• Navigate to your windows control panel


• Open up "Scheduled Tasks"

• "Add Scheduled Task"

• Click Next..

• Click "Browse" and select your batch file

• Setup when to run your task, with a name.  I called mine "nightly", and set it to run "daily"

• The next screen lets you configure the exact time to run, and what interval of days to run it on (I selected 6pm and weekdays)

• All done! Click "Finish" and your good to go.