3 Introduction

Grayupload takes all necessary information from arguments supplied in the command line. In general, these fall into two categories: options, and their arguments.

Option is a letter that begins with a single dash character, or a word that begins with a two dashes. The former form is called short option and the latter long option. If two or more short options are used in a row, they can be clustered, i.e. placed one after another after a single dash character. E.g. -nvr is equivalent to -n -v -r.

Long option names can be supplied in full, or in abbreviated form. Grayupload accepts any non-ambiguous abbreviation.

Some options require one or more arguments. If a long option takes single argument, this argument can be given either as the next word after the option, or together with the option name, delimited from it with a single equals sign: --user foo or --user=foo.

For a short option that takes single argument, the argument can either be given as the next word after the option, or immediately after the option letter, so that -t stable and -tstable are equivalent.

If an option takes multiple arguments, all words that follow it and don’t start with a dash are treated as its arguments. In other words, anything up to the next option or end of command line is collected as option arguments.

A double-dash alone signals end of options. Anything after it is understood as non-option arguments.

Normally, each invocation supplies at least one destination option and a tarball. For example:

grayupload --to download.gnu.org.ua:ftp/bar bar-0.1.tar.gz

Grayupload will form a triplet by creating a detached PGP signature of the tarball and a clearsigned directive file and upload the three files to the server supplied in the destination option (--to, in this example).

If the release tarball already exists on the distribution server, it is an error to try to upload it again. However, if you are really sure you want to replace it with a newly created one, you can do so by supplying the --replace option. Depending on the upload server setup it will either remove the old tarball or move it away to the archive storage prior to the actual upload.