If curl is asked to continue from where it left off, and the file was
already correctly downloaded, it exits with a result code of 18. This
would be OK I guess if the 18 were used only for this situation, but
apparently it is used for other situations.

I suggest that curl should exit with status 0 if the file is already
downloaded correctly.

I presume that curl doesn't just look for the count of bytes in the
file it's resuming but instead actually verifies that those bytes are
correct.

Below is a shell transcript. My prompt uses two numbers:
  * result of previous command
  * history number

Dave

0 413 Z% curl --continue-at - -O
http://bits.netbeans.org/dev/nightly/latest/zip/moduleclusters/netbeans-trunk-nightly-200808010201-identity.zip
   % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
                                  Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 303k 100 303k 0 0 142k 0 0:00:02 0:00:02 --:--:-- 153k
0 414 Z% curl --continue-at - -O
http://bits.netbeans.org/dev/nightly/latest/zip/moduleclusters/netbeans-trunk-nightly-200808010201-identity.zip
** Resuming transfer from byte position 311089
   % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
                                  Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
   0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 0
curl: (18) transfer closed with outstanding read data remaining
18 415 Z%

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Received on 2008-08-02