I've been googling how to post to a wordpress blog from a bash script all day, and this script is the best I found. Thank you!

I did the following: ./cli-poster.sh -T "My Title" < myfile.txt, where myfile.txt has paragraphs of text (separated by 2 newlines). All the paragraphs run together and any html code shows up instead of being processed by the browser.

How can I keep my paragraphs?

I'd also like to put an image into a post.

I think this may be the cause of some or all of the "parse error. not well formed" errors you refer to in the FIXME list at the start of the script.

XML breaks if there are any unescaped "&" symbols (among other symbols like ">", "<", etc.). Your original script used a PHP method to escape these: I didn't test this, so I don't know if it worked well or not. With my alterations to your code, I'm using a python script to do the same thing.

If you edit the script to dump "WPTITLE" and "WP_POST" right before use, you can see whether they are escaped correctly. Mine were, but upon sending to the server they appear to be unescaped again (I used wireshark to capture the packets and look at the XML), leading to the error.

Oddly, if you manually enter "&" you get no errors; I guess the leading "&" gets converted to "&", then back again, leading to a correctly formatted message to the server. This suggests to me that double-encoding the symbols with my python script is a cheap hack to fix the bug.. but clearly inferior to actually solving the problem.