darwis059 / axel

Web retrieval tool

This fork adds multiple connections incremental downloading to axel.

It's based on "reactivation" branch of Emir Habul.

Instead of downloading the file in big chunks (the default), it has the following strategy:

• it downloads the file in small chunks, 5 megabytes or smaller
• starting from beggining of the file

Why is this useful ?

Some files like videos could be played before the download is finished we just need to adopt a correct chunk-cutting strategy. It's exactly what axel-incremental-downloading is doing.

Now you don't need to wait for a video to finish to download, you can start watching it directly.

Testing

I downloaded on a 700 meg file from a remote host, the hash matched the original file. Testing platform: MacOSX

Building on MacOSX

./configure --prefix=/opt/local --i18n=1 make -j8 -w all CFLAGS="-O2 -arch x86_64 -I/opt/local/include" LFLAGS="-L/opt/local/lib -lintl -liconv"

Author

Nicolae Namolovan

Feel free to fork and improve.