PowerShell-based download manager

Ravikanth Chaganti used PowerGUI and BITS cmdlets to create a nice utility which lets you download multiple files using the great features of BITS protocol (works in background not affecting other applications, has priorities, allows to suspend and resume downloads and so on.)

To create a download job you can feed in a specific URL of a file you need to be downloaded, a CSV file or a URL of a page which references the files you need. In my case I used this latter option and supplied the URL of the page which has all downloads from Microsoft PDC conference.

Once I clicked OK the tool parsed the page and gave me a list of all the files it found linked from the page.

I used the Filter functionality to only pick the slides (files with PPTX extention) from PDC’s SVC track. Selected all the files and clicked Start Web Downloads:

Then I went to the List Active BITS Jobs node and pressed F5 from time to see the status changing.

For failed items you can click Restart (in my case though they all succeeded), for Transferred ones – Complete Transferred Jobs:

And you got the files!

You can download this pack (absolutely free with all PowerShell code behind!) here and read more about the pack in the user’s guide Ravikanth put together.

UPDATE: By the way, do let Ravikanth know what you think by sending him a tweet or leaving comments at the BITS PowerPack page or his blog. He is fixing issues and adding features amazingly fast! 😉