Axel

The fourth download utility in our list is Axel, attempts to improve the downloading process by using multiple connections for one file. It can use multiple download locations for one download. According to the developers, Axel can increase the download speed of your downloads by 60% and it supports protocols: HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, and FTPS.

We have reviewed Axel in a separate article, which you can find here: How to use Axel as download accelerator to speed up FTP and HTTP downloads in Linux.

In the above article, you can check some download time comparisons between wget, HTTP download, and Axel.

Here are some examples of using Axel:
To perform a simple download with Axel, you can use the following command:

$ axel https://wordpress.org/latest.zip
You can set maximum download speed with the corresponding option –max-speed or short option -s. The value is set in bytes per second:

$ axel –max-speed=512000 https://wordpress.org/latest.zip
To save the file with different name, you can use the -o option to specify the file name:

$ axel -o wordpress.zip https://wordpress.org/latest.zip
If you want to install Axel on your Linux system use the appropriate from the commands below:

$ sudo apt install axel # Ubuntu/Debian

yum install epel release && yum install axel # CentOS/RHEL

dnf install axel # Fedora

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.