comirror - Generic webcomic mirrorer

comirror [comic url]

comirror "reads" a webcomic while saving the comic images to the current working directory.

comirror takes no options.

Zero if at least one new comic image was downloaded, one if either no images were found or all found images already existed in the current directory. Any other non-zero return value indicates grave errors.

comirror is designed to operate in the current working directory. Images are saved to it; the configuration is read from comirror.conf and the last state (if any) is read from comirror.state.

Both files are formatted in the form key <tab> value with one key-value pair per line. Comments or empty lines are not supported. comirror.state is automatically written when comirror terminates.

A little explanation of the comirror.conf keys. Note that comirror-setup(1) will automatically create this file for you, you only need to edit it if comirror-setup(1) didn't work properly or you don't want to use it at all.

image_re

A regular expression matching the URL of the webcomic image to be saved.

next_link

The text on the link to the next image. Can be left out if it contains "next".

link_to_image

If this is set to a true value, comirror will first try to find a link pointing to image_re and only if that fails look directly for images. This is useful for comics with small-ish preview images which link to larger ones.

The future of this option is unclear, such behaviour may become the default.

You should not need to edit this.

uri

Absolute URI to the last but one comic page comirror was inspecting. Can be overridden by the commandline argument. Exists so that comirror will resume its comic crawl from the right point when it's started again.

comirror requires the perl module WWW::Mechanize

This script has no brain. It has very limited knowledge about the usual layout of a webcomic and makes a few guesses which happen to work in a lot of cases. However, there may well be webcomics which (combined with an unrestrictive image_re) lead comirror to crawling lots of non-comic images. So of course, use at your own risk.

comirror-setup(1)

Copyright (C) 2010 by Daniel Friesel <derf@chaosdorf.de>

  0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.