wgetbm-announce Mailing List for Wget background download manager

SourceForge Headquarters 225 Broadway Suite 1600 San Diego, CA 92101 +1 (858) 454-5900

Wbm 1.2 has been finished finally!

Download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/wgetbm/files/wbm-1.2.tar/download

Note, that you can also run setup.sh to upgrade a Wbm 1.1 installation. 
The seven new config variables will then be added to your existing wbm.cfg.

There main changes are:

1. Auto-reloading wbm
2. Stopping downloads when wbm is aborted
3. New command 'show downloadtable'
4. Displaying the ETA of downloads
5. Changing to a download directory
6. File name character decoding
7. An audible warning before shutdown

1. Auto-reloading wbm

Wbm.sh now by default reloads the download table (and may perform 
necessary operations on downloads). So the function of the 
wbm-autorun.sh is now fully implemented in wbm.sh and is thus not longer 
provided in the tarball. How often wbm reloads depends on the value of 
the variable auto_reload_interval. Valid values for this variable are 
integers or decimals followed my an 's' or 'm' (seconds, minutes). For 
example, "15s", "42.7s", "1m", "1.5m". Such a value can also be passed 
as an argument to wbm.sh. This will change the variable value for the 
current and future wbm executions.

2. Stopping downloads when wbm is aborted

There is a new variable active_downloads_status_after_script_abort which 
is set to 'stop' by default. This causes wbm to stop active downloads if 
wbm is aborted by pressing CTRL-C. This resembles more the behaviour of 
a 'normal' download manager where downloads are stopped when the program 
is exited. If the variable is set to 'wait' the active downloads will 
automatically be started the next time you run wbm.

3. New command 'show downloadtable'

This will just show the current state of the download table. This may be 
handy sometimes to have a quick look at the table without having wbm to 
start waiting downloads.

4. Displaying the ETA of downloads

The download table now optionally shows the estimated remaining download 
time (ETA) of active downloads. However, this only works with Wget >= 
1.11. The ETA display is controlled by two variables:

  1. show_download_eta (true, false or auto)

If it's set to "auto", wbm (tries to) figure out the Wget version and 
displays the ETA if Wget is >= 1.11.

  2. show_eta_column_always (true or false)

If false, the ETA column is not shown if there are no active downloads. 
This variable only If true, the ETA column is also shown if there are no 
active downloads. Note, that this variable is

Note, that if you update wbm using setup.sh the new variables will be 
inserted in your existing wbm.cfg.

5. Changing to a download directory

You can go to a directory of a download by typing ". wbm.sh cd NUMBER". 
Note the dot at the beginning. This will cause Bash to run the script in 
the current shell context. If you don't supply the dot, the current 
directory of your shell cannot be changed. Unfortunately, if you invoke 
wbm in this way you can't use aliases. For example, if 'w' is an alias 
then ". w cd 3" doesn't work. However, you can solve this problem by 
creating a link to wbm.sh (ln -s wbm.sh w). But note, that there is a 
little caveat in this case as there is also a 'w' command in /usr/bin. 
So you have to take care that the directory path of the wbm-link appears 
before that of the 'w' command in the PATH variable.

6. File name character decoding

Until now, wbm decoded only the percentage-encoded space character (%20) 
in the file name of a URL. For example, if you added the URL 
http://example.com/hello%20world.txt, wbm decoded the file name 
"hello%20world.txt" to "hello world.txt" and saved it in the 
downloads.csv from where it is retrieved when the download table is 
displayed. In wbm 1.2 this character decoding is extended to all 
characters (that are encoded in UTF-8 format). Note, that this character 
decoding is only used by wbm to display the file names in the downloads 
table. If wget starts a download it will decode the encoded characters 
by itself before it creates the actual download file. Note that wget can 
also decode ISO 8859-1 encoded characters.

7. Audible warning before shutdown

If the new boolean variable audible_warn_before_shutdown is set to 
"true", there will be a audible warning every 10 seconds before the 
system is halted. Note that this also changed the valid values for 
auto_shutdown_wait_time which are now only whole numbers that determine 
the wait time in seconds.

If you don't hear the beeps this is probably not a bug of wbm but rather 
most likely a problem of your Linux distro that disabled the speaker 
output. For example, Ubuntu users may be affected by this. To reactivate 
the speaker you can try several things:

  - remove or comment out the pcspkr module in
    /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
  - unmute / turn up volume of the PC Speaker/Beep in alsamixer
  - type 'xset b on'

The first two steps mitigated the problem on my Ubuntu Lucid. That means 
that the beeps work with user root. This is actually sufficient as only 
root is allowed to halt the system anyway. Another possibility is to 
install the 'beep' tool. Wbm will use it instead of the echo command if 
it's present.

wgetbm-announce Mailing List for Wget background download manager

wgetbm-announce — New releases will be announced in this list