DOSAGE

Section: User Commands (1)
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NAME

dosage - comic strip downloader

SYNOPSIS

dosage [options] module [module...]

DESCRIPTION

dosage is an application designed to keep a local 'mirror' of specific web comics and other picture-based content, such as 'Picture Of The Day' sites, with a variety of options for updating and maintaining collections.

OPTIONS

-b PATH, --basepath=PATH: Specifies a base path to put comic subdirectories. The default is 'Comics'.
--baseurl=PATH: Specifies the base URL for output events. The default is a local file URI.
-a, --all: Traverses all available strips backwards from the current one. This can be useful you want a full collection of a new comic strip, or update an existing one where files are missing. Catchups can start at a specific image by using the index syntax, see the INDEX SYNTAX and SPECIAL SYNTAX sections for more information. This is useful when you missed some days and want only to download the missing files. To make this task easy, the traversal ends at the first existing image file when starting from an index (excluding the index itself).
-h, --help: Output brief help information.
-l, --list: List available comic modules in multi-column fashion.
--singlelist: List available comic modules in single-column fashion.
-m MODULE, --modulehelp=MODULE: Output module-specific help for MODULE.
-o OUTPUT, --output=OUTPUT: OUTPUT may be any one of the following:

: html - Writes out an HTML file linking to the strips actually downloaded in the current run, named by date (ala dailystrips). The files can be found in the 'html' directory of your Comics directory.

: rss - Writes out an RSS feed detailing what strips were downloaded in the last 24 hours. The feed can be found in Comics/dailydose.xml.

: rss - Writes an RSS feed with all of the strips downloaded during the run, for use with your favourite RSS aggregator.

-t, --timestamps: Print timestamps for all output at any level.
-v, --verbose: Increase the output level by one with each occurence.
-V, --version: Display the version number. module At least one valid module must be specified. A list of valid modules can be found by passing the -l option. Multiple module arguments can be specified on the command line. Module names are case insensitive, and it is sufficient to specify a unique substring of the module name.

INDEX SYNTAX

One can indicate the start of a list of comma seperated indices using a ':'.

The index format is documented when using the --modulehelp option. An alternative method is to use an existing filename as index, since images are always stored in index format.

OFFENSIVE COMICS

Some users may find certain comics offensive and wish to disable them. Modules listed in /etc/dosage/disabled and ~/.dosage/disabled will be disabled. These files should contain only one module name per line.

SPECIAL SYNTAX

@: This expands to mean all the comics currently in your 'Comics' directory. All other specified comic module names will be ignored.
@@: This expands to mean all the comics available to Dosage.

INDEX SYNTAX can not be used with SPECIAL SYNTAX

EXAMPLES

Retrieve all Mega Tokyo comics:

: dosage -a megatokyo

Retrieve the current comic of Cyanide and Happiness:

: dosage cyanideandhappiness

Retrieve the current strip of all comics in your 'Comics' directory:

: dosage @

Retrieve the current strip of every comic that there is a module for:

: dosage @@

Retrieve the Penny Arcade strip for a given index:

: dosage pennyarcade:2004-07-22

Retrieve Calvin and Hobbes strips from a given index going backwards to the beginning until an existing file is found:

: dosage -c calvinandhobbes:20120722

ENVIRONMENT

HTTP_PROXY: mainline will use the specified HTTP proxy whenever possible.

NOTES

Should retrieval fail on any given strip mainline will attempt to retry. However the retry information is only outputted in the second and successive output levels.

At the time of writing, a complete Dosage collection weighs in at around 3.0GB.

RETURN VALUE

The return value greater than zero when

•: a program error occurred.
•: comics could not be found or downloaded
•: the program run was aborted with Ctrl-C

Else the return value is zero.

BUGS

See http://trac.slipgate.za.net/dosage for a list of current development tasks and suggestions.

FILES

/etc/dosage/disabled: Disables comic modules on a global scale.
~/.dosage/disabled: Disables comic modules on a local scale.

AUTHORS

Jonathan Jacobs <korpse@slipgate.za.net>
Tristan Seligmann <mithrandi@slipgate.za.net>
Bastian Kleineidam <calvin@users.sourceforge.net>

COPYRIGHT

This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.