Continue Download with cURL

By  on  

One of the most useful but least talked about utilities a developer has at their disposal is cURL.  The cURL command line utility has been so amazing that Chrome lets you copy requests as cURL from the developer tools Requests panel.  cURL lets you post form data, follow redirects, get response headers, determine redirect URL, check gzip encoding, and much more.

One more awesome feature that cURL has baked in is allowing the developer to continue interrupted downloads.  You can use cURL to download via the -O option:

curl -O https://davidwalsh.name

If that download gets interrupted, you can use the -C - addition to continue the download:

curl -C - -O https://davidwalsh.name

If you remember the 14k modem days, there was nothing worse than starting a download from scratch.  The internet speed is much faster these days but the average download has increased as well, so if you're using cURL, be sure to use this option to avoid fresh downloads!

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Vertically Centering with Flexbox

    Vertically centering sibling child contents is a task we've long needed on the web but has always seemed way more difficult than it should be.  We initially used tables to accomplish the task, then moved on to CSS and JavaScript tricks because table layout was horribly...

  • By
    Create a Brilliant Sprited, CSS-Powered Firefox Animation

    Mozilla recently formally announced Firefox OS and its partners at Mobile World Congress and I couldn't be more excited.  Firefox OS is going to change the lives of people in developing countries, hopefully making a name for itself in the US as well.  The...

Discussion

  1. If you are using wget you can resume a broken download with -c or --continue option.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!