dl - fetch remote file for convenient local reading (That's lowercase "DL".) dl will fetch a document at a given URI, save to a temporary file, and then print its local path to standard output. This behavior makes dl handy on the Unix/Linux command line for treating remote URIs like local files. For example: less `dl http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3454.txt` xpdf $(dl http://www.cs.harvard.edu/~malan/resources/cheatsheet.pdf) emacs $(dl ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/net/internet.text) dl supports the HTTP, HTTPS and FTP protocols. It depends on wget for downloading; thus you must have wget installed. Error handling: In the event the document cannot be fetched, dl will emit a warning to stderr, print nothing to stdout, and yield a nonzero exit code. You might want to consider whether the invoked primary command (e.g., "less", "xpdf" or "emacs" in the examples above) will fail gracefully enough if this happens. dl is in the public domain. If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces. INSTALL Just save the file dl.sh as "dl", somewhere in your $PATH. (It has the .sh extension here to keep github from being confused about the file type.) Make sure that it has the execute bit set (chmod +x dl).