Episode: 3748
Title: HPR3748: The Squirrels gift to HPR
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3748/hpr3748.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 04:54:21

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,748 for Wednesday the 14th of December 2022.
Today's show is entitled, The Squirrel's Gift to HPR.
It is hosted by Zen Flotor 2, and is about 9 minutes long, it carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, The Squirrels have modified Bash Potter to do something different.
Hello boys and girls from Zen Flotor, your favorite magical forest squirrel,
farmer human being converted into squirrel by aliens in the 1960s and atheists with another podcast.
This time I decided to give the audience of Hacker Public Radio a free gift for Christmas.
The squirrels have all gotten together and decided that the humans need a free gift for Christmas.
We've never done this before. So what I did was I uh a cobble together
a podcast collecting bunch of software that I've
re-scripted from Bash Potter, Link Fesadans Bash Potter, that has been reworked to run under the
Open BSD corn shell. By the way, Bash Potter will work under the corn shell or the Bash
Shell, either one of them without any problem. So it wasn't too much work.
And as you know, Bash Potter if you've ever used it, it collects your podcasts and stores them
under directories, sub directories it makes that are labeled by the day it's run.
So you'll have December 1st, December 2nd, December 3rd, December 4th and so on. Each day you run
it, it creates a new day and it downloads the podcasts from the list in the bp.configuration file.
As some of you may already know, it's the RSS feed information from that bp.configuration file
and stores them daily, day by day by day. I wanted something some 14 years ago that would store
podcasts by the originating author. And so I created a modified version of the Bash Potter
that would store things in a sub directory that you would label out when you created the
set the podcast up by the podcast name. For instance, I have an example here that I'm going to give you
that you can download where I have an ARRL directory for my ham radio podcasts. I have Astrophys
directory for Astrophys podcast. BSD now, Freedom Becripted, HPR, Linux Journal podcast,
which has now become the reality 2.0 podcast. I just haven't renamed that. The Brothers West,
the Lundich show which is no longer active. Brian Lundich isn't or hasn't been making any
podcasts off of that RSS field quite some time. BSD talk which is also
in active at the moment, maybe defunct two names. It's been quite a while. And then finally,
Gany world order. And you'll see when you download this file, it's called, and let me just go back
to that directory. The file I made is called Pod thing. And you untar it with the command
tar-zxvf- or space, excuse me, pod thing. And it will untar into the directory you want to
write it in. And you just switch down into the storage directory and then the media-guest
directory. And frankly, you can move the media-guift directory and rename it to whatever you want,
media or Fred or John or whatever name you want that directory to be. And move it to where
in the machine you'd like to run it. Currently, as I say, it's written to work with the Open BSD
Cornshell. If you happen to be a Slack user, I believe, let me just take a look at Slack builds here
and do a search in Open BSD. I was thinking, yeah, there it is, KSH-Open BSD. They happen to have
one ready for Slack, we're 15. You could possibly just install that and do a little tweaking
and set it up to run so that it is the KSH that we're looking for. Or if you want to run just
the bash shell, then you can go down into each one of the directories for the programs and you'll
see a bash potter directory down beneath where the bash potter code is located that I've modified.
And just change the header on the bash potter scripts to what you want, which would be
more bash shell. You'd want to change that to pound exclamation slash bin slash bash
on the top of each one of those bash potter shells. Again, change it back to that.
Right now it reads pound sign exclamation slash bin slash KSH, which will activate the Open BSD KSH shell.
And I don't remember, but I think if you're a Slackware and you install from Slack builds,
the KSH-Open BSD, it will just show us KSH. If it doesn't, you can make a link to KSH when
you get it installed from whatever it called it. And that should work just fine.
The corn shell is a little more secure for running stuff like that from a Cron tab and a server.
If you're running net BSD, of course, they have a corn shell, so you shouldn't have any problem
with that. And you can start collecting your podcasts by in directories, by who they
originated from rather than the way bash potter does it, which is day by day.
Anyway, have a look at the script, how you engage it, once you set it up.
And you shouldn't have to set this one up. You could just write it right off the bat using the
the Cron shell command that I created called getAllPodcast, just do a dot slash getAllPodcast,
get underscore all underscore podcast. You'll see it there at the top level of this media
guest directory that you'll probably rename and move to somewhere else in your hard drive once
you get it exploded. And then you can play with it. And I'm sure that some efficiencies could be
done in the script, for instance, you could perhaps copy the bash potter shell to another directory
and create symbol links into all these other directories to save a little disk space maybe.
But I didn't bother to. I just copied the whole thing to a new directory. Each time I had a podcast,
I created a directory for it. And then I just copy the bash potter shell from one of the previous
podcasts I have been downloading into the new one. And then, of course, I get into the getAllPodcast
script and modify it with the appropriate echo commands and stuff to to make it execute that
script to get the podcast. And this can all be run from a Cron shell. So you could have it to go
grab your podcast once a week if you wanted to. I'm sure there's probably a lot of other people that
have written something similar or maybe even better in the way of text podcast gathering scripts.
And I'd be interested in seeing them make a show on theirs, their homemade devices,
or even criticisms or comments about this script that I made some 14 years ago. I haven't
really modified it, as you can tell, because some of the podcasts have long since been dead.
When I made this BSD talk was still an active podcast, so that was quite some time ago.
But at any rate, it gives you an alternative way of collecting podcasts if you're into such things.
If not, oh well. Best late plans of Scorland men. Thank you for listening. And
Merry Christmas to everyone. We'll try to make another podcast here soon since we're
sure to podcast, boys and girls. Thanks for listening. Bye from Scorland.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at HackerPublicRadio.org.
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On the Sadois status, today's show is released under Creative Commons,
Attribution 4.0 International License.