is it possbile to dowload one part of a file from web?

Question

lets say there is one very big file on some server and i just want to download first 1MB. How can I do it on Linux ?

Answer 1

If the server supports it, curl -o filename -r 0-1048575 http://url/to/file will just download the first MB.

Answer 2

wget URL

then Ctrl + c when about 1MB has been written.

If you want exactly 1MB, then you can run the downloaded chunk through split

split --bytes=1048576 FILENAME

you can even pipe wget into split so that the file gets saved as 1MB chunks as it downloads... see the man pages.