2.3. Getting Information about paperboy

There are several flags that allow you to get information about your current installation of paperboy. The most important information flag is probably -h (help), this allows you to quickly see what arguments paperboy accepts and what they do (in case you forget and looking at the manpage is too much trouble).


kryptech@debian:~$ paperboy -h
Usage:   paperboy [OPTIONS]
Example: paperboy -f ~/feed.rss -t ~/feed.xsl

File specification:
  -f PATH        path to the XML feed to be parsed
  -o PATH        where to store the output
  -u URL         if given, download this feed and store it in the location
                 specified with -f before parsing
  -t PATH        path to the XSLT stylesheet to apply to the feed
  -x PATH        path to dynamic/shared library with user-defined XSLT functions
  -y PATH        if -x is a bridgework to another language,
                 path to libraries in that language

Operation modes:
  -j             take multiple feeds and join them
  -g             download the feeds and exit, no processing is done ("get-only")
  -G             process the feeds normally, but ignore any URLs ("don't-get")

Miscellaneous:
  -h             display this help and exit
  -v             print verbose informational messages.
  -V             print version information and exit
			

Another important flag is -v, which prints verbose messages. Verbose mode is helpful if you are having a problem and want to get a better idea of what's going wrong. Amongst other additional information, error messages will be provided in an extended format which gives helpful information (from the developer's point of view) for figuring out exactly where things went wrong. Since this information is not useful to the average user, it is normally suppressed. If you are experiencing persistent problems, however, try passing the -v flag so you can give us more information as we try to help resolve them.


wren@fuchikoma:~ $ paperboy -f example.xml
paperboy: A bad argument was passed No XSLT template
wren@fuchikoma:~ $ paperboy -v -f example.xml
paperboy: A bad argument was passed No XSLT template
paperboy: Error #5 in paperboy-main/main.c:163 main()
			

Downloading statistics will also be presented when you enable verbose mode.


kryptech@debian:~/xml$ paperboy -f blogentries.xml -u http://collab.freegeek.org/~wren/rss/blog.rss 
-t tutorial1.xsl -o blogentries.html -v
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  8882  100  8882    0     0   4441      0  0:00:02  0:00:02 --:--:--  5986
			

Finally, the -V flag prints what version of paperboy you are using.


kryptech@debian:~/xml$ paperboy -V
0.6.2+cvs20050712