Chami.com Tips

Batch downloading multiple web pages and other files without using a browser

Looking for a way to download multiple web pages, images or other files from web sites without using a browser? For example, you may want to do this if the program you're downloading has many parts or if you have a set of frequently updated files that needs to be download every so often. Rather than using a browser to manually start downloading each file, you could call a command line utility that can download individual web files within a batch file. First, download and install URL2File Windows Application, which is the program we'll be using in this example (URL2File Windows Application is a product of Chami.com). URL2File can retrieve and save the content of a given World Wide Web URL to a local file. So, to retrieve the web page at http://www.chami.com/tips/ and save it to a local file named tips.htm, run the following command from a Windows Command Prompt/DOS Box:

URL2File http://www.chami.com/tips/ tips.htm

Note the format of the above command: URL2File followed by the web page/file address and the name of the file that you want to save the content as. The next step is to create a batch file that can call URL2File for each file you need to download. A Windows batch file is a text file with a list of commands, usually with the .BAT extension. Let's assume that there are three files named file1.zip, file2.zip and file3.zip at http://www.chami.com/tips/ that you need to download. To create a batch file to download above files:

• Open Windows Notepad
   
• Enter following three commands into the blank notepad (one command per file to be downloaded):
   
  URL2File http://www.chami.com/tips/file1.zip file1.zip
  URL2File http://www.chami.com/tips/file2.zip file2.zip
  URL2File http://www.chami.com/tips/file3.zip file3.zip
   
• Save the notepad file with a name of your choice followed by .BAT ("download.bat" for example)
   

Now run "download.bat" from your Windows Command Prompt/DOS Box by typing:

download

and hitting ENTER. The newly created batch file will call URL2File three times for each of the three files and sequentially download them for you. To download other files, simply modify the batch file and run it again.