This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Perl Buzz by Andy Lester. Original Post: Using WWW::Mechanize to get my scratchy 45s Feed Title: Perlbuzz Feed URL: http://perlbuzz.com/atom.xml Feed Description: What's happening in the world of Perl programming, including Perl 5, Perl 6, the CPAN and Parrot? Latest Perl Buzz Posts Latest Perl Buzz Posts by Andy Lester Latest Posts From Perlbuzz

I'm a big fan of WFMU's Beware of the Blog. So much music geekery and arcana in one handy source!

Sometimes there will be a post with lots of MP3s for download, like this one today with long-forgotten 45s of songs paying tribute to Merle Haggard. I don't want to listen to the mp3s in my browser, and I don't want to manually do the Save As dance in the browser.

Perl and WWW::Mechanize to the rescue! If you have WWW::Mechanize installed, you also have the mech-dump utility. mech-dump started as a tool to make it easier to create WWW::Mechanize programs by showing what form fields exist, but it does more than that. By default, mech-dump will fetch a page and display the forms and fields on the web page. If you call it with --links, you'll only get back the links, like so:

alester:~ $ mech-dump --links http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2012/04/a-tribute-to-the-hag-mp3s.html 
http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/styles.css?v=6

http://static.typepad.com/.shared:v20120403.02-0-g1ba1fe9:typepad:en_us/themes/common/print.css

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2012/04/you-cant-put-your-arm-around-a-memory.html?no_prefetch=1
... etc ...

Filter that output through grep and pass it to xargs and wget, and you've got a handy MP3-only downloader.

alester:~ $ mech-dump --links [big URL] | grep mp3$ | xargs wget

--2012-04-04 09:27:32--  http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/GG/Skeeter_Harmon_-_A_Tribute_To_The_Hag.mp3

100%[=======================================================>] 4,935,323   4.08M/s   in 1.2s

... etc ...

I suspect very few Mech users are aware of mech-dump, and how handy it can be from the command line. I wish I'd done a better job of publicizing it.