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Replace wget with Prozilla

By cbarrett | June 23, 2007

A quick and simple wget replacement to speed your downloads.
wget has long been a great tool for downloading from the commandline. Its quick, easy to script and very simple. But if you’ve noticed that it can be really slow, you aren’t alone. Here’s how to get all the greatness of wget, with a little added speed.

First, you will need to install prozilla (proz). If you have yum or apt, this should be really easy. I won’t get into the gritty details, but in Fedora Core 5, its in the extras repo.

$ yum -y install proz

$ proz http://ubuntu-releases.cs.umn.edu//6.06/ubuntu-6.06.1-desktop-i386.iso

All Done: Download Successful!

As you can see, it couldn’t be more simple to use this app.

What about scripting it? I won’t get into all the possibilities, but here’s a quick bash trick to download multiple items.

for i in `seq 1 5`
do
proz http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/openSUSE-10.2-Alpha3/iso/openSUSE-10.2-Alpha3-ppc-CD$i.iso
done

It’ll look similar to this when its downloading:

Connection Status Received
1 Downloading 3452.0K of 160425.0K
2 Downloading 3987.8K of 160425.0K
3 Downloading 3426.8K of 160425.0K
4 Downloading 2781.0K of 160425.0K

http://suse.mirrors.tds.net/pub/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.2-Alpha2/iso/SUSE-Li

nux-10.2-Alpha2-i386-CD1.iso
File Size = 641700K
Total bytes received = 13647.6K (2.13%)
Current speed = 1184.27Kb/s, Average D/L speed = 1049.82Kb/s
Time remaining 9 minutes 58 seconds

Resume Supported

Ctrl-R to exit and resume later
Ctrl-X to exit without resuming later
Ctrl-L to repaint the screen

Connect OK!

Whats best, proz supports resume, which to my knowledge, wget does not (don’t scream if I’m wrong here).

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