Question

I realize that this question is not unlike asking someone for the name of a song one cannot remember anything about except that one liked it. Sorry, but it bugs me just like such a song.

A while back I came across some command line tool that prepares a file in order to allow one to resume aborted downloads. If I remember correctly it is quite an old tool and essentially it generated a second file which includes something like block info of the original one. The generated file is small and made available for download. One can then fetch the actual file using this meta file and can resume broken downloads (so, it is bit like a .torrent except not for p2p.)

Does anyone know the name of this command, please? If so, does it still make sense to use it or is rsync a better option?

Thanks,
HC

Answer 1

I’ll hum you a few melodies, just nod when you recognize the one:

Did you mean metalink?

Did you mean jigdo?

Did you mean par2?

However, you can use a large number of tools, among which

• wget -c
• aria2c
• axel

I have a slight association with metalink/jigdo from your description

Most of these tools have other means to optimize download speed as well (automatic mirror searching, e.g.)