{"id":205,"date":"2010-04-06T20:09:53","date_gmt":"2010-04-06T19:09:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.miscdebris.net\/blog\/?p=205"},"modified":"2010-04-06T20:10:12","modified_gmt":"2010-04-06T19:10:12","slug":"use-curl-to-download-a-file-from-sourceforge-mirror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.miscdebris.net\/blog\/2010\/04\/06\/use-curl-to-download-a-file-from-sourceforge-mirror\/","title":{"rendered":"Use curl to download a file from sourceforge (mirror)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sometimes one wants to download a source package or similar from sourceforge with curl and not with the browser, e.g. in a script where one wants to download a package automatically. It turns out, that due the latest changes in the download system of sourceforge this is not straightforward.<\/p>\n

Assume you want to download the binutils binary package from the MinGW project<\/a>. If you go to the download site of binutils<\/a> and click on “direct link” you get “http:\/\/downloads.sourceforge.net\/project\/mingw\/GNU%20Binutils\/binutils-2.20.1\/binutils-2.20.1-2-mingw32-bin.tar.gz”. If you just use “curl -O URL” nothing happens. Adding the option “-v” some more output is shown:<\/p>\n

* About to connect() to downloads.sourceforge.net port 80 (#0)\r\n*   Trying 216.34.181.59... connected\r\n* Connected to downloads.sourceforge.net (216.34.181.59) port 80 (#0)\r\n> GET \/project\/mingw\/GNU%20Binutils\/binutils-2.20.1\/binutils-2.20.1-2-mingw32-bin.tar.gz HTTP\/1.1\r\n> User-Agent: curl\/7.16.4 (i386-apple-darwin9.0) libcurl\/7.16.4 OpenSSL\/0.9.7l zlib\/1.2.3\r\n> Host: downloads.sourceforge.net\r\n> Accept: *\/*\r\n>\r\n< HTTP\/1.1 302 Found\r\n< X-Powered-By: PHP\/5.2.9\r\n< Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"binutils-2.20.1-2-mingw32-bin.tar.gz\"\r\n< Location: http:\/\/surfnet.dl.sourceforge.net\/project\/mingw\/GNU%20Binutils\/binutils-2.20.1\/binutils-2.20.1-2-mingw32-bin.tar.gz\r\n< Content-type: text\/html\r\n< Content-Length: 0\r\n< Date: Tue, 06 Apr 2010 18:50:34 GMT\r\n< Server: lighttpd\/1.4.26\r\n<\r\n* Connection #0 to host downloads.sourceforge.net left intact\r\n* Closing connection #0<\/pre>\n
Sourceforge redirects to a mirror server, but curl doesn’t follow it. Fortunately the “-L” option tells curl to follow this redirection. So<\/p>\n
curl -L -O http:\/\/downloads.sourceforge.net\/project\/mingw\/GNU%20Binutils\/binutils-2.20.1\/binutils-2.20.1-2-mingw32-bin.tar.gz<\/pre>\n
works. This sourceforge trac ticket<\/a> provided the information. Additionally it’s possible to shorten the URL a bit. Instead of the long URL above you could also use:<\/p>\n
http:\/\/downloads.sourceforge.net\/sourceforge\/mingw\/binutils-2.20.1-2-mingw32-bin.tar.gz<\/pre>\n
Ok, it’s not that much shorter but still. I’m not sure if this always works, at least for MinGW packages it does.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sometimes one wants to download a source package or similar from sourceforge with curl and not with the browser, e.g. in a script where one wants to download a package automatically. It turns out, that due the latest changes in the download system of sourceforge this is not straightforward.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[30,9,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-development","category-linux","category-macosx"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6pnj-3j","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.miscdebris.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.miscdebris.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.miscdebris.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.miscdebris.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.miscdebris.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.miscdebris.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":246,"href":"https:\/\/www.miscdebris.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205\/revisions\/246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.miscdebris.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.miscdebris.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.miscdebris.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}