-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 (Not Cc'ing Gerard, as I'm not sure he wants to be included in this tangent.)
Tony Lewis wrote: >> Unfortunately, at least as far as I can tell, wget does not issue an >> exit code if it has downloaded a newer file. > > Better exit codes is on the wish list. > >> It would really be nice though if wget simply issued an exit code if >> an updated file were downloaded. > > Yes, it would. I don't think this is what the exit codes differentiation will handle: Wget really ought to exit with zero status for all success cases. The Unix idiom is that 0 is success, anything else is a failure of some sort; so while it would certainly be handy to differentiate between various types of success, there isn't really a way to do that appropriately. The exception is that Unix tools will often issue a non-zero exit status for "I didn't have to do anything"; so a -N on a file that didn't have to be downloaded might result in non-zero, giving that differentiation we needed. However, an important question would be, what should Wget do for multi-file downloads, where either multiple files were specified on the command-line, or it's running in recursive-retrieval mode? Say you specified three files with -N, one needed downloading, one didn't, and the other was a 404? I'm thinking, perhaps more important than different exit codes (which will still be useful for some circumstances: single-file downloads, spidering, serious failures, I/O and allocation problems), strictly-defined program-parseable output formats may be more useful. Something which, for each file, specifies the results plainly. This could become even more important when we support multiple simultaneous download streams: we'll want to output parseable updates on each chunk of downloaded file we retrieve, so we can communicate to (say) a GUI wrapper as the different streams are running. You'd probably want to specifically ask for logging in this format, as it's liable to be less user-friendly than the current output formats (who wants to read, during a multi-stream fetch, an endless series of "file `index.html': got bytes 4096-5120" lines?). - -- Micah J. Cowan Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer... http://micah.cowan.name/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFG9WTL7M8hyUobTrERCNP1AJ9igD3zejm34VBlEIyIdx83Q0V9pgCfd0tW ax1u6l9uaapCZREZHQljep8= =08dv -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
