Using xmlstarlet to retrieve latest Drupal version number

I'm working on a script to be able to setup a complete new drupal installation.

Apart from setting up the default project structure in our subversion tree
/trunk/db/
/trunk/docs/
/trunk/files/
/trunk/www/

and using a local subdomain like http://localhost.krimson for each project

i was also looking for a simple way to download and install the latest drupal version from the commandline.

We all know that you can query http://updates.drupal.org/release-history/drupal/6.x to get a complete release version history of the drupal project. The task now was to be able to grab the latest version from that XML.

Hurray, hurray.. thanks to bashcurescancer.com/the-best-in-command-line-xml-xmlstarlet i learned that xmlstarlet would do the trick for me.

I installed the latest xmlstarlet lib using

sudo apt-get install xmlstarlet

and than i ran

curl -s 'http://updates.drupal.org/release-history/drupal/6.x' | xmlstarlet sel -t -m '//releases/release[1]/version' -v '.' 6.x

which returned the simple answer

6.6

I love those open source tools!