DOSAGE

Section: User Commands (1)
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NAME

dosage - a commandline webcomic downloader and archiver  

SYNOPSIS

dosage [options] 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 strip 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). -c, --continue Same as --all, but stop at the first existing image file. Useful for cron jobs that are not executed every day.
-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

Instead of starting at the latest comic strip, an index lets dosage start at a certain strip. The index can be specified by appending a colon : and the index name after the module. Multiple comma-spearated indices can also be specified.

The index name itself usually is the part of the comic strip URL that identifiess a strip, eg. a number or a date. The expected format is documented when using the --modulehelp option.  

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.

dosage -a calvinandhobbes:20120722

On Unix, xargs(1) can download several comic strips in parallel, for example using up to 4 processes:

cd Comics && find . -type d | xargs -n1 -P4 dosage -b . -v
 

ENVIRONMENT

HTTP_PROXY
mainline will use the specified HTTP proxy when downloading URL contents.
 

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

Users can report or view bugs, patches or feature suggestions at https://github.com/wummel/dosage/issues  

AUTHORS

Jonathan Jacobs <korpse@slipgate.za.net>
Tristan Seligmann <mithrandi@slipgate.za.net>
Bastian Kleineidam <bastian.kleineidam@web.de>  

COPYRIGHT

Copyright © 2004-2005 Tristan Seligmann and Jonathan Jacobs
Copyright © 2012-2013 Bastian Kleineidam


 

Index

NAME
SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
OPTIONS
INDEX SYNTAX
SPECIAL SYNTAX
EXAMPLES
ENVIRONMENT
NOTES
RETURN VALUE
BUGS
AUTHORS
COPYRIGHT

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