Installation and usage tutorial of the easy-to-use Axel command line downloader

Axel is a very lightweight Linux command line downloader that supports HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and FTPS protocols. Multiple mirror sites can be used to download a single file at the same time, which allows Axel's download speed to be greatly increased artificially. A visual increase of 40% is absolutely no problem. More importantly, Axel is also very lightweight and takes up very little CPU and memory.

Axel downloads all data directly to the target file in one step, instead of downloading into multiple file blocks and then splicing them together like other downloading software. When downloading, Axel establishes multiple connections to the same file, and each connection downloads a separate file fragment to complete the download faster, which is why Axel downloads faster.

Because it is lightweight, Axel is more suitable for downloading files than wget, but it has many fewer functions than wget. For example, wget has a whole-site copy function that makes webmasters jealous (please search this blog for related tutorials: wget).

Most LINUX distributions (Ubuntu series, Mint, Fedora, suse, openSUSE, Arch Linux, Manjaro, Mageia, etc.) have axel packages, so we can install them directly from the official repository of the distribution. But for CentOS/RHEL, we need to enable EPEL Repository. This blog does not yet have any tutorials for opening EPEL, please use Baidu to solve it.

Install axel

#[Install Axel on Debian/Ubuntu/LinuxMint]

$ sudo apt-get install axel

#[Install Axel on RHEL/CentOS]

$ sudo yum install axel

#[Install Axel on Fedora]

$ sudo dnf install axel

#[Install Axel on openSUSE]

$ sudo zypper install axel

#[Install Axel on Mageia]

$ sudo urpmi axel

#[Install Axel on Arch Linux based distributions]

$ sudo pacman -S axel

1. Download a single file

The following command will download the file from the given URL and store it in the current directory. When downloading the file, we can see the file information (number of connections established, download speed, download progress, estimated time to complete the download, and time when the connection is completed).

axel http://dl.138vps.com/Web%20app/h5ai.tar.gz

2. Rename the downloaded file

To save the file under a different name, add the -o (lowercase letter) option and the file name when initiating the download. Here we use the file name 138vps.tar.bz2 to save the file.

axel -o 138vps.tar.gz http://dl.138vps.com/Web%20app/h5ai.tar.gz

3. Limit download speed

By default axel sets the maximum speed for downloading files in bytes/second. It is recommended to use this option when we do not want to occupy a large bandwidth during downloading and affect the normal use of other programs. Just add the -s option followed by the byte value. Here we want to download a file with a speed limit of 512 KB/s.

axel -s 512000 http://dl.138vps.com/Web%20app/h5ai.tar.gz

4. Limit the number of connections

axel establishes 4 connections by default to get files from different images. Additionally, we can add more connections or reduce links by using the -n option.

axel -n 8 http://dl.138vps.com/Web%20app/h5ai.tar.gz

5. Resume unfinished downloads

axel has default behavior of resuming unfinished downloads. Axel periodically updates status files (with a .st extension) when downloading files. Download stopped midway for some reason? Don't worry, just use the same axel command, it will check file and file.st and if found, it will resume the download from where it stopped instead of starting from 0.

axel http://dl.138vps.com/Web%20app/h5ai.tar.gz

6. Learn more about axel

man axel

or

axel --help

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