webcheck -q not silent

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I am now convinced that there are also other problems with the way webcheck interprets options presented to it.

The --yank=PATTERN doesn't seem to work reliably. The man page says it accepts perl-type regular expressions, but I have been unable to find anything that works to exclude all URLs starting with /

It seems that the simplest of regular expressions (i.e. literal strings) will work, as with the example on the manpage, but that metacharacters and character classes do not work.

/[b] works, /[bcd] works for URLs starting with /b or /c or /d, even though these don't match the full URL as the manpage requires, but /[a-z] doesn't

^/.*$ seems to work with egrep but doesn't work with webcheck. It's all very confusing

It is clearer if you file separate bugs for separate issues. Anyway, regarding the -q option not working. What output are you seeing? I think there may be some debugging info left over from development. You should be able to comment out the line containing
  conn.set_debuglevel
in schemes/http.py without ill effects.

Regarding the second problem. The patterns are matched against the full URL (see the manual page), therefore no URL starts with a / (most start with http://, https:// or something similar). Perhaps what you are looking for is something like this:
  --yank='^https?://[a-z0-9A-Z]*/$'

Hope this helps.

Oops, there was a dot missing from the regular expression, it should read:
  --yank='^https?://[a-z0-9A-Z.]*/$'

This bug was fixed in the package webcheck - 1.10.4

---------------
webcheck (1.10.4) unstable; urgency=low

  * switch to source format 3.0 (native)
  * remove some left-over debuging code (LP: #401050)
  * remove old /etc/webcheck removal code
  * upgrade to standards-version 3.9.1 (no changes needed)
  * several small bugfixes which more or less drop support for Python 2.3
  * limit list of "referenced from" to 10 items
  * pass char_encoding option to tidy to fix some tidy-related errors
  * add a Referer header if possible (thanks Devin Bayer)
 -- Ubuntu Archive Auto-Sync <email address hidden> Fri, 15 Oct 2010 10:05:35 +0000