WMGET(1)

💖 WMGET(1) — the manual, but make it cute 💖

okay bestie, gather round, because we're talking about wmget(1) and honestly? she's iconic. 🫶

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✨ NAME ✨

wmget — a background download manager that lives inside a dockapp 🎀

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

wmget dock [options]

wmget [options] {URL}

wmget cancel {job-id}

wmget list

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so wmget is a dockapp, which means it's a lil app that runs in a tiny window meant to be "docked" into a spot your window manager gives you. The whole point is that it makes grabbing files in the background, like, so much easier. 🦋

It was mainly developed under GNU Window Maker (the author's fave WM, no cap), but it's known to work under AfterStep too, and it should play nice with other dockapp-aware window managers and docks.

Under the hood it uses the excellent libcurl library — yes, that's the same one that's part of the Curl automated-download program — to pull files from Web servers, FTP servers, and other sources. ✨

Here's the vibe: wmget lets you run multiple downloads without keeping a terminal open (for FTP or curl or whatever) and without parking another window on your desktop (looking at you, Mozilla download progress). Download progress is visible any time the Dock is visible. main character energy fr. 💅

You kick off downloads either by "pasting" URLs from Web browsers or other apps, or by invoking wmget from the command line (or another script or program) with a source URL. The dockapp has a handful of configurable download options — target directory, HTTP proxy server, etc. 👑

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✨ STARTING UP ✨

To start the dockapp, just run wmget dock &. That's it, that's the tweet.

If you're on Window Maker, you can then drag the new appicon onto your Dock, right-click on an area outside the four progress bars, select Settings, and select Start when Window Maker is started. 🎀

If you're running AfterStep, add it to your Wharf by adding this line to your ~/GNUstep/Library/AfterStep/wharf file:

*Wharf wmget - Swallow "wmget" wmget dock &

Other window managers support dockapps in different ways. And even if your WM has zero special dockapp support, you can still run wmget like above — it'll just show up as a small window or "icon". No biggie. 🌸

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✨ USING WMGET ✨

wmget's user interface is simple, and we love her for that: four stacked progress bars, initially empty, representing four possible simultaneous downloads. The top bar says wmget when there's no download running there, but any download will cover that up. 🙈

Each running download normally shows up to nine characters of its filename, overlaid with a progress bar. Click on any progress bar and you get a percentage display plus a stop button. Click the percentage display to switch back, click the stop button to stop the download. There is currently no confirmation — it just stops. 💀

You can "request" downloads at any time. If all four slots are busy, extra requests queue up and wait for one to finish; wmget will never be downloading more than four files at a time. ⭐

By default, wmget figures out a reasonable filename for any requested downloads, writes them to your home directory, and won't overwrite an existing file by the same name. All of these, plus a few other options, are configurable. See below. 💜

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🦋 Requesting Downloads with the Mouse 🦋

The easiest way to request a download is by copying and pasting a link. wmget lets you paste a URL by middle-clicking anywhere on any of its status bars. So: copy a link from some other source (for example, right-click a link in Mozilla or Netscape and pick Copy Link Location), then middle-click on one of the progress meter boxes in wmget. 🖱️✨

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🦋 Requesting Downloads from the Command Line 🦋

The wmget command also lets you directly request downloads from the command line, or from within a script or another program. The syntax is wmget URL, plus any of the options documented below.

Once you run this command, you'll either get an error message or a "job ID". The job ID is only useful in conjunction with the wmget cancel command. 🎯

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🦋 Download Failures 🦋

Downloads can fail for a variety of reasons, from running out of disk space to modem hangups. 😭 Since wmget is designed not to interrupt your workflow or exceed its little square window, it responds to any download error by aborting the download and writing an error file to your download directory. This error file has the name file.ERROR, where file is the name of the actual download target. This error file is a plain text file containing information on what you were downloading and what went wrong.

