How to download list of files from a file server?

Question

How would I download a list of files from a file server like this one http://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/binaries/ ?

I suppose I could use wget but then it tries to get all the links and the html file as well. Is there a better tool to accomplish this?

just to clarify your question: you just want the list of files which could be downloaded from the server, not the files itself (yet)?
In what way is a command like ` wget --no-verbose --spider --no-directories --recursive --level=2 apache.org/dist/httpd/binaries` not working for you? If you could be more specific that might help

John T · Answer 1 · 2009-09-26 04:41:18Z

You can specify what file extensions wget will download when crawling pages:

wget -r -A zip,rpm,tar.gz www.site.com/startpage.html

this will perform a recursive search and only download files with the .zip, .rpm, and .tar.gz extensions.

akira · Answer 2 · 2009-09-26 06:03:29Z

supposing you really just want a list of the files on the server without fetching them (yet):

%> wget -r -np --spider http://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/binaries/ 2>&1 | awk -f filter.awk | uniq

while 'filter.awk' looks like this

/^--.*--  http:\/\/.*[^\/]$/ { u=$3; }
/^Length: [[:digit:]]+/ { print u; }

then you possibly have to filter out some entries like

"http://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/binaries/?C=N;O=D"

2 Answers