Axel 1.0a review

Axel does the same thing any other accelerator does: it opens more than one HTTP/FTP connection per download and each connection tran

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 47K Developer: Wilmer van der Gaast

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Axel does the same thing any other accelerator does: it opens more than one HTTP/FTP connection per download and each connection transfers its own, separate, part of the file. It may sound weird, but it works very well in practice.

For example, some FTP sites limit the speed of each connection, therefore opening more than one connection at a time multiplies the allowable bandwidth. Be forewarned that some FTP operators don't like it when you do this.

It is better to open the additional connections on several servers and download from all of them simultaneously. Axel >=0.97 supports this. You may either specify a list of mirrors to use or tell the program to search for mirrors.

The difference between Axel and other (mostly Windows-based) accelerators is that it does not write data to separate files and join them later. Axel puts all the data in the right file, in the right order, at download time.

This is possible, because most Unix file systems allow you to write data after the end-of-file. Axel is console-based and uses few system resources.

Supported architectures:
The program should work on all Linux systems, as far as I know.
Mac OS X is supported as well. You can compile your own binary from sources or you can use the version which is in Fink.
At least FreeBSD should work, other BSD's shouldn't be much of a problem either.
Win32 systems, using Cygwin.
Sun Solaris 8 and probably other versions.
The old 0.96 version can be compiled without threading, which allows you to compile the program for AtheOS. I will try to port the more recent 0.99 version to this system as well. Because AtheOS has its own threads API, it might take some time.


What's New in This Release:
Support for downloading using more than one local interface
An alternative scp-alike progress indicator
HTTP URL handling improved (% escapes)
Fixed problems with downloading forwarding HTTP URL's