How to do resumable downloads with curl

• Posted 17 October 2023
• Tagged with curl

The flag you want is --continue-at -, which will resume the transfer from the size of the already-downloaded file.

Here’s an example of using it in practice.

curl \
   --location \
   --remote-name \
   --continue-at - \
   https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/wikibase/commonswiki/20231009/commons-20231009-mediainfo.json.bz2

It behaves in a “sensible” way at the beginning and end of the download:

• If you haven’t downloaded anything yet, it starts downloading from the first byte of the remote file.
• If you’ve already downloaded the complete file, it stops as soon as it checks the byte count with the remote server.