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

  • By
    CSS vs. JS Animation: Which is Faster?

    How is it possible that JavaScript-based animation has secretly always been as fast — or faster — than CSS transitions? And, how is it possible that Adobe and Google consistently release media-rich mobile sites that rival the performance of native apps? This article serves as a point-by-point...

  • By
    CSS @supports

    Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS.  What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix.  Yuck.  Another thing we...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    9 Incredible CodePen Demos

    CodePen is a treasure trove of incredible demos harnessing the power of client side languages.   The client side is always limited by what browsers provide us but the creativity and cleverness of developers always pushes the boundaries of what we think the front end can do.  Thanks to CSS...

  • By
    MooTools Accordion: Mouseover Style

    Everyone loves the MooTools Accordion plugin but I get a lot of requests from readers asking me how to make each accordion item open when the user hovers over the item instead of making the user click. You have two options: hack the original plugin...

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!