What does the "#" symbol indicate during file download?

[XanthosGambit]

Several of the files have a "#" symbol by their name instead of a "*". Does this mean the download failed?

[Hrxn]

It means that the file has already been found in the location it's supposed to write to, or that the file is already present in the archive file.

[mikf]

To be a bit more specific:

• * means the file got downloaded
• # means the download got skipped due to the reasons mentioned by Hrxn

The idea was to also have a symbol for failed downloads, but that got replaced with using logging messages.

You should be able to enable colored output by enabling output.ansi and setting output.mode to "color". On Windows it uses simple ASCII characters for compatibility reasons by default.

[XanthosGambit]

If I've deleted previously-downloaded files due to testing my extractor settings, is there a way to regenerate the archive file, so it doesn't have those files stored as "already downloaded?"

Additionally, is there a way to scan a directory for files and add those to the archive?

[mikf]

If I've deleted previously-downloaded files due to testing my extractor settings, is there a way to regenerate the archive file, so it doesn't have those files stored as "already downloaded?"

Not with gallery-dl. You can use some other tools like sqlitebrowser to modify the archive file and delete some entries.

Or you just disable the archive for a moment and re-download your missing files that way (-o archive=). Files already on disk won't get re-downloaded.

Additionally, is there a way to scan a directory for files and add those to the archive?

Also no. Either run gallery-dl with the same URLs another time and let it go through all those files again (#2975), or you manually modify the archive file.