On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 1:48 PM, David P. Caldwell < da...@code.davidpcaldwell.com> wrote:
> I have a small program that downloads and installs an arbitrary > version of Tomcat, using the API provided by Apache to select the > proper mirror, and so forth. > > The script currently takes the Tomcat version as an argument. My > script provides a default (which in my case is the latest version of > Tomcat 7), but I have to manually update that default whenever I > notice a new version has been released. > > What would be the best way for the script itself to determine the > latest available version? Obviously I would give points for "easy" and > points for "robust," knowing that those two things might be in > conflict. > > I can think of many horrifying ways to do it: > > * loop through integers starting with the last known version, > attempting to download 7.0.x, until getting a 404 > * scraping and parsing the HTML at > http://archive.apache.org/dist/tomcat/tomcat-7/, which I expect is > rather stable > I did this recently for Tomcat 8. Here's the command I used, which works on my Mac. LATEST_VERSION=$(curl -s http://tomcat.apache.org/download-80.cgi | grep "<h3 id=\"8.0." | xpath '/h3/text()' 2>/dev/null) A slight variation works on Ubuntu if you install xpath. LATEST_VERSION=$(curl -s http://tomcat.apache.org/download-80.cgi | grep "<h3 id=\"8.0." | xpath -e '/h3/text()' 2>/dev/null) I'm sure there are other ways to do it, this was just the first one I put together that worked for me. Dan So my challenge isn't coming up with *a* way to do it, but coming up > with the best way. > > Suggestions? > > -- David P. Caldwell > http://www.davidpcaldwell.com/ > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tomcat.apache.org > >
