Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

How it works...

The script uses cURL to download the RSS feed. You can view the format of the incoming data by logging in to your Gmail account and viewing https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom.

cURL reads the RSS feed with the user authentication provided by the -u user:pass argument. When you use -u user without the password cURL, it will interactively ask for the password.

• tr -d '\n': This removes the newline characters
• sed 's:</entry>:\n:g': This replaces every </entry> element with a newline, so each e-mail entry is delimited by a new line and, hence, mails can be parsed one-by-one.

The next block of script that needs to be executed as one single expression uses sed to extract the relevant fields:

 sed 's/.*<title>\(.*\)<\/title.*<author><name>\([^<]*\)<\/name><email> ...