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🦋 Viewing and Canceling Downloads 🦋

As noted above, you can see the currently-running downloads in the four progress boxes on the dockapp. Clicking on a bar reveals a stop button, and clicking on that stop button cancels the download (but leaves the partially-downloaded file on your computer). 🛑

At any time, you can also run the wmget list command, which displays all the running downloads as well as any queued-up requests. The listing contains entries like this:

Job 10 [linux-2.6]: 1658544/33073407 RUNNING
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/linux-2.6.0-test6.tar.bz2
=> /home/aaron/DOWNLOAD/linux-2.6.0-test6.tar.bz2

What you're looking at in that (admittedly dense) listing is: the job ID, the name of the download as displayed on the dockapp (surrounded in brackets), the progress in bytes, the total bytes to download, the current status, the source URL, and the target file on your computer. Whew. 😮💨

You can cancel any requested or running download from the command line by specifying wmget cancel job-id.

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✨ COMMAND-LINE OPTIONS AND THE CONFIGURATION FILE ✨

wmget supports a handful of configuration options. You can specify defaults for all downloads by putting them in a configuration file or by adding command-line options to the wmget dock command at startup. Or you can specify options for one specific download by adding options to the wmget URL command when you request them. There isn't any way to specify options on URLs you paste with the mouse. 🙈

Dockapp command-line arguments override config-file settings, and per-URL settings override dockapp settings. Hierarchy, bestie. 👑

The configuration file is an optional file named .wmgetrc in your home directory. If it's there, it's parsed by the dockapp at startup. The syntax is simple: one option per line, all options consisting of a name and possibly a value. Blank lines are okay, and lines starting with # are ignored (so you can disable options easily). Option names are just the same as the command-line option names given below, except you don't put the dashes (--) and you can't use the one-letter abbreviations. 💅

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• --version, -v — regardless of any other options, this prints out version and copyright information and exits.
• --help, -h — regardless of any other options, this prints out a help message and exits.
• --silent, -s — suppress any output text other than error messages. 🤫
• --verbose, -V — write extra debugging information; not very useful unless you're debugging or extending the software.
• --output pathname, -o pathname — specifies where to write downloaded files. In the config file or on the dockapp command line, this can only be used to specify your default download directory; it must be an existing directory, and if it's not absolute then it is assumed to be relative to your home directory. On a specific download request, this can provide an alternate save directory or even an alternate filename; in that case, a non-absolute path is relative to the default download directory. 📁
• --display name, -d name — display the first nine characters of name in the progress display for this file. (Only valid on specific download requests, not on the dockapp or in the config file.)
• --overwrite, -O — allow wmget to overwrite an existing file when downloading. Normally, it will refuse to do so.
• --continue, -C — when fetching a file that already exists locally, assume the local copy was an aborted download and try to download just the remainder.
• --auth username:password, -a username:password — provides login information for the server from which you're downloading. 🔐
• --proxy server:port, -p server:port, --proxy_auth user:password, -P user:password — specifies a proxy server and optionally a proxy-server username/password pair for getting past firewalls.
• --follow N, -f N — specifies how many HTTP redirects to follow when resolving a page; by default, wmget is configured to follow up to 5. Set this to 0 to disable redirection. (In any real-world situation, if you're getting redirected more than 5 times, there's a problem...)
• --user-agent string, -U string — specifies which User-Agent string to provide to servers when performing HTTP downloads. The default User-Agent names both the wmget and libcurl versions in use.
• --ascii, -B — force FTP downloads to use ASCII mode; normally, they use binary mode. If you're downloading text documents, ASCII mode will take care of any necessary conversions between the text formats of the server and your computer.
• --referer string, -e string — provides a "referer" string to the Web server.
• --interface interface, --n interface — names a specific network interface to use (e.g., eth0 for the first Ethernet interface on a Linux system). Rarely needed.
• --headers, -h — when performing an HTTP retrieval, include the HTTP message header in the saved file. This is only really useful for testing.

👀 heads up bestie: -h shows up twice up there — once for --help and once for --headers. That's literally what the page says, so I'm not touching it. iykyk.

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✨ FILES ✨

• ~/.wmgetrc — the (optional) configuration file for the wmget dockapp. Settings in this file are used to specify defaults for the dockapp when it starts; see the section on configuration and command-line options for more details.
• ~/.wmget.iq — a Unix-domain socket created by the wmget dockapp to accept requests from wmget commands. Created at startup automatically. 🧚

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✨ AUTHOR ✨

Aaron Trickey. 🫶

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and that's the whole page, bestie — no notes, 10/10, would read again. this was wmget manual page, version 0.6.1, dated February 2016. go download something and let the dockapp cook. 💖✨🎀