How To Limit Download Speed And Resume Broken Downloads Using Linux Mint / Ubuntu Command Line

Using wget directly from the Linux Mint / Ubuntu command line is a quick way to download files. The beauty of this tool is that it offers various options like limiting the download speed, resuming broken downloads and so on. For a quick primer on using wget, refer to the older article here.

Here is a cool way to make sure that when downloading large files, wget doesn’t hog all the bandwidth (which it does by default) and will continue downloading at the specified download rate plus resume downloading should it get interrupted:

1. Open Terminal and type the following command (syntax shown below) :

wget --limit-rate=xxk/m -c http://filetobedownloaded

What this means is  that once –limit rate is used, wget will download either in KBps [k]or MBps[m] (based on how much bandwidth you have and want to allocate ) with the option of resuming the download if it is interrupted from the file location specified. The -c option is very useful in resuming broken downloads should there by any interruption in transfer.

2. Using the above parameters, say to download an ISO image file such that download rate is restricted to 65 KBps and the downloaded can be resumed, we have :

wget --limit-rate=65k -c http://linuxfreedom.com/linuxmint/stable/12/linuxmint-12-gnome-dvd-32bit.iso

wget download tips

This is a simple and yet powerful tool which can be customized to make downloading files a lot efficient.

Happy downloading!

 

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