Multithreaded downloading with shell script

Question

Let's say I have a file with lots of URLs and I want to download them in parallel using arbitrary number of processes. How can I do it with bash?

Answer 1

Have a look at man xargs:

-P max-procs --max-procs=max-procs

         Run  up  to max-procs processes at a time; the default is 1.  If
         max-procs is 0, xargs will run as many processes as possible  at
         a  time.

Solution:

xargs -P 20 -n 1 wget -nv <urs.txt

Answer 2

If you just want to grab each URL(regardless of number) then the answer is easy:

#!/bin/bash
URL_LIST="http://url1/ http://url2/"

for url in $URL_LIST ; do
    wget ${url} & >/dev/null
done

If you want to only create a limited number of pulls, say 10. Then you would do something like this:

#!/bin/bash
URL_LIST="http://url1/ http://url2/"

function download() {
    touch /tmp/dl-${1}.lck
    wget ${url} >/dev/null
    rm -f /tmp/dl-${1}.lck
}

for url in $URL_LIST ; do
    while [ 1 ] ; do
        iter=0
        while [ $iter -lt 10 ] ; do
            if [ ! -f /tmp/dl-${iter}.lck ] ; then
                download $iter &
                break 2
            fi
            let iter++
        done
        sleep 10s
    done
done

Do note I haven't actually tested it, but just banged it out in 15 minutes. but you should get a general idea.

Answer 3

You could use something like puf which is designed for that sort of thing, or you could use wget/curl/lynx in combination with GNU parallel.

Answer 4

http://puf.sourceforge.net/ puf does this "for a living" and has a nice running status of the complete process.

Answer 5

I do stuff like this a lot. I suggest two scripts.
the parent only determines the appropriate loading factors and 
launches a new child when there is 
1. more work to do
2. not past some various limits of loadavg or bandwidth

# my pref lang is tcsh so, this is just a rough approximation
# I think with just a few debug runs, this could work fine.

# presumes a file with one url to download per line
# 
NUMPARALLEL=4 # controls how many at once
#^tune above number to control CPU and bandwidth load, you
# will not finish  fastest by doing 100 at once.
# Wed Mar 16 08:35:30 PDT 2011 , dianevm at gmail

 while : ; do
      WORKLEFT=`wc -l  < $WORKFILE`
      if [ WORKLEFT -eq 0 ];
           echo finished |write sysadmin
           echo finished |Mail sysadmin
           exit 0
           fi
      NUMWORKERS=`ps auxwwf|grep WORKER|grep -v grep|wc -l`
      if [ $NUMWORKERS -lt $NUMPARALLEL]; then  # time to fire off another 1
           set WORKTODO=`head -1 $WORKFILE`
           WORKER $WORKTODO &  # worker could just be wget "$1", ncftp, curl
           tail -n +2 $WORKFILE >TMP
           SECEPOCH=`date +%s`
           mv $WORKFILE $WORKFILE.$SECSEPOCH
           mv TMP $WORKFILE
        else # we have NUMWORKERS or more running.
           sleep 5  # suggest this time  be close to ~ 1/4 of script run time
        fi
  done