Episode: 481
Title: HPR0481: Mashpodder
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0481/hpr0481.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 21:26:57

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Hello.
This episode is a mashbutter.
I've been using mashbutter for many years
and it's been written by Link from the Linux Link Tech Show.
It's a simple 41-line script that does one thing
and it does it very well.
It uses said, arc, grep, wget,
various other programs to go out and get a file
from the internet and download it onto your computer.
That file being a podcast,
denoted by the enclosure tag in an XML feed and an RSS feed.
And it finds out which RSS feed that you want to download
by listing that in a file called pp.conf,
which is simply the URL that contains the RSS feed.
It's a very, very nice program and has inspired me
to do a lot more bash programming.
And because of that,
I've gotten more familiar with a lot of the other commands
that I just listed earlier on in the show.
Down to the years,
many people have contributed back to Link
and you can find those contributions on LinkSight,
which is linky.org forward slash bashbutter.
One of the criticism that people have had of bashbutter
is the fact that it downloads every file
that's in your RSS feed.
Well, that's exactly what it's supposed to do.
You give it a feed and you will not,
it downloads everything that's in that feed.
However, when you join a podcast,
particularly a news podcast,
that has been gone for a year or two,
there's going to be a lot of episodes in there.
So what I did previously was I just come to it
out the WGIT line that would download that podcast.
But other people have contributed back various different changes
to do various options with that.
I've contributed back a change to make
to speed up the podcast once you've downloaded them.
And various different things to improve bashbutter.
Now, Link continues to maintain a lean-mean fighting machine
bashbutter that is on his website.
And you can also get the additional contributions over there.
I want to talk about a bashbutter,
which is a variation of Link's bashbutter script.
And what bashbutter does is it takes some of the common changes,
most requested changes from people,
and it implements them.
It implements a lot of the fixes for some of the URLs.
It gives you more flexibility in where you want to put your files.
And it also gives you flexibility on how many episodes you want to download.
If you do a bashbutter dash help,
you will see that you can specify a different config file,
specify a different date, you can override the config file,
you can display help, message, and various other things.
But first of all, I better tell you where you can get it,
and who has written it.
It's been written by Chess Griffin from the
Linux Reality podcast, which if you haven't heard this,
you should go back and listen to all the episodes.
There's 100 episodes of absolute goodness over there.
And there'll be a link in the show notes to that.
Mashbutter itself, you can get at code.google.com,
forward slash p, forward slash mashbutter.
And the latest version as a recording is mashbutter-svn23.tar.gz.
So once you download that and you're on tar,
using command tar, space, dash, xzvf, I think,
and mashbutter blah, blah, blah, blah.
Then that will give you a directory
that has got one, two, three, four files in a, well,
three, probably three files.
Mashbutter.shell, which is the script itself,
the mp.com file, the parsons score,
and closure.xsl that we've talked about before,
and the podcast.log.
With the podcast.log is used by mashbutter and bashbutter
to keep track of the podcast that it's downloaded.
So once you've downloaded them there,
and then she gets added to your podcast.log file.
One are two things that you is added to the mashbutter.conf file.
Has been the options to specify the name of the directory
and to determine the number of podcasts that can be downloaded.
So whereas in the previous bp.conf,
the mp.conf has got three fields.
The first one is the URL.
The second one is the directory in which it's going to go.
And the third one is the number of podcasts you want to download.
You have the option all known or just update
or a number greater than zero.
Now this has been excellent because it's allowed me to download
my music podcast directly into my output folder
and my technical podcast into a folder called Fast.
And once a mashbutter has run, then from a cron job,
the following thing I run is a script that will convert
all the files to org.
And will convert, sorry,
will increase the speed by a factor of two.
And once that's done, it'll output it to the output directory.
So that's pretty much it, a mashbutter.
It's got all the creamy goodness of bashbutter,
but runs approximately an order of magnitude longer in lines of code.
So that's nearly up to 386 lines of code.
But that said, there are a lot of comments in there on subroutines.
It's very, very, very, very easy to read.
So it's actually a nice coding style as well that chess has developed.
Okay, that's about it.
One other thing that I'd like to do here is recommend a podcast to you.
What I think would be nice is if other people could recommend podcasts.
There is a underlinuxlink.net.
There's a list of excellent tech-related podcasts.
But I'd like to recommend a good music podcast to you.
There's a guy called Brendon,
and he produces Spudjo.
And it's at Spudjo.libsyn.com
and the RSS feed is HGDP colon4sr-4sr-spudjo.libsyn.com
for RSS.
It's a podcast that comes out twice a week or so.
And it features female artists from around the world,
who originally started with Irish female artists,
and now he's expanded to female artists from around the world.
Various different styles, various different genres,
very, very interesting.
Go have a listen, subscribe, and drop them a line.
Oh, one word of warning is that he's learning Irish,
so the intros and outros are in Irish,
and all the URLs and most of the songs are in English,
so don't worry about it.
So if you have a recommendation for a podcast,
please record a HPR episode,
and tag that on at the end.
Tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode
of Hacker Public Radio.
Thank you for listening to Hacker Public Radio.
HPR is sponsored by Carol.net,
so head on over to C-A-R-O dot N-C for all of us here.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
