Re: [Bug-wget] [bug #45790] wget prints it's progress even when background

[Giuseppe Scrivano]

Darshit Shah <address@hidden> writes:

> This affects an invokation using the shell's background operator (&) too.
>
> E.g.: wget 
> http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/multi-arch/iso-cd/debian-8.1.0-amd64-i386-netinst.iso
> &
> will cause the logging output and progress bar to be displayed on the
> terminal as explained in the bug report.
>
> However, I am not willing to fix that behaviour. A huge number of
> people copy URLs and paste them in their terminals for Wget to
> download without double-quoting them. A large number of these URLs
> have the "&" character which causes the shell to background the
> process. They tend to realise that something went wrong when the
> screen is garbled by a background process spewing messages to stdout
> and stderr. If this behaviour is changed, many people won't realise
> their error and un-necessarily invoke multiple instances of
> backgrounded Wget processes, eventually coming back here with new bug
> reports.
>
> The bahviour has remained so for a long time and I'm inclined to
> retain the status quo.

I agree with you here, the behavior should not be changed.  It would be
a bug if wget stops reporting errors when resumed.

Regards,
Giuseppe