Download contents of FTP but only first 10meg of each file?

Question

I have an FTP of very large files scattered among smaller files.

I want to download the entire FTP contents, but limit the amount downloaded for each file to 10meg or so.

So all files less than 10 meg will be intact, but all files larger than 10 meg will only get the first 10 meg of data.

Is this at all possible? If not, is there a way to download all files smaller than 10meg?

Answer 1

To answer you second option for skipping the large files, in FileZilla you can set up a filter based on file size, and use that to hide/skip files greater than 10Mb.

Answer 2

To download all the files smaller than 10MB you can do this if all the files are in a single folder. (Assumes you are using a GUI FTP client)

• Sort the files by size - usually by clicking on the filesize header
• Select the first file smaller than 10 MB
• Hold Shift and select the last file. This will select the range of files.
• Transfer those files

If the files are in multiple folders you'll have to repeat this for each folder.

Answer 3

Thanks to @quack quixote I can use curl to do it.

It has an option '-r/--range' which allows me to specify a byte range of filesize.
This will ensure that I will get the first 10meg of large files and the complete file for anything smaller.