Download a file with resume support
Low risk
What do risk levels mean?
- Read-only
- Inspects state without changing anything.
- Low risk
- Reversible with a routine follow-up command.
- Medium risk
- Changes state; undo path documented.
- Destructive
- Deletes or overwrites; confirmation required.
Downloads a file to a chosen path, following redirects, and resumes from where it stopped if the transfer is interrupted — useful for large files on unreliable connections.
networkdownloadcurlresume
Parameters
URL of the file to download.
Local path to save the file to.
Commands
Download the file, resuming any partial transfer at the output path
curl -L -C - -o <output_file> <url>Verification
ls -l <output_file>The file exists with the expected size; rerunning the download prints that the transfer is already complete.
Undo
Delete the downloaded file
rm <output_file>Pitfalls
- Resume only works when the server supports HTTP range requests; otherwise curl restarts the download from the beginning.
- If the remote file changed since the partial download, resuming produces a corrupt file; delete the partial file and start over.
- Verify checksums (shasum, sha256sum) for downloaded software before executing it.
- The verification and undo commands use macOS/Linux syntax; on Windows use "Get-Item {{output_file}}" to verify and "Remove-Item {{output_file}}" to undo.