a glob of nerdishness

Here’s a quick little tip I had to figure out again today. Sometimes a flaky network or server will cause Safari to think it is done downloading a file before it’s complete. When this happens, Safari will drop the incomplete file out of its temporary download wrapper, leaving you stuck with a partially saved copy that can no longer be resumed. If this happens halfway through a large file, you can use the built-in OS X ‘curl’ command to resume the incomplete download right where it quit, provided the server supports it:

curl -o <incomplete_local_file> -C - <URL>

The trick is the ‘-C’ option with the “-” argument, which tells curl to continue from the offset automatically determined by the local partially-downloaded file.