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
    Create a CSS Cube

    CSS cubes really showcase what CSS has become over the years, evolving from simple color and dimension directives to a language capable of creating deep, creative visuals.  Add animation and you've got something really neat.  Unfortunately each CSS cube tutorial I've read is a bit...

  • By
    How to Create a RetroPie on Raspberry Pi – Graphical Guide

    Today we get to play amazing games on our super powered game consoles, PCs, VR headsets, and even mobile devices.  While I enjoy playing new games these days, I do long for the retro gaming systems I had when I was a kid: the original Nintendo...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create a Simple Dojo Accordion

    Let's be honest:  even though we all giggle about how cheap of a thrill JavaScript accordions have become on the web, they remain an effective, useful widget.  Lots of content, small amount of space.  Dojo's Dijit library provides an incredibly simply method by which you can...

  • By
    Telephone Link Protocol

    We've always been able to create links with protocols other than the usual HTTP, like mailto, skype, irc ,and more;  they're an excellent convenience to visitors.  With mobile phone browsers having become infinitely more usable, we can now extend that convenience to phone numbers: The tel...

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!