Hi LQers,

Scheduled downloads from Exede have been going great thanks to you guys.

But now I have a problem with a particular URL. Here is the URL as shown in crontab:
"https://archive.org/compress/OTRR_Philip_Marlowe_Singles/formats=VBR%20MP3&file=/OTRR_Philip_Marlowe_Singles.zip"

It apparently fails at the "%" after "VBR" because the corresponding line in syslog looks like this:
CRON[4192]: (jnyreb) CMD (wget -c "https://archive.org/compress/OTRR_Philip_Marlowe_Singles/formats=VBR)

I've spent a couple of hours trying to find out whether cron has a problem with "%" or whether it makes bash unhappy. In my old DOS/Netware days I used to write scripts in basic and "%" was a method off defining a variable. But I can't anything about "%" and cron on the Inet. Probably because I'm looking in the wrong place(s).

So, if you guys can ride to the rescue I would be most grateful.

Thanks for your help.
Charlie Bishop

The problem is that the % is a special character in cron. You need to escape each % by adding a backslash i.e \%

I think michaelk addressed the "cron" aspect.

Another way to consider is a torrent. Transmission is a great client you might already have on your system. There are other good ones too. You can queue up a large number of torrents and then prioritize the ones to download first, so bandwidth gets utilized in an optimal manner. Archive.org has torrent options for most if not all of its material. An advantage with that is that the client has at least one time-dependent alternate bandwidth setting. So you could just set the alternate speed limits to 0k up and 0k down during your expensive hours and leave it go full out during the night.

Thanks for your help (again). It is really great to have folks I can ask about questions that I can't find answers to in books etc. because I don't know what to look up. At this rate I may learn something.

Thanks again.
Charlie Bishop