If you spend a bit of time hacking Ruby, you may find this application useful. Downer is a tool I created to scratch a personal itch I have regarding downloading many files at once. You know web pages that have a lot of urls that need to be individually downloaded one at a time? Yeah, I hate those. So I made a general purpose tool I could integrate with existing tools in order to download things in a more automated fashion.

Usage

To use Downer, you first need a list of urls. This url list can be a simple text file where each line contains a url you wish to download. Using the command line, you make the following call:

downer ~/Downloads/some_file.txt ~/Music/new_album

Downer will attempt to retrieve all of the urls and let you know if any fail.

Extending Downer

If you want to use Downer in your own projects, the code base is easy to understand and manipulate. There's also a suite of Rspec tests ready if you want to hack at it. I'm in the process of building a large application which I know will need code from this gem, so I attempted to make it's interface and classes as accessible as possible. Enjoy

Installation

gem install downer

Things I was too lazy to do in this release

• Add support for multi-threading to run many download workers at once
• Create command line flag arguments for accepting url sources other than local files
• Add support for grabbing password-protected urls