Resume interrupted downloads with cURL in Linux

I have recently been trying to download an ISO of a certain Linux distro, but I find myself at the wrong end of a crappy connection. I tried downloading it with both Firefox and Chrome but both choked very early in the process and current speed would go down to 0 and after a while the connection would just cutoff with no way to resume the download from where I left off.

Fear not because [cURL][curl] comes to the rescue. After typing Up-Arrow and Enter more time than I care to admit, I decided to let the computer do the hard work and automate this thing. So I created a small Bash script called acurl.sh (for Automated cURL) that looks like this:

export ec=1;

while [ $ec -gt 0 ]; do
    /usr/bin/curl -O -C - $1;
    export ec=$?;
done

if [ $ec -eq 0 ]; then
    echo "Downloaded $1";
fi

What's going on above is that I have a while loop that is checking the exit code of curl. This exit code is captured by assigning the value of $? to the variable $ec. If curl exit code is larger than 0 then continue trying to download the file, which is represented by parameter $1, from where we left off, which is accomplished by passing the parameter -C to curl.

Assuming that the script above is located somewhere in the $PATH, then using it is as simple as this:

acurl.sh http://distrodomain.org/downloads/linux-distro-version-platform.iso

This is definitely a brute force approach, but it does the work.

[curl]: http://curl.haxx.se/ "cURL"