[mdlug] Evil URLs at OpenSuSE

[Raymond McLaughlin]

MDLUGers:

Maybe this usage has been around a while and I just haven't noticed, but
this week I did notice, urls like this:
<http://software.opensuse.org/download/X11:/xfce/SUSE_Linux_10.0/i586/>
The evil bit seems to be the inclusion of the colon ':' in the directory
name.

This is the url of a directory containing about 50 files, all of which I
wanted to download. I gave this url to "wget -r" and then the fun began.
In stead of just pulling the directory and its 50 or so files wget went
crazy downloading hundreds of files from a half dozen servers. Not just
the i586 files, but also the noarch files (which I did happen to want),
the src files, the x86_64 files... It looked like it was going to
recurse to the whole internet if I let it.

I'm not sure if the colon character caused the wget problem, but it sure
broke some of the scripts that I use for file management! Is this some
new usage I'm not aware of? It seems just plain wrong to me.

Anyone else run into this?

Raymond McLaughlin