Welcome to Sean's brain

I love the fact that i can load up my NAS with torrents and let it do it’s work without having to worry.  I’m also a fan of automating anything. In an attempt to make my life easier; i’ve thrown together a quick and dirty eztv rss feed to fetch my favorite tv shows. Now there are a couple out there but nothing i could get set up on my NAS properly. I’ve written this quick and dirty script to handle it. This is what i did:

The first thing i needed to do was install Transmission on my dlink 323. Transmission is much better than the crappy bit torrent that comes with the 323.  You can find install instructions here: http://forum.dsmg600.info/t2719-%5BREL%5D-Transmission.html.

Once transmission is installed the first thing you’ll need to do is make sure you start the daemon with the watch folder setting. A watch folder is a folder that you can dump .torrent files into and transmission will queue them up for you. Great little asset!. To tell transmission to watch a folder – edit your /ffp/start/transmission.sh file and look for transmission_start() function. Replace with:

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$su_cmd $user -c "$command -c /mnt/HD_a2/Downloads/watcher -g ${TRANSMISSION_HOME} -e ${TRANSMISSION_HOME}/$n

Now that we have a watcher folder we need to get .torrent files to it. Queue EZTV. eztv.it is a great website that allows you to search through hundreds of TV show torrent rss feeds. It’s updated as soon as a new episode is available and it’s perfect for what i’m looking for. Since i want to keep everything very simple, i’ve opted to create a text file called feedList.txt and i’ll use this file to hold all of the tv show rss feeds that i’m interested in keeping up with.

And now the brains of the whole operation. I’ve written a script called getTorrents.sh that does the following:

1. Check the feedList.txt file and loop through each rss feed on each line
2. use wget to fetch the rss feed and check it against the previous one downloaded and saved. If it’s the first time we’ll create a blank
3. then we do a diff with a regex (and some clean up) to get the diff of the rss links to the torrents that are missing in the saved file
4. we again wget the .torrent files that diff returns and move them into our watcher folder.

Here’s the script in all it’s glory:

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#! /bin/bash
 
#set path for cron
export PATH=/ffp/sbin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/ffp/bin:/usr/bin:/bin
 
count=0
feed=feedList.txt
feedFolder="feeds"
watchFolder="../watcher"
 
# loop through the feed list
while read line
do
        let count++
        echo -e  "$count - $line"
 
        #look for saved file
        if [ ! `ls ./$feedFolder/$count.saved` ];
        then
                #make it
                echo > ./$feedFolder/$count.saved
                echo "$count.saved doesn't exist, now creating"
        fi
 
        #update feed
        wget -O ./$feedFolder/$count.rss $line
 
        #get the diff and wget the torrents
        diff ./$feedFolder/$count.rss ./$feedFolder/$count.saved | grep -o '<link>[^"]*' | sed 's/<lin
        #diff ./$feedFolder/$count.rss ./$feedFolder/$count.saved | grep -o '<link>[^"]*' | sed 's/<li
 
        #move to watchfolder for transmission
        mv *.torrent $watchFolder
 
        #chown so that transmission can use those torrents
        chown -R nobody:501 $watchFolder/*
 
        #save the need feed for next run
        cp ./$feedFolder/$count.rss ./$feedFolder/$count.saved
done <$feed

The very last thing we need to do now is set up the cron to run this little gem on a daily basis:

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0 0 * * * cd /mnt/HD_a2/Downloads/tvrss/; /ffp/bin/sh getTorrents.sh > /mnt/HD_a2/Downloads/tvrss/log 2>&1

If you want the code check it out here: http://code.google.com/p/transmission-tvrss/

You’ll also require you nas to have wget, diff installed on it. By default diff isn’t so you’ll have to dig around for 323 packages. I can’t remember off hand what i did to get it installed.