I’ve been hunting around for a shell script to download the XKCD archives, but pretty much everything I’ve found has either done loads of redundant downloads, required too much interaction, broken on the missing comic #404 or some other issue.

In the end I decided it would be quicker to write something myself. I normally post my shell stuff on http://www.shell-fu.org/, but this is a bit long to go there really, so incase it’s useful to anyone else, I’m posting it here:

To use the script, just change the directory at the top and run. You can re-run the script later on and it will fetch any new comics you’ve not already got (for example it can be run as a weekly cron job).

Any bugs, please let me know in the comments.