fget - a minimal http/ftp download tool for boot disks

(Note: This is posted here for the sake of historic curiosity only. Go look at dl.c from gatling instead)

In protocol design, perfection has been reached not when there is nothing left to add,
but when there is nothing left to take away.
--RFC1925

Download it from fget-0.4.1.tar.bz2 [binaries]! The current version is 0.4.1. Recent changes: minimal internal changes, not user visible.

fget supports downloading a single URL (the first argument on the command line) from an FTP or HTTP server. The URL may contain username and password (like in http://bob:secret@download.com/file.tar.gz). fget supports IPv4 and IPv6 (the IPv6 URL format for IP numbers is http://[::1]:80/file.tar.gz) transport. You can set the INTERFACE environment variable to the name of the network interface ("eth0") to use IPv6 link-local addresses. Files are always written to stdout.

fget is meant for boot and rescue disks, so small size is the most important feature. It can be linked against diet libc and you can disable the built-in DNS routines to make the binary even smaller. On my x86-linux box, the diet libc statically linked fget binary without DNS weighs about 24k (update! dietlibc 0.5 reduces the size to 13k!)

You can contact me at felix-fget@fefe.de.

See also