Another console download manager

I mentioned a script yesterday, so I’ll mention another one today — another sort of “download manager” for the console. This isn’t nearly as feature-ful as fttps, but since it approaches the issue in a concise and straightforward way, I thought it worth bringing to attention.

wget-queue.pl claims to be an offshoot of a bash script called wget-queue.sh, but I haven’t had much luck in tracking that down, unless this is what it means. It works in much the same way as I originally envisioned when I thought I was coming up with an original idea, and probably if I had enough skill to put together a program (which I don’t) it would look and behave in the same way as wget-queue.pl.

I’ll let you dig around and see how it works; if it were me I would plant this in a directory somewhere, set up cron to execute it once an hour or so, and keep the list of programs to download somewhere in your home directory. I adjusted it slightly for my system, so that it keeps a “session” directory where the logs and settings are stored, and a “watch” directory where I can manage the list of files to download. I wanted the style to mimic rtorrent, if you must know. I also added an -nv flag to the actual download command, because I foresaw the log file getting rather big.

If I must be terrifically honest, I think blice’s fttps is still a step above this even if it never fully matured. Even in its unfulfilled state fttps has a few more controls and features than wget-queue.pl (and wget-queue.sh, if we can count that one) and while it is worthy of some refinements, I’ll probably stick with it on my machines. The perl script is worth investigating though, if you are curious and capable of tuning it. 😉