Adventures in Linux: Podcast Edition Follow-Up (Geek Alert!) 0

I mentioned here that all I had left to do is to get Podracer running as a cron job.

I’ve never had any luck setting up cron jobs, so I decided to RTFM.

I opened a terminal and entered the command man crontab (that tranlates into manual for crontab) and brought up the manual.

After reading the manual, I entered the command crontab -e to open my own personal cron file under my user name.

I entered this line in the vi editor (vi is not for the faint of heart; it’s taken me almost a year to feel at home in it).

0 19 * * * podracer

That means at 0 minutes and 19 hours of every day run podracer. The reason I selected 19 hours was to test whether I got it right.

I did. It’s a little after 7 p. m. and Podracer is happily automatically downloading podcasts even as I type.

When it’s done, I’ll edit crontab so that Podracer runs at 4 a. m. and every day’s downloading will be automated.

As it stands now, here are the contents of my signature file, which tells Podracer what to download (the lines preceded by the number sign are ignored by the program–they are to help me remember what the heck I’ve been doing):

#
#News
#
#Radio Times
http://www.npr.org/templates/rss/podcast.php?id=510027
#Diane Rehm Show
http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510071
#Talk of the Nation
http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=5
#Voices in the Family
http://www.whyy.org/rss/voices.xml
#Whaddya Know
http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wyk/.jukebox?action=viewPodcast&podcastId=5243
#
#Linux
#
# Geek News Central
http://www.geeknewscentral.com/podcast.xml
#LQ Podcasts
http://feeds.feedburner.com/linuxquestions/LQPodcast
#LQRadio
http://feeds.feedburner.com/linuxquestions/LQRadioShowOnly
#Linux News
http://linux.quicksurf.com/?feed=rss2&cat=78

I highly recommend Geek News Central for anyone interested in the digital world. Todd Cochrane has a great newscast about geek stuff in plain English.

And he even read my email on the air and linked to Podracer.