Today i was looking for an alternative to wget, but which support segmented download. So i’ve found Aria2. Quoting the description on Sourceforge:

Aria2 is a lightweight multi-protocol & multi-source download utility operated in command-line. It supports HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, BitTorrent and Metalink (DHT, PEX, MSE/PE). Aria2 has built-in XML-RPC interface. You can manipulate aria2 via XML-RPC interface.

Aria2 can download a file from multiple sources/protocols and tries to utilize your maximum download bandwidth. It supports downloading a file from HTTP(S)/FTP and BitTorrent at the same time, while the data downloaded from HTTP(S)/FTP is uploaded to the BitTorrent swarm. Using Metalink’s chunk checksums, aria2 automatically validates chunks of data while downloading a file like BitTorrent.

There are other alternatives, such as wget and curl, but aria2 has two distinctive features: (1) aria2 can download a file from several URIs(HTTP(S)/FTP/BitTorrent) and (2) If you give aria2 a list of URIs, aria2 downloads them concurrently. You don’t have to wait for the current download queue to finish one file at a time anymore. aria2 tries to utilize your maximum download bandwidth and downloads files quickly.

Here you can find a very useful and detailed tutorial to simplify the use of Aria2.

You can install Aria2 directly from Ubuntu repository executing:

sudo apt-get install aria2

There are two interfaces for Aria2 for those who have little familiarity with the commandline:

• Aria2fe designed and constructed using C++/Qt
• Aria2::GUI written in Perl, with usage of the Perl-TK-Modules (require perl and perl-tk installable from repository)