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Listings and posts

Walk a subreddit by any sort, page through it, and fetch individual posts by id or URL.

A subreddit listing is the bread and butter of Reddit, and posts reads it the way the site does: pick a sort, pick a time window, and page through as deep as you want.

Listing a subreddit

reddit posts golang

That is r/golang's hot listing. The argument is forgiving: golang, r/golang, /r/golang, or a full subreddit URL all work. Sort it like the site:

reddit posts golang --sort new
reddit posts golang --sort top --time week
reddit posts golang --sort controversial --time all

--sort takes hot, new, top, rising, or controversial. --time applies to top and controversial and takes hour, day, week, month, year, or all.

More than one subreddit

posts takes several subreddits at once and concatenates the results:

reddit posts golang rust zig -o json

When one of several fails (a private or banned community, say), reddit notes it on stderr and carries on with the rest, so one bad name does not sink the batch.

Paging deeper

A listing page holds up to 100 posts. Two flags go past that:

  • -n, --limit caps the total number of posts. Ask for more than one page worth and reddit walks the after cursor for you.
  • --pages sets how many pages to walk explicitly (0 means until the limit is met or the listing runs out).
reddit posts golang --sort top --time year -n 500     # walks ~5 pages
reddit posts golang --pages 3                          # exactly 3 pages

reddit stays polite between pages: the global --delay applies to each request.

Fetching one post

post fetches the link itself (without its comments) by id or URL:

reddit post 1abc23
reddit post https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/1abc23/title/

It takes several ids or URLs at once, same as posts. For the discussion under a post, use comments.

Useful fields

A post record carries the id and full name, the subreddit, the title and author, the score and upvote ratio, the comment count, the created and edited timestamps, the URL and permalink, the domain, the flair, and the self/over-18 flags. It also carries the media URL for a video post, the source URL of the first preview image, the gallery image URLs, and the archived/pinned/original-content flags. Narrow to what you need with --fields:

reddit posts golang --sort top --fields title,score,num_comments,permalink

See output formats for the full set of renderers.

2 min read