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.