
While bp.conf comes preconfigured with a dozen-odd popular Linux podcasts, you can edit this file in a text editor, adding or deleting feeds. The file bashpodder.shell is the BashPodder shell script itself parse_enclosure.xsl is the stylesheet used on the actual XML feeds, and bp.conf is the configuration file that contains your list of podcasts to catch, one to a line. Then use wget to download the three files that comprise the heart and guts of BashPodder: It requires that you have the bash shell, sed, and wget, which are all universal on Linux, plus xsltproc, a tool that applies XSLT stylesheets to XML documents from the command line.įirst make a main directory where you want to keep your podcasts, and then make it the current directory. There’s isn’t even a formal tar.gz source file. And you can use it to do some pretty useful stuff.īashPodder is very much a DIY project there’s no man page or documentation of any kind. An experienced shell programmer could write and debug an equivalent in an afternoon.īut there’s no need to, now that Fessenden’s already done the work. It’s actually a very simple program itself - strip away the few dozen comment lines and you have just 20 lines of Bash code, with wget smack in the center. That’s what BashPodder uses behind the scenes. You might say, “Well, I’m pretty sure I can do that with wget” - and you’re right.

Because of its simplicity, it works on every Linux distribution, and it’s cross-platform, too - Fessenden reports that users have gotten it to work on AIX, BSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris, among others. Written by Linc Fessenden of The Linux Link Tech Show podcast, BashPodder parses the URLs of any podcast feeds you give it and saves the podcast files to dated directories. It’s hands-on, no-frills - and a perfect example of how a few command-line statements can work together to do a powerful job. It’s one of the oldest ones out there, and may still be the best.


BashPodder is a quick CLI-based GPLed podcatching client. But the truth is that you don’t need all that fancy stuff to harvest podcasts with Linux. Many are available for Linux, including iPodder and Podget. Podcatchers, the programs that download and aggregate your favorite podcasts, are popular on all platforms.
