4dl
4dl is a 4chan image downloader written in bash. It uses the 4chan API to scrape threads for all the images then downloads them with wget. Over the years I've made many iterations of this and currently this is the best in my opinion. It could be better (more modular, have archive support, better command-line flags) but it's fast and it works. It is more or less feature complete for what I want it to do so I thought I'll just put it on GitHub.
I think it could be rewritten in POSIX shell in the future which is a goal of mine but it probably won't add anymore features. Speaking of features...
Features
- Pretty print display of the thread stats - such as poster name, board, subject, comment, post date, replies, files etc - before downloading.
- Cache's the thread data so only one web request needs to be made, aside from downloading.
- Saves the thread no. and board to a file so you can tell if you've downloaded the thread before. Useful when downloading wallpapers from /wg/. Also uses the
--no-clobberwget flag which will not redownload things that are already downloaded. - Calculates, at the end, how many files were downloaded and how long it took in a human readable format.
- If the bump/image limit has been reached or the thread is archived then a status message will appear.
- Parallel downloading for faster downloads.
Nix
For example, to open a shell in which 4dl is made available in $PATH:
nix shell github:numpadd/4dl
Or to run the script directly:
nix run github:numpadd/4dl https://boards.4channel.org/board/threadnumber ~/Pictures/directory
Or to quickly install this program in a per-user profile:
nix profile install github:numpadd/4dl
Dependencies*
- awk
- bash obviously
- coreutils
- curl
- dateutils
- fd
- findutils
- grep
- jq
- ncurses
- recode
- util-linux
- wget
*most of these are dependencies due to the sheer laziness of myself :)