Gentlemen, some fool has, say, put a multimegabyte gif on some page that you have clicked for download next -fetch.
Sure, you can wait till you notice your modem session has been completely wasted and then call in the sharpshooter i.e. http://jidanni.org/comp/wwwoffle/wwwoffle-swat Or, if you have been tipped off that there might be something big up, you could probe first before putting it on the fetch list: Andrew> If you are online and use wget -Y on --spider URL Andrew> and then decide that the page is too large then pressing Control-C Andrew> will stop wget. This will mean that WWWOFFLE will stop downloading Andrew> the page unless the intr-download-size or intr-download-percent Andrew> options are set to keep on downloading the page. Well, OK, but that's still no defense against one bloated gif in a million. That's where cattleguard(tm) comes in. Yes, cattleguard lets you the user set limits for in wwwoffle.conf, oh 100kb for *.gif, oh 200kb for *.jpg, you can even set limits for html and pdf and txt! Now you can click in confidence, that never again will someone have the liberty feed you some file with _no limits whatsoever_ just because you clicked on it or something that contained it. What happens is wwwoffle first checks the Content-Length field of the HTTP header to see if the proposed file is in bounds. If it is overboard or [optional:] doesn't have a Content-Length field, well, wwwoffle then just replaces it with one of its greypages saying what the deal was, with a special link in case you still want to get the file, now aware of just how big it is. Would the wget crew think of releasing wget without --quota? Therefore it's time wwwoffle stop the end of the victimization via any old net.accident that got near its nozzle... vote for (Andrew to kindly implement some form, any form of my) cattleguard (concept) today! Be it thru mere Content-Length header checks, or real download counts, anything is better that finding out for the last 45 minutes you've not been downloading that important doctoral treatise, but instead a blow up of somebody's nose.
