gophcatch
(ver 2011)
Freeware


In today's web, programs called "feed readers" are ubiquitous. 
They regularly retrieve a special resource (the "feed") which 
represents a web page's content in a simplified and standardized 
format.  A feed reader also checks if that feed contains new items 
and notifies you about that.

gophcatch is a feed reader's equivalent for Gopher.  It retrieves a 
gopher menu and checks if it contains new items.  This allows you to 
keep up with another user's phlog, for example.  gophcatch is supposed 
to be called by a cron daemon.  It will simply print new items on 
stdout, so cron can mail them to you. If no new items are found and no 
errors occured, gophcatch prints nothing.

As a result of the simplicity of the gopher protocol and gopher menus, 
gophcatch is an almost trivial shell script written in GNU  bash. 
Internally, it also uses cURL and, optionally, lynx.