Opkg: find multiple package sizes?

[OneCD]

Hello, first time posting here.

I'm not sure I'm in the right place to ask questions about opkg. If not, please advise me where the correct forum is.

I'm using opkg via Entware on a QNAP NAS. I've written a wrapper shell-script that automatically downloads and installs particular IPKGs depending on the end-user's environment.

Question: does anyone know of a way to find the sizes of multiple specific IPKGs?

I presently have a list of IPKGs to download. In order to implement a progress display of package downloading, I need to know the total size of all IPKGs to be downloaded before I start.

So, I query opkg via the info option - one package at a time. This is quite slow. I'd like to be able to ask about multiple packages at-once.

Any ideas?

I'm currently working on forking multiple instances of opkg. Each one will get the size of a particular IPKG. But, this is becoming quite ugly, as opkg appears designed to prohibit multiple instances.

I'm hoping there is a supported method to obtain the size of multiple packages, without needing to resort to such hackery.

Thank you.

[OneCD]

follow-up: after some searching, found that I can access the opkg package list file directly [/opt/var/opkg-lists/entware].

So, I can now grep it for package sizes, which should be faster than querying opkg multiple times.

Cheers!