Podcasting Hacks

Build Your Own Podcatcher

Using Perl, you can quickly build a command-line podcatcher for yourself.

Rolling your own command-line podcatcher, like the one shown here, gives you ultimate flexibility in what podcasts you download and when you fetch them. You can also hook up this script to a cron job or to a Windows batch file and download new podcasts overnight.

The Code

Save this code as spc.pl:

   #!/usr/bin/perl -w
   use Storable qw ( store retrieve );
   use FileHandle;
   use LWP::Simple qw( get );
   use strict;

   # The path to the history file that remembers
   # what we have downloaded.

   use constant HISTORY_FILE => ".history";

   # The file that includes the URLs of all of the feeds

   use constant FEEDS_FILE => "feeds.txt";
   #The directory to use for output of the enclosure files

   use constant OUTPUT_DIR => "enclosures"; 

   # Loads all of the feeds from the feeds file and returns 
   # an array.
   
   sub feeds_load()
   { 
     my $feeds = [];
     my $fh = new FileHandle( FEEDS_FILE );
     while( <$fh> ) { chomp; push @$feeds, $_; }
     $fh->close();
     return $feeds;
  }
   # Returns the filename from a URL
   
   sub parse_filename($)
   {
     my ( $fname ) = @_;
   
   # Remove the arguments portion of the URL
   $fname =~ s/\?.*$//;
   # Trim anything up to the final slash
   $fname =~ s/.*\///;

   return $fname;
 }
   
   # Parses a feed and finds the title of the feed and the
   # URLs for all of the enclosures
   
   sub parse_feed($)
   { 
	my ( $rss ) = @_;
	
	my $info = {};
	my $urls = [];

	while( $rss =~ /(\<item\>.*?\<\/item\>)/sg )
	{
     my $item = $1;
     if ( $item =~ /(\<enclosure.*?\>)/ ) ...