Downloading HTTP in off-peak

I want to write a quick and dirty blog post to tell you a little solution on downloading HTTP files in your off-peak usage using linux.

The tools I’ll be using for this is my old favourite wget and a new tool, “at”.

The at daemon is required to be running first, so on debian or ubuntu

/etc/init.d/atd start

Then downloading your file at an off-peak time (4am for me) is as simple as

echo “wget –c http://ubuntu.virginmedia.com/releases//maverick/ubuntu-10.10-desktop-i386.iso” | at 04:00

Simple hey 😄