I recently discovered a superb podcast on startups (in Hebrew). And, I wanted to download the episodes, so that I can listen to it when I commute to work. The podcast homepage has a page for each episode, with a download link at the bottom.
However, instead of downloading each episode manually, I decided to find an easier way, with the use of the command line. And to make it more interesting, I wanted to accomplish this with a single command line.
wget -q -O - "$@" http://simplecast.fm/podcasts/173/rss | grep -o "http://.*.mp3" | xargs wget
The first part brings the content, in quiet mode, to allow piping into grep. The second part extracts the episode file names and paths, in my case they are all mp3 files. And the last part downloads all the files. I used the RSS feed instead of the podcast homepage as a way to have all the content in a single file.
I wonder, can this be done with a single wget command?
BTW, a useful tool for experimenting with regular expressions is RegExr.