Here is something i was looking for the past days. Today i just felt like i had to find out a way. What i needed is a console download manager for RapidShare. And the solution was right in my hands…

I was thinking i had to find a suite to do the job nicely blah-blah. My thought was windows-like. In *nix systems things tend to be simpler. So the solution was just the wget command. It is a standard small programm provided with any linux platform. So what you need to do is similar to:

wget --http-user=myusername --http-password=mypassword file_to_download

So easy… For more options (such as downloading a list of files etc) fiddle with the help page and the man page. Lot’s of info provided.

So next time a linux task comes up… think simple!!

/me out

UPDATE: Here is a bigger list of things to make it a bit more like a download manager:

nohup wget --http-user=myusername --http-password=mypassword --input-file=files.txt --background --directory-prefix=/mnt/data/downloads/ --output-file=/dev/null --limit-rate=160k -c -b &

Ok here is what i did:

1. I started with “nohup” which means that the process will not terminate if you log off (ignore the SIGHUP for experienced users out there).
2. The “–input-file” parameter actually feeds the wget with a file that has all the files i want to download on a new-line seperated file.
3. The “–background” puts the process on the background.
4. The “–directory-prefix” tells wget to store all the files in that folder (“/mnt/data/downloads/” here).
5. The “–limit-rate” adds a limit on the speed of the download (so you can surf the web too).

For the rest just check out the man page. Now why is that a less thing than a download manager?