Simple Perl podcatcher

The logic involved in an application to download podcasts, a podcatcher, can be quite straightforward. At its simplest, for each podcast it must:

• retrieve the podcast feed, a file containing the location and descriptions of available podcasts
• retrieve certain of these podcasts, usually any not yet downloaded

It's the sort of task that could be done in a short Python or Perl script, and I wrote a rudimentary one of my own some years ago. However, when I recently wanted a slightly more functional script, I had trouble finding such a beast for Windows. Unix users seem to be well served by BashPodder, but I had to keep looking. Eventually I settled on a really straightforward Perl script which does everything I need. The benefit of a simple script over a full compiled application is that it's very lightweight in terms of system requirements, and if it doesn't do exactly what I want I can easily modify it.

The script I now use is called philpodder. It has some documentation, but the link to the script and updates from that page seems to be dead. I hope there haven't been any useful updates that are no longer downloadable. Anyway, I have philpodder set in Task Scheduler to run every three days to collect any recent new podcasts, and it's been working splendidly so far.