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Let's say we have an IRC #ChannelName at irc.server.com where people can freely download files from the bots, by commands such as /msg BotName xdcc send #123, and we want to download one such file into our /download/dir. How to do it in a simple, wget/curl-like, command?

It may be more than one command, or a script, but bear in mind that I want to encapsulate this into a script so I can just type something along the lines of

irc-download.sh irc.server.com ChannelName BotName 123 /download/dir

Then wait a while, and have the file, like it was a wget download.

Good things to have in a solution:

  • Is cross-platform (i.e., Windows binary or source code that can compile into it, or script).
  • Has some sort of progress indication.
  • Can download two files at the same time (i.e., has no problem connecting twice to same server).
  • Is secured against a bad bot sending other unrequested files in the same session.
  • Is mostly self-contained (i.e., any needed binaries can run by themselves).
Camilo Martin
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    "bonus-points" ? Are you going to offer a bounty for this coding project? More people will be interested to do that. Good luck. – shellter Feb 25 '16 at 04:06
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    @shellter Sorry if it came across as entitled. These are just nice things to have in a solution. I just have no experience with using IRC clients and there are so many of them someone might just know 2+ that can be scripted. – Camilo Martin Feb 25 '16 at 04:16
  • (While I didn't downvote), I may vote to close as "too broad". Did you have some code you needed help with? Else you're asking for a software recommendation which is also off topic. An interesting problem, but as phrased now, off-topic on Stack Overflow(IMHO). Maybe http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com can help you? Good luck. – shellter Feb 25 '16 at 04:19
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    @shellter If I was asking "how to download an FTP file through the command line", it wouldn't be considered "software recommendation", right? (alas, searched and [it isn't](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/936108/how-to-script-ftp-upload-and-download)) I'm sure IRC is not much more obscure than FTP, and that there's some "curl/wget" de-facto standard too. If you know of one, I can re-phrase the question as "how can I use irc-curl to download a file". – Camilo Martin Feb 25 '16 at 04:29
  • IMHO, asking for something that might be listed in a man-page (yes, quite possibly as a poorly documented option (when you're lucky) ;-) ), is either asking for a recommendation or something that belongs on SuperUser.com. Else (slightly) improve your specification, add a 100+ point bounty and see if anyone can produce what you need. (again, IHMO). Wishing your best of luck on finding what you need. Going to bed. Good luck. – shellter Feb 25 '16 at 04:35

2 Answers2

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I've looked high and low for a solution that is not super cumbersome (like installing Cygwin on Windows, come on, there are IRC clients coded in ~250 lines of C, you can even telnet this ****).

And while nobody has simply made a program that does this basic task on a protocol older than your grandma's swimsuits, turns out we live in a world where NodeJS is a thing that exists.

So yeah, this is simple.

First, install these NPM packages (globally with -g if you want):

npm install irc xdcc progress

Then, put this code in irc-download.js:

var irc = require('xdcc').irc, ProgressBar = require('progress'), progress, arg = process.argv;
var user = 'user_' + Math.random().toString(36).substr(2), bar = 'Downloading... [:bar] :percent, :etas remaining';
var client = new irc.Client(arg[2], user, { channels: [ '#' + arg[3] ], userName: user, realName: user });
var last = 0, handle = received => { progress.tick(received - last); last = received; };

client.on('join', (channel, nick) => nick == user && client.getXdcc(arg[4], 'xdcc send #' + arg[5], arg[6]));
client.on('xdcc-connect', meta => progress = new ProgressBar(bar, {incomplete: ' ', total: meta.length, width: 40}));
client.on('xdcc-data', handle).on('xdcc-end', r => { handle(r); process.exit(); } ).on('error', m => console.error(m));

Then you can use basically the same command line I was going for in the question:

node irc-download.js irc.server.com ChannelName BotName 123 /download/dir

Javascript is like the Christopher Hitchens of programming or something.

Camilo Martin
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You can try https://github.com/namboy94/xdcc-dl as well, if you prefer to use Python.

Somebody still uses you MS-DOS
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