Scarf is just what it says on the tin, a very simple RSS feed reader for Unix systems, written in Perl. I looked about freshmeat for others and sadly didn't find any that I liked the look of... they were all (from what I could tell) quite complex creatures, either with proper widget full GUIs or complex ncurses interfaces. What I wanted was something simple that would fit the traditional Unix text stream interface, taking in arguments and just spitting out text, and scarf was the result. To quote the README

Introduction
============

Scarf was, to be honest, written over a few evenings to help learn a little bit more Perl, and as such it should carry a warning about quality. Its not broken but its hardly the most feature-rich program. Also I think I should pull a Sun and claim it shouldn't be used in life or death situations! :)

The Justification for scarf's existence is I wanted a simple RSS feed parser so I could drag them down, beat their contents into fortune files (you don't want to know) and spam my Uni's BBS with them in quiet periods. Needless to say I couldn't find another RSS feed reader for Unix that could accomplish this simple task (although other feed readers may suck less this one doesn't use ncurses or other crap and can be run quite happily in an automated fashion as part of scripts, I mean hell thats how things should be!).

Why the name? Well... it needed to be something pronouncable that expands to roughly what it does. And also not create a namespace conflict, and in that I think I've succeeded. It can be thought of as a couple of things, first its expansion, second the fact that it "scarfs feeds down" and third... er.. you can print it out, wrap it around your neck and keep warm. Or something.

Anyway now thats out the way heres the rest of the README.

2005-11-20 scarf 0.3b (16k)

2005-04-02 scarf 0.3 (16k)

2005-03-21 scarf 0.2 (16K)