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How can I get the title of an RSS feed with Bash? Say I want to get the most recent article from MacRumors. Their RSS feed link is http://feeds.macrumors.com/MacRumors-All. How can I get the most recent article title with Bash?

twlscnds
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An alternative to xmllint is xmlstarlet and so:

curl -s http://feeds.macrumors.com/MacRumors-All |  xmlstarlet sel -t -m "/rss/channel/item[1]" -v "title"

Use the xmlstarlet sel command to select the xpath we are looking for and then use -v to display a specific element.

Raman Sailopal
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You can combine curl and an XPath expression (here, using xmllint), and rely on the fact that the feed is in reverse chronological order:

curl http://feeds.macrumors.com/MacRumors-All | xmllint --xpath '/rss/channel/item[1]/title/text()' -

See How to execute XPath one-liners from shell? for other ways to evaluate XPath.

In particular, if you have an older xmllint without --xpath, you may be able to use the technique suggested by this wrapper:

echo 'cat /rss/channel/item[1]/title/text()' | xmllint --shell <(curl http://feeds.macrumors.com/MacRumors-All)
Joe
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  • This gives me the following error (pasted in pastebin): https://pastebin.com/Yk3GKFwA I'm using macOS – twlscnds Nov 06 '20 at 13:20
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    @twlscnds Add a `-` at the end so `xmllint` knows to read from STDIN. Rewritting the first command: `curl http://feeds.macrumors.com/MacRumors-All | xmllint --xpath '/rss/channel/item[1]/title/text()' -` – user137369 May 31 '23 at 12:01