Curl has this impressive looking feature: $ man curl --max-filesize <bytes> Specify the maximum size (in bytes) of a file to download. If the file requested is larger than this value, the transfer will not start and curl will return with exit code 63.
NOTE: The file size is not always known prior to download, and for such files this option has no effect even if the file transfer ends up being larger than this given limit. This concerns both FTP and HTTP transfers.* Anyways, wget could also have --max-filesize. WWWOFFLE could do something on a per URL basis. We modem users then wouldn't have to worry about something going hog wild as much. (*Well, they ought to have another option about what to do if it is not known: get up to max=0, XXX bytes, or infinity. Wait... couldn't some track of how many bytes swallowed so far be made and a stop be put to it if it exceeds... Indeed, wget prints those progress messages showing it is keeping track, info in header or not. Indeed, at least we can still see the top part of some whopping .JPG, etc. Too bad .pdfs are seemingly useless if truncated.)
