Re: [Bug-wget] Feature: Disabling progress bar when wget is backgrounded

[Darshit Shah]

On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 1:16 PM, Tim Ruehsen <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi Darshit,
>
>> 1. The point of the --show-progress switch is to override all other
>> settings and display a progress bar on screen. This patch does not
>> take into consideration the --show-progress switch.
>
> If I background wget, I definitely do not want to see a progress bar any more,
> no matter if --show-progress bar is on or not (e.g. when the switch in ON via
> wgetrc). Maybe it's a matter of taste - but I can't see any use in the
> combination 'background' + 'progress=on'. Not sure if anyone expects this - at
> least the docs should state this clear, e.g. "This option will force progress
> output even when you background the process".
>
You're right. When Wget is backgrounded, maybe we do not want the
progress bar to be visible.

However, as Giuseppe mentioned in the other thread, leaving the
progress bar on is a great way for users to realize that they've made
a mistake in copying the URL which needs to be double quoted. Even I
do frequently rely on this behaviour to realize such a mistake. Hence,
I'm not too keen on changing the existing behaviour.

If we do want to make this change, there's other cases to look into
too. What happens when Wget is recursively downloading a website and
the instance is backgrounded? We won't see the progress bar then, but
Wget will still spew all the verbose output to stderr between file
transfers. We should also consider muting all of that.
Then the bahviour of Wget should be similar to when it is invoked with
the -b option. Redirect stderr to a file called wget-log and prevent
writing anything to the screen.

Also, the proposed patch places the test in display_progress(), which
is invoked every second. Maybe we can make use of the SIGCONT signal
to decide whether to draw the progress bar or not?
> Regards, Tim
>



-- 
Thanking You,
Darshit Shah