Introduction

On 2025-06-19 Ken Fallon did a show, number 4404 , responding to Kevie's show 4398 , which came out on 2025-06-11.

Kevie was using a Bash pipeline to find the latest episode in an RSS feed, and download it. He used grep to parse the XML of the feed.

Ken's response was to suggest the use of xmlstarlet to parse the XML because such a complex structured format as XML cannot reliably be parsed without a program that "understands" the intricacies of the format's structure. The same applies to other complex formats such as HTML, YAML and JSON.

In his show Ken presented a Bash script which dealt with this problem and that of the ordering of episodes in the feed. He asked how others would write such a script, and thus I was motivated to produce this response to his response!

Alternative script

My script is a remodelling of Ken's, not a completely different solution. It contains a few alternative ways of doing what Ken did, and a reordering of the parts of his original. We will examine the changes in this episode.

Script

#!/bin/bash
# Original (c) CC-0 Ken Fallon 2025
# Modified by Dave Morriss, 2025-06-14 (c) CC-0

podcast="https://tuxjam.otherside.network/feed/podcast/"

# [1]
while read -r item
do
    # [2]
    pubDate="${item%;*}"
    # [3]
    pubDate="$( \date --date="${pubDate}" --universal +%FT%T )"
    # [4]
    url="${item#*;}"
    # [5]
    echo "${pubDate};${url}"
done < <(curl --silent "${podcast}" | \
    xmlstarlet sel --text --template --match 'rss/channel/item' \
    --value-of 'concat(pubDate, ";", enclosure/@url)' --nl - ) | \
sort --numeric-sort --reverse | \
head -1 | \
cut -f2 -d';' | wget --quiet --input-file=- # [6]

I have placed some comments in the script in the form of '# [1]' and I'll refer to these as I describe the changes in the following numbered list.

Note: I checked, and the script will run with the comments, though they are only there to make it easier to refer to things.

1. The format of the pipeline is different. It starts by defining a while loop, but the data which the read command receives comes from a process substitution of the form '<(statements)' (see the process substitution section of "hpr2045 :: Some other Bash tips" ). I have arranged the pipeline in this way because it's bad practice to place a while in a pipeline, as discussed in the show: hpr3985 :: Bash snippet - be careful when feeding data to loops .
   (I added -r to the read because shellcheck , which I run in the vim editor, nagged me!)

2. The lines coming from the process substitution are from running curl to collect the feed, then using xmlstarlet to pick out the pubDate field of the item, and the url attribute of the enclosure field returning them as two strings separated by a semicolon ( ';' ). This is from Ken's original code. Each line is read into the variable item , and the first element (before the semicolon) is extracted with the Bash expression "${item%;*}" . Parameter manipulation expressions were introduced in HPR show 1648 . See the full notes section Remove matching suffix pattern for this one.

3. I modified Ken's date command to simplify the generation of the ISO8601 date and time by using the pattern +%FT%T . This just saves typing!

4. The url value is extracted from the contents of item with the expression "${item#*;} . See the section of show 1648 entitled Remove matching prefix pattern for details.

5. The echo which generates the list of podcast URLs prefixed with an ISO time stamp uses ';' as the delimiter where Ken used a tab character. I assume this was done for the benefit of either the following sort or the awk script. It's not needed for sort since it sorts the line as-is and doesn't use fields. My version doesn't use awk .

6. Rather than using awk I use cut to remove the time stamp from the front of each line, returning the second field delimited by the semicolon. The result of this will be the URL for wget to download. In this case wget receives the URL on standard input ( STDIN ), and the --input-file=- option tells it to use that information for the download.

Conclusion

I'm not sure my solution is better in any significant way. I prefer to use Bash functionality to do things where calling awk or sed could be overkill, but that's just a personal preference.

I might have replaced the head and cut with a sed expression, such as the following as the last line:

sed -e '1{s/^.\+;//;q}' | wget --quiet --input-file=-

Here, the sed expression operates on the first line from the sort , where it removes everything from the start of the line to the semicolon. The expression then causes sed to quit, so that only the edited first line is passed to wget .

Links

• hpr1648 :: Bash parameter manipulation
  • Section entitled Remove matching suffix pattern
  • Section entitled Remove matching prefix pattern
  • Diagram showing the Bash parameter manipulation methods
• hpr2045 :: Some other Bash tips
  • Section on process substitution
• hpr3985 :: Bash snippet - be careful when feeding data to loops
• hpr4398 :: Command line fun: downloading a podcast by Kevie
• hpr4404 :: Kevie nerd snipes Ken by grepping xml by Ken Fallon