Download High Quality Movie Trailers

XML parsing is often left to programming languages, not for command line use or in shell scripts. Here I used XMLStarlet Command Line XML Toolkit a wonderful set of tools that brings power of handling XML to commandline and Wget to download the content. The xmlstarlet tool seeks the URL’s in XML feed and passes it to wget.

/usr/bin/wget -c  `/usr/bin/xmlstarlet sel  --net  -D -T -t  -m "/records/movieinfo/preview" -v  "large" -o " " http://www.apple.com/trailers/home/xml/current.xml` 

These two programs are ported and available for other operating systems. The wget “-c” (continue) is optional. You can use any other downloader instead of wget. I suggest curl

cowsay: a configurable talking and thinking cow

Today's Debian Package of the day Cowsay reminds me of a dull day few years back when I wrote this 'cowwords' script to amuse myself.Even a useless tool like cowsay can be interesting with creative use, CrunchBang has another cool hack using vrms and cowssay Happy Hacking! :) .

Cowsay is a useless but very fun text filter written in Perl. If you send some text into cowsay, you get an ASCII cow saying your text. For example, cowsay Hello, World! prints

_______________
< Hello, World! >
 ---------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

Script in public domain originally posted on FSUG-Bangalore Mailing-list

#!/bin/sh # # SCRIPT: cow-words.sh # AUTHOR: Rakesh 'arky' Ambati (http://www.linuxgazette.com/blog/4864) # DATE: 17 January 2005 # VERSION: you_must_be_kidding # # CREDITS: I Thank Karma_Police for the 'cow file randomizer code' # # PURPOSE: Retrieves the Dictionary.com 'Word of the Day" RSS Feed and # a random character teaches them. # # DEPENDS: 'xmlstarlet' # 'cowsay' # Both are available packages in Debian (Sid) repository. # To install them just type 'apt-get install xmlstarlet cowsay' # # # set -x # Uncomment this for debugging. # # ##################################### # Use 'cowsay -l' to the full list of cow files in your system # # (Sorry fellas I removed possible offensive 'sodomized*, head-in,telebears, # # kiss' cow files # ###################################### cows=(apt beavis.zen bong bud-frogs bunny cheese cower daemon default dragon dragon-and-cow elephant elephant-in-snake eyes flaming-sheep ghostbusters hellokitty kitty koala kosh luke-koala mech-and-cow meow milk moofasa moose mutilated ren satanic sheep skeleton small stegosaurus stimpy supermilker surgery three-eyes turkey turtle tux udder vader vader-koala www) random=RANDOM%44 ######################################### ## Get the XML feed and do the selection ## ######################################## /usr/bin/xmlstarlet sel --net -t -m "/rss/channel/item/description" -v "." "http://dictionary.reference.com/wordoftheday/wotd.rss" | /usr/bin/cowsay -n -f ${cows[random]} # End of the script