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