in reply to Downloading a range of sequential files

I have a script exactly like this. It was one of my Very First Perl Scripts Ever (tm). I called it... wait for it... urlrange. :) One thing you might want to add is a way to specify the precision of numbers in the range. Your automagic precision detection will work in most cases, but occasionally it's nice to be able to specify.

Also, you might want to make a way to specify a suffix, rather than one being automatically determined. My script takes it's args as prefix first last suffix. So if I had http://blah.com/file01-blah.txt ..., I would run: urlrange http://www.blah.com/file0 1 5 -blah.txt.

Hopefully you will find this useful.

Update: you can look at my version at my website.

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Re^2: Downloading a range of sequential files
by Ionizor (Pilgrim) on Aug 06, 2003 at 22:42 UTC

    Specifying precision - good idea. Thanks!

    As far as suffix being automatically determined, what I had didn't actually work very well since any file that didn't end in a number would cause a script error. I've since added in automatic detection and a die to gracefully catch non-numeric filenames. Most of the files I'm listing end in numbers anyway, so it wasn't that big a problem for me. Eventually I'm planning to implement a switch (--activenumber="3" or something like that) that allows me to specify the number to increment / decrement (in case of filenames like "results-2000-01-25-final.html").

    One of my design goals with this was to make it as automagic as possible - I'm lazy so I want to be able to just copy and paste the URLs, add parameters to the end and hit enter.

    --
    Grant me the wisdom to shut my mouth when I don't know what I'm talking about.

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      Note that my paramater order was designed to be done as lazily as possible too. Using your example, say I had the url http://foobar.com/results-2000-01-25-final.html and I wanted to get 2000-01-25 through 2000-01-28. My sequence of operations would go something like so.

      First I would type the command:

      wget `urlrange `

      Then paste the url:

      wget `urlrange http://foobar.com/results-2000-01-25-final.html`

      And finally all I have to do is move my cursor over to the 25, add a space before and after, and put the last digit of my range. My result would be something like:

      wget `urlrange http://foobar.com/results-2000-01- 25 28 -final.html`

      Which, I would say, is about as lazy as it can get (in terms of number of keystrokes). But... to each his own, I suppose. Your interface seems to work fine for you.

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        Cursoring around in shell windows makes me insane. Heh...

        --
        Grant me the wisdom to shut my mouth when I don't know what I'm talking about.

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