Sho Fukamachi Online

Don’t you just love these little things, so impossible in the past, but which save so much time?

I remember at times in the past I wanted to download a whole sequence of files, of whatever type, saved in a known location but named in a numerical sequence. I remember what I’d do, I’d resort to any of a number of methods – from the simplest, dumbest technique of simply going to each URL by hand and manually downloading what was there, using cut and paste to load “components” of the URL into download managers, using Microsoft Excel to generate an incrementing URL list, and finally the bluntest weapon of them all – brute force wget.

Isn’t it so much nicer to just be able to do this:

# wget.rb
i = 1
100.times do
  puts 'http://www.example.com/files/path/filename' + i.to_s + '.ext'
  i = i+1
end

then ruby wget.rb > wget.txt
and finally pipe it into wget ..

FINISHED –03:42:35–
Downloaded: 317,666,256 bytes in 179 files

Start to finish: under 10 minutes.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 3rd, 2006 at 3:44 am and is filed under programming, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.