Randall R Schulz wrote:
Jim,
Sourceforge has mirror selection built in to their main Web site design and it is not the most "wget-friendly," if you will.
The link you copied is misleading in its appearance. It actually leads to a Web page from which you select a mirror (buried amid the boilerplate and advertising is the text "You are requesting file: /abiword/abiword-2.0.11.tar.gz Please select a mirror"). The links on that page are the ones that include the query parameter ("?...") that selects the mirror. Without that parameter, you just won't get the actual file you're trying to download.
Thus there's no way around either using the "-O" option to wget or manually renaming the file with the mirror selection query parameter appended.
Randall Schulz
I think the path I followed was this: From freshmeat's listing I browsed to: http://freshmeat.net/redir/abiword/56/url_tgz/abiword-2.0.10.tar.gz Which took me to the mirror selection page. From there I copied the link for the download from the mirror and used that for input to wget: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/abiword/abiword-2.0.10.tar.gz?use_mirror=... That was the URL that consumed all the time trying to get the resumed download. I thought quoting it had worked, but I tried it again and it downloads a small file, like the previous attempts. I didn't want to click on the link, because I didn't want the browser to truncate the 20MB+ that I had already retrieved. Had I moved the file and clicked on the link, I would have seen that the next screen shows the direct link in case the download doesn't start. I used that link, provided by someone else in an earlier email, with wget -c and the download resumed to completion. From now on, I'm just going to start the download, kill it, and then use wget with the backup link. BTW, a few weeks ago, when I was asking for alternative download programs, several people mentioned that wget has no problem with following this kind of link. I did ask in advance. Then I couldn't figure out how to make it work and focused too hard on making wget do something it apparenlty can't do. Telling someone they may not be competent to get a job because they couldn't follow the simple man pages was really annoying after doing that much research into the problem.