Re: Not sure if the backup failed or is still progressing

[Daniel Staal <DStaal@usa.net>]

--As of May 31, 2013 12:15:54 AM -0500, Ronak Patel is alleged to have said:

> In my short amount of time, I've learned quite a few things on how to
> use the terminal, everything from the basic such as sudo su to the
> intermediate such as the chmod command and -- for me at least -- the
> challengingly unfamiliar, compiling tarsnap from source. It's been a
> very educational experience.
>
> I actually uninstalled tarsnap because I was frustrated with repeatedly
> typing out a modified version of my command to get it to run. After
> receiving your reply, I went and recompiled and installed tarsnap and
> tried out -v. It works just as I had hoped. It turns out that it had
> indeed been running since my account was debited some change after the
> website updated.
>
> Nevertheless, it's running now and I know it's running as I see files
> flashing up the terminal. Thank you for patiently helping me with my
> stupid question.

--As for the rest, it is mine.

No question is stupid if you are honestly looking for an answer.  ;)

It sounds like you are fairly new to UNIX/Linux, so I thought I should 
mention something: the 'quiet by default' is considered good and polite 
behavior for command-line programs.  Not everything follows it, of course, 
but in general a command line program shouldn't output anything it doesn't 
need to: For a command like tarsnap, that means unless it's been asked, it 
shouldn't output anything.  (Which means it's actually 'noisy' in the way 
it normally operates...)  If there are errors, they should go to STDERR 
(which you can see from the terminal), or to syslog, as appropriate. 
STDOUT should be limited to actual data output from the program.

The reason for this is for scripting: A program that puts out extra cruft 
in it's output is hard to put in a script or a pipeline to feed into 
another program.  If all it's putting out is the actual data, then it's 
much easier.

So, in general, a long running command-line program that hasn't put up any 
output is still busy - and a command line program that gave you back the 
prompt has succeeded.  Saying 'I'm done' is rude and inconsiderate - 
someone may be trying to feed that input to another program, and that line 
will mess things up.  Success is silent.  It's only *failure* that should 
be noisy.  (And even then - separate them from data if you can, so the data 
can be processed.)

Daniel T. Staal

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