aria2: An Ultra Fast Download Manager On Linux

Introducing one of the fastest download managers in the universe: aria2.

Introduction

aria2 is a brutally fast and very feature rich download manager available for Linux platform. It can handle almost any kind of download you can ever imagine (FTP, HTTP, BitTorrent, SFTP, ...).
You can install it by simply running sudo apt-get install aria2 at the command line or by using Ubuntu Software Center (if you're on Ubuntu).

How To Use

First add the following line at the bottom of your .bashrc (or .bash_profile depending on your distro). 
alias aria2c='aria2c -c -x5 -s10 -m0'
This practically replaces the original aria2c command with a pre-configured one that
  • tries to resume the download in case of a disconnect or failure
  • for each download establishes up to 5 simultaneous connection to the server
  • downloads a file using 10 connections/segments
  • retries indefinitely in case of failure to connect to the server
Remember to close the terminal and open a new one, for this change to take effect.

Single (ad-hoc) Downloads

Just grab the link from Firefox or whatever browser you use, open a terminal and type aria2c THE_URL, replacing THE_URL with the URL you wish to download.

Batch Downloads

Create a file, for example urls.txt, and copy-paste all the links you wish to download into the file, each URL on a separate line. Then open a terminal and run aria2c -i urls.txt.

Scheduled Downloads

There are cases that you wish the download start at a certain time and terminate at another certain time. For example, your ISP may have granted you free unlimited download during certain hours. In such cases simply use cron.
To schedule aria2, in a terminal run EDITOR=gedit crontab -e to edit your crontab in gedit. Add the following two lines at the bottom of the file, save it and exit gedit --just remember to change YOUR_USERNAME to your real username. 
00 02 * * * cd /home/YOUR_USERNAME/Downloads && aria2c -c -x5 -s10 -m0 -i urls.txt > aria2.log 2>&1 &
00 07 * * * pkill -15 aria2c
This is scheduling aria2 to run every day at 2AM, downurls.txt and stop downloading at 7AM.
loading all the links in the file

Image source NASA

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