Another common feature that mktorrent(1) is lacking is the
support for writing the resulting Bencode'd data to stdout. The
issue is three-fold:
• ‘-’ has no special meaning for ‘--output=’, and thus using
‘--output=-’ results in a file named ‘-’ being created in the
current working directory; (unless such file exists, that is);
• alternatively, ‘--output=/dev/stdout’ (or similar) fails
because of the unconditional use of O_CREAT | O_EXCL (as I've
noted in another report);
• finally, most of the diagnostics (excluding mainly actual
errors) is directed to stdout, although it (arguably) makes
sense to send them to stderr instead.
Please thus consider the two patches MIME'd.
(Note, however, that the resulting code may benefit from an
additional isatty () check.)
For debian/changelog, I'd suggest the following bit:
* Allow output to stdout with "--output=-" (Closes: #XXX). Note that
all the diagnostics (including --verbose) now goes to stderr
unconditionally.
TIA.
PS. Also to note is that as long as the use of mktorrent(1) from Shell
code is considered, writing copyright information upon every
invocation doesn't seem like a particularly clever idea, either.
Perhaps it should be dropped altogether. Or, there could be
--version…