Here are some examples on how to use Telegram bot api via CURL

Prerequisites

For getting messages in private chat with bot

• Create a bot using @BotFather, get it's token
• Start conversation with bot
• Run following curl command

curl https://api.telegram.org/bot<TO:KEN>/getUpdates | grep -Po '"from":{"id":.+?,'

or

• Go to @getmyid_bot and obtain your account id

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For getting messages in public/private chat where bot invited

• Create a bot using @BotFather, get it's token
• Invite your bot to desired chat
• Write message like this /test @your_bot_tag
• Run following curl command

curl https://api.telegram.org/bot<TO:KEN>/getUpdates | grep -Po '"chat":{"id":.+?,'

You will get output like the one below, keep chat id: "chat":{"id":-1001182736542,

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Sending messages either to yourself in the chat with bot or to the group chat

Environment variables used in examples

# bot token
$TOKEN=abc:de123
# your acc or group chat id
$CHAT_ID=12345

To supress curl output, add -s key + > /dev/null in the end

Send text messages

curl -X POST -H "Content-Type:multipart/form-data" -F chat_id=$CHAT_ID -F text="message" "https://api.telegram.org/bot$TOKEN/sendMessage"

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Send document from disk

curl -X POST -H "Content-Type:multipart/form-data" -F document=@"path/to/some.file" "https://api.telegram.org/bot$TOKEN/sendDocument"

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Example of piping an image from stdout to curl

Creating qr code from string, piping stdout to curl, sending it as an image

qrencode -s 6 -o - "Some text to encode" | curl -X POST -H "Content-Type:multipart/form-data" -F chat_id=$CHAT_ID -F photo=@- "https://api.telegram.org/bot$TOKEN/sendPhoto"

For sending other entity types, replace /sendPhoto and photo with the following:

/sendAudio audio /sendPhoto photo /sendVideo video /sendAnimation animation /sendVoice voice /sendVideoNote video_note

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More types, as well as required/optional fields for each type, could be found here

Some examples that might help you - here