wget (was: Re: Abhandlungen der K önigliche n Ak ademie der Wissensch aften zu Berli)

[Dominik Wujastyk]

I was recently trying to help a colleague with the bash script below for
fetching entire books from the Digital Library of India.  He had Windows, so
we installed CygWin, in order to get bash and wget.  However, the script
wouldn't work.

I finally discovered that the essential syntax I'm using below, "for i in
{X..Y..Z}", works with bash version 4, but not earlier.  And CygWin's bash
is still at version 3 (so in MinGW's).

When I type "bash --version", I get this:

$ bash --version
> GNU bash, version 4.1.5(1)-release (i486-pc-linux-gnu)
> Copyright (C) 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <
> http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
>

Sorry, Windows users, it looks like you'll have to wait until bash 4 gets
into CygWin or MinGW.

Best,
Dominik

2010/1/14 Dominik Wujastyk <ucgadkw at ucl.ac.uk>

> Birgit is quite right about the value of wget.  It's an amazing little
> tool.  I use it routinely to get books from the Digital Library of India,
> where texts are presented only as individual pages.
>
> Until about a year ago, one could use the "-r" recursion setting of wget
> to fetch a whole directory-full of files in one go.  Then the DLI disabled
> that feature.  So now one has to issue a wget command for each page.
> But it's easy to do with a small bash script like this:
>
> ---------- cut here -----------
> #!/bin/bash
>
> # fetch Kapadia_Desc.Cat.Govt.Colls.MSS.BORI-Jaina
> # Literature and Philosophy XIX.1 Svetambara Works_1957
>
> for i in {00000001..397..1}
>        do
>                wget
> http://www.new.dli.ernet.in/data/upload/0048/903/PTIFF/$i.tif
>        done
> ---------- cut here -----------
>
> The magic number "371" is the number of pages in the book, which DLI tells
> you.  In Firefox, you can find out the directory in which a book's TIFF
> files live by loading a page of the book and then hitting Tools/Page Info
> and selecting "media".
>
> Bash is the default shell in Linux; it's also available to Windows users
> by installing the excellent Cygwin.
>
> Best,
> Dominik
>
>