On Tue, 25 Nov 2014, Bj”rn Felten wrote to mark lewis:

 ml> why not detect that in your script with diff or compare?

 BF>    That's what I've been doing for more than two decades now. 8-) 

so what's the problem?

 BF>    A clumsy work-around if you ask me...

clumsy? i view it as much more elegent than other methods... in fact, i've been
switching a lot of my processing over to such methods... for many i also
calculate a md5 and store it in a file so that it can be checked before the
data file is downloaded... if the md5 hasn't changed, the file hasn't changed
and pulling the md5 file is less intensive on the system and the pipeline ;)

)\/(ark