Newpods is a small, fairly simple bash script that can help you sync podcasts that you've recently downloaded to your portable device. If you're tired of copying files by hand, but don't want to use a heavyweight GUI solution, newpods might be right for you. The only thing you need to run newpods is the newpods script itself. You can also download the whole project, if you want to see the license file and other ancillary material.
Newpods will look through a directory tree to find podcasts that have been downloaded since the last time the program was run. It will then insert two commands into the bash history list: one to pushd to the podcast directory on your portable device, so you can clean out old files as needed, and one to copy the new podcasts to your portable device. See the Screenshot page for a typical run. The User Guide contains much information on running the script.
This script should run correctly on Linux, Mac OS X, *BSD, and (probably) Cygwin. If it doesn't, let me know and I'll fix it. It should also correctly handle file and directory names that contain whitespace.
Newpods started out, as so many projects do, as a simple, short, shell script. It should have grown into a Perl or Python program, but it turned into something of a bash exercise in how to pass information from a subshell to its parent, and how to run a sourced script without any unwanted side effects.