More than three years later, and this is still a good example of doing a loop in bash, but not an ideal solution for mass downloads.

Sorry to re-burst your bubble, but if i wanted to download all the MP3’s on a site i’d do:

wget -r -N -A.mp3 http://somesite.com/mp3s/

Nick was right, wget does it better.

But bash is still cool….

I don’t have a bubble to burst. I got tired of reinflating it and just let it go.

I’m very familiar with wget and fully understand it’s capabilities and limitations. The recursive option is great if you want to actually mirror a site or a page, but not so handy if all you want are the MP3s on that one page.

When I’m leeching files I just open a terminal, run a wget loop that reads from stdin, then just paste any urls I want to fetch into the terminal. It’s the poor man’s download manager and it serializes the downloads so it’ll have a minimal impact on the network.

Now assume the server limits you to just 4 connections. You’ll have to wait for the first to finish before you can even start the 5th.

I’m fully aware of the download option. If you read the second paragraph of the article you will see that I indicate it’s tedious, not impossible.

Why not use Option-click (on a Mac; for Windows it’s probably control-click) to automatically download whatever link is clicked?

That way, if you’re sitting on a web page with lots of interesting things you want to download, just hold down that modifier key and click click click. This works on all versions of Firefox (other browsers, too), and requires no setup or configuration.