Quick backstory: I was using aria2c to download a bunch of files, and I found myself manually juggling between multiple aria2c terminal sessions and keeping track of download links. I was frequently encountering scenarios like this, so I decided to streamline the process a bit.

The use case was straightforward: download content in batches, automate the process as much as possible, and use a simple tool that would work seamlessly across different platforms with minimal setup requirements and resources, and be able to work with a remote client, ssh in my case.

I wanted to use an existing tool and found some batch downloaders for aria2c on GitHub, but none of them quite matched my needs. So, I created my own solution.

For this, I chose Bash as the tool of choice, due to its low setup requirements and created this simple script to facilitate the process.

The script works like this

1. Have a download_link.txt file in the same directory as the script. This file would contain links separated by newline characters (\n).
2. The script reads each link line by line.
3. Each link would be passed to aria2c, which initiates the download. The main script waits for the download to complete.
4. Once downloaded, the script removes the current link from the download_link.txt file
5. This process would repeat until all links’ content is downloaded.

You can find the full code on aria2c-packload

In usage, I only needed to add links to the download_link.txt file:

https://example.com/download-link-1.zip 
https://example.com/download-link-2.modal

and then start the downloader script:

$ chmod +x ./downloader.sh
$ ./downloader.sh

This approach saved me from managing multiple terminal sessions, download links etc. Plus it also works smoothly in a remote server without requiring additional setup (assuming aria2c is already installed).

This has been a time-saver for me and maybe it helps you as well 😊.

Chow!