On 31 Jan 2002 at 9:48, Bruce BrackBill wrote:

> Thanks for your responce Ian.  When I use it without
> --ignore-length option it appears that wget "SOMETIMES" ignores
> the last_modified_date OR wget says to itself ( hey, I see the
> file is older than the local copy, but hey, since the server
> isn't sending me a content_length i'm just going to download it
> again anyway :-).  According the the manual ( as I read it )
> wget should ALWAYS reget the file if it has an empty content
> length ( even though this is undesirable behavior ).

Sorry I ignored the timestamping part of your question. My answer
only addressed the delays you were getting.

It depends on the "SOMETIMES". Can you provide a sample debug
output log (-d) and point out where you think wget is not
behaving like you want it to? Also, you haven't mentioned which
version of wget you are using yet.

Wget should behave exactly the same for --ignore-length as it does
when there is no Content-Length header, and as far as I can see
from the source code, it does. If no Content-Length header was
received, or it was ignored then only the timestamps are compared.

Although the manual says that the Content-Length is used as an
additional check, it fails to mention that that only applies when
the Content-Length header exists and the --ignore-length option has
not been used.

> 2) In the php scripts I send out last_modified_date
> 3) php does not send content_length ( and I don't do it
> either in the script )

In that case, Wget's timestamping retrieval decision is based
solely on the Last-Modified header, regardless of whether you use
--ignore-length or not. A debug log would help confirm this.

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