NAME

crossbow-fetch — Request, parse and process all registered feeds

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

The crossbow-fetch command is part of crossbow(1), the cron(8)-friendly RSS aggregator. It is responsible for retrieving, parsing, and processing all new items of the tracked feeds. In order to be tracked, a feed must be registered via crossbow-set(1).

If crossbow-fetch is invoked without options all registered feeds are updated. By supplying an identifier via the -i flag, only the corresponding feed is updated.

A feed is updated by the following sequence of actions:

• The URL is fetched, and the obtained XML is parsed into a set of feed items.
• The obtained set is compared with the one retrieved on the previous execution (if any). Items appearing in the former but not in the latter are marked as "fresh".
• Fresh items are processed according to the set-up defined via crossbow-set(1). This step might entail the execution of a sub-process: this can be avoided by supplying the -D flag.
• The new set is stored in place of the previous one, effectively marking new items as seen. Items whose processing failed at the previous step are not stored, so they will be processed again. This step will be skipped entirely if the -d flag is supplied.

OPTIONS

-D

Do not execute sub-commands for feeds configured with the subproc or pipe output modes. Print some information on what would have been run instead.

-c

Catch-up with the feed, marking new items as seen without processing them. The effect is the same as -D, but the processing is skipped entirely, even for feeds configured with the print or pretty output mods.

-d

Do not mark new items as seen.

-h

Prints the synopsis and exits.

-i identifier

Only fetch the feed identified by identified.

-v

Increase verbosity

EXAMPLES

By placing this string in a crontab, a check for updates will be run automatically every two hours:

0 0-23/2 * * * crossbow-fetch

If the local mail is configured properly, the output produced by the invocation should be delivered in the user's mailbox.

SEE ALSO

crossbow(1), crossbow-del(1), crossbow-query(1), crossbow-set(1), crossbow-outfmt(5)

AUTHORS

Giovanni Simoni <dacav@fastmail.com>