[headbirth]

Can anyone suggest a method for checking on whether a site has been updated via the commandline?

[rwhiffen]

The curl util will do that for you:
http://curl.haxx.se/ is where you can D/L it. There's a binary version for Mac OS X so you dont' have to compile it yourself. It's also in fink, probably darwin ports too.

Once you have it installed, You can do something like:

[rwhiffen:~] rwhiffen% curl -I http://whiffen.org
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 09 Aug 2005 13:57:03 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 mod_ssl/2.8.22 OpenSSL/0.9.7d PowWeb/1.1
Last-Modified: Mon, 08 Aug 2005 03:05:06 GMT
ETag: "305aeb1-167d-42f6cbe2"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 5757
Content-Type: text/html

[rwhiffen:~] rwhiffen%

You can use grep to get just the line you need:
[rwhiffen:~] rwhiffen% curl -sI http://whiffen.org | grep "Last-Modified"
Last-Modified: Mon, 08 Aug 2005 03:05:06 GMT
[rwhiffen:~] rwhiffen%

Further, cut can be used to trim it even more:
[rwhiffen:~] rwhiffen% curl -sI http://whiffen.org | grep "Last-Modified" | cut -b16-80
Mon, 08 Aug 2005 03:05:06 GMT
[rwhiffen:~] rwhiffen%

You can assign that to a variable if you need to:
[rwhiffen:~] rwhiffen% setenv LAST_MOD `curl -sI http://whiffen.org | grep "Last-Modified" | cut -b16-80`
[rwhiffen:~] rwhiffen% echo $LAST_MOD
Mon, 08 Aug 2005 03:05:06 GMT
[rwhiffen:~] rwhiffen%

The ` is the quote above the tab key with the ~ char.

Cheers,

Rich

[rwhiffen]

After reading the question again, I think it might be simpler to do

curl -z <time> http://some-url

From the curl manual:
TIME CONDITIONS

HTTP allows a client to specify a time condition for the document it
requests. It is If-Modified-Since or If-Unmodified-Since. Curl allow you to
specify them with the -z/--time-cond flag.

For example, you can easily make a download that only gets performed if the
remote file is newer than a local copy. It would be made like:

curl -z local.html http://remote.server.com/remote.html

Or you can download a file only if the local file is newer than the remote
one. Do this by prepending the date string with a '-', as in:

curl -z -local.html http://remote.server.com/remote.html

You can specify a "free text" date as condition. Tell curl to only download
the file if it was updated since yesterday:

curl -z yesterday http://remote.server.com/remote.html

Curl will then accept a wide range of date formats. You always make the date
check the other way around by prepending it with a dash '-'.



One of these two will probably do what you want.

Rich

[headbirth]

Thanks ... I think curl is already installed in X isn't it??? I do have wget installed, off-hand do you know if it could check for an update?