I just discovered this morning this cool utility in my /bin directory : xmllint

You can use it to extract values from your xml files within your shell scripts

$ cat foo.xml
<emplist>
  <emp no="1">
    <ename>John</ename>
  </emp>
  <emp no="2">
    <ename>Jack</ename>
  </emp>
</emplist>
$ echo 'cat //emplist/emp[@no="1"]/ename/text()'|
  xmllint --shell foo.xml |
  sed -n 3p
John

I like this !