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Some of downloads do not download actual file but some kind of redirection file like download.php and thus there is no way to download file other than using browser's native download function.

Example would be this URL. Next to "Multipart" there are 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 numbers becuse this download is split on 6 parts. The file I am trying to download is called Brother210c_410cn_620cn_DCP110c_service.part1.rar

Why in such cases no download managers work? Is there a way to make it work with download managers?

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  • Its pretty trivial to block download managers with Javascript. It sounds like thats the case here. You do understand most browsers pretty much are download managers on their own, in the sense, you can download as many files as you want at the sametime and they will automatically download them as fast as your connection will support.
    – Ramhound
    Jan 3, 2014 at 16:23
  • @Ramhound They won't download in segments like download managers do and they do not resume as well.
    – Boris_yo
    Jan 3, 2014 at 19:31
  • I have never had problems doing resumes on files using Firefox and Chrome.
    – Ramhound
    Jan 3, 2014 at 19:33
  • Some resumes on Chrome and Firefox do not continue from the place they stopped and reset whole download. With download accelerators this does not happen.
    – Boris_yo
    Jan 4, 2014 at 11:30

1 Answer 1

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There are a few ways that a website might interfere with a download-manager:

  • The URL to the file is not actually to the file, it is to a page which automatically redirects to the file (this is what you saw). Depending on how the server is configured, and how the download-manager works, the redirect page may not be providing the right information (e.g., MIME types) for a download-manager to get the file, or the manager may not be able to detect the file correctly.

  • The server that is providing the file is using sessions which expire, so trying to get the same file again will not work and you must go through the normal web page again in order to create a new session key.

  • The server does not support resume (that is, it sends the whole file ignoring Range headers in requests), so the download-manager is unable to resume it and/or use multiple download streams to get it faster.

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    in this case, the download.php page runs serverside to serve up the download, so the target of the link must executed on the server before it performs a binary write of the actual file to be downloaded in the response stream. usually a download manager just GETs the object targeted, and does not process the response stream.
    – Frank Thomas
    Jan 3, 2014 at 16:47
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    And even if you compensate with something like wget configured to capture cookies and such, it could still just use sessions to prevent (re-)downloading a file. ’been there; fought that. :-/
    – Synetech
    Jan 3, 2014 at 16:50
  • @<s>download-manger</s> download-manager (Maybe I meant to say “download-manger” because I was referring to some kind of file-dump website. :^Þ But, don’t try out those URLs, they are not real sites.)
    – Synetech
    Jan 3, 2014 at 17:09

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