Get title of an RSS feed with bash

Question

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?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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 with --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)