Got a long list of URLs that you need to get into your Instapaper account? Batchtapaper is probably what you're looking for.
You'll often encounter things like Byliner's wonderful curated end-of-year lists of articles. I want to read all of them, but I don't want to have to add each one of them to my Instapaper account manually; so, I use Batchtapaper.
You can install batchtapaper using RubyGems:
% gem install batchtapaper
The simplest way to use batchtapaper is to point it at a file containing some URLs:
% batchtapaper /path/to/urls.txt
Enter your Instapaper username and password when prompted, and it should fly away and add them one-by-one to your account.
The text file you pass to batchtapaper should have one URL on each line, like so:
http://example.com/article
http://blog.example.org/2013/01/foo
However, you can also specify titles if you wish by separating them from the URLs with a tab:
http://example.com/article An Article
http://blog.example.org/2013/01/foo A blog post
If you use batchtapaper quite a lot, one of the first things you'll want
to do is to create an ~/.instapaperrc file containing your
authentication details. All you need to do is put your username/email
address on the first line and your password — if you have one — on the
second, like so:
foo@example.com
p4ssw0rd
It's worth setting this file's permissions to 400 if you share your
computer with anyone else.
batchtapaper will also accept input from STDIN, which means that you
can use it in an ordinary chain of commands. If you've got something
that spits out URLs, then simply pipe that output into batchtapaper and
it will process them all:
cat urls.txt | batchtapaper