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
    9 Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos

    As much as developers now loathe Flash, we're still playing a bit of catch up to natively duplicate the animation capabilities that Adobe's old technology provided us.  Of course we have canvas, an awesome technology, one which I highlighted 9 mind-blowing demos.  Another technology available...

  • 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...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS Transforms

    CSS has become more and more powerful over the past few years and CSS transforms are a prime example. CSS transforms allow for sophisticated, powerful transformations of HTML elements.  One or more transformations can be applied to a given element and transforms can even be animated...

  • By
    Advanced CSS Printing – Using JavaScript Double-Click To Remove Unwanted DIVs

    Like any good programmer, I'm constantly searching around the internet for ideas and articles that can help me improve my code. There are thousands of talented programmers out there so I stumble upon some great articles and code snippets that I like to print out...

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!