in reply to lwp-download program

There are two basic ways to check whether a file exists before clobbering it. You can use stat or its little cousin -e on the filename before opening, or else you can call sysopen with the O_EXCL flag set and catch the error when the file exists.

As near as I can see, lwp-download is a one-shot program not designed for downloading multiple files. In your wrapper, you could accept a list of urls from the command line and loop through calls to lwp-download. I don't know why you are getting only one getFile() call through unless you are hitting some fatal error in the first call.

Why don't you just call lwp-download through system instead of pasting it into a subroutine? I'm very suspicious of that procedure, there are lots of traps you can trip doing that.

After Compline,
Zaxo

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Re^2: lwp-download program
by pccode (Novice) on May 29, 2005 at 20:24 UTC
    The lwp-download script actually checks for existing files and then prompts you before it overwrites them. Unfortunately that part of the program stopped working in the download subroutine. 
    # Check if the file is already present
          if (-f $file && -t) {
          $shown = 1;
          print "Overwrite $file? [y] ";
          my $ans = <STDIN>;
          unless (defined($ans) && $ans =~ /^y?\n/)                   
+           {
              if (defined $ans) {
              print "Ok, aborting.\n";
              }
              else {
              print "\nAborting.\n";
              }
              exit 1;
          }
          $shown = 0;
          }
          else {
          print "Saving to '$file'...\n";
          }

    [download]
    I will try your suggestion to use system instead of the subroutine.
[reply]
[d/l]
      The system function solves the problem. Thanks.
[reply]

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