nget Frequently Asked Questions

Index:

1. Why doesn't -G somegroup -r "*.png" work?
2. Whats a regexp? I'm too lazy to read a man page.
3. Whats this "unequal line count" error?
4. I have maxconnections set at 10 but only one article is being downloaded at
a time.  Why?
5. -r with --no-autopar (or things that imply it: -T/-M/-U/-K) still doesn't
match par files.
6. After download, some files have weird names like foo.bar.293874837.283747324


Answers:

1. Why doesn't nget -G somegroup -r "*.png" work?

nget uses regular expressions, not glob style matching.  So what you
really meant was -r ".*\.png" (or really -r "\.png", since regexps aren't 
"anchored" by default.)  For regexp info see grep(1) or regex(7) or if you
are using --with-pcre, see perlre(1).


2. Whats a regexp? I'm too lazy to read the man pages.

Simple description: take your glob expression, replace:
. with \.
? with .
* with .*

See the manpages for more complicated stuff ;)


3. Whats this "unequal line count" error? 

(Starting with nget 0.15, this is only an error if unequal_line_error=1 in
 your .ngetrc.  Otherwise it is just a warning.)

If its always the same difference, its likely that your news server
just counts the lines differently.  You can use the linelenience option
to accept this, the man page has more info but you can add a line like:
linelenience=0,1
to the server section of your .ngetrc (Assuming the server returns 1
above normal)

The main reason this check is in there is to catch any possible download
corruption, but in a case like this its just the server and nget
disagree on the method of counting.  pan most likely just doesn't care
if the line count is different.


4. I have maxconnections set at 10 but only one article is being downloaded at
a time.  Why?

The maxconnections setting allows connections to multiple servers to be left
open simultaneously, so that when retrieving posts that are not all available
on one server, it doesn't have to keep reconnecting each time it needs to
change server.

Support for retrieving multiple articles at once (either from the same server
or seperate ones) is not currently implemented, though it is on my todo.


5. -r with --no-autopar (or things that imply it: -T/-M/-U/-K) still doesn't
match par files.

Order of arguments matters.  These args must appear before the -r/-R in
order for the -r/-R to know not to treat par files specially.


6. After download, some files have weird names like foo.bar.293874837.283747324

When nget downloads an incomplete or broken file, it will change the filename
in order to avoid the dupechecking algorithm thinking you have a correct copy
already.  In addition, when par2 files are present and autopar is on, nget
may purposely download incomplete files even when you don't specify -i, in
order to aquire enough data for par2 to repair the set.