Question

I’m trying to mirror files on FTP server. Those files can be very large so downloads might be interrupted. I’d like to keep the original files while downloading partial files to a temporary folder and once completed override local older versions.

1. Can I do this? how?
2. Is there another easy to use (command line) tool that I can use?

Answer 1

Looking at the wget manual I can’t see this functionality, however you could write a bash script to do what you want, which would essentially run an individual wget for each file then move it using normal mv command.

Alternativly have a look at rsync according to the manual there is a paramater that sets a temp dir

-T  --temp-dir=DIR          create temporary files in directory DIR 

I am not 100% sure wheather this is where it puts the files during downloads as not had chance to try it out.