No, RSYNC cannot be used to download files from an HTTP server. RSYNC is a tool frequently used in Linux environments to synchronize files and directories between different locations while using minimal data. It utilizes the RSYNC algorithm to decrease the amount of transferred data, making file synchronization faster and less bandwidth consuming. The major advantage of RSYNC is its ability to update whole directory trees and file systems, while preserving symbolic links, file permissions, user & group ownerships and timestamps. Its common use cases include taking backups, mirroring, and transferring large amounts of data to remote computers.
However, RSYNC is not designed to access files from or send files to HTTP servers. HTTP, or Hypertext Transfer Protocol, is a protocol designed specifically for transferring hypertext files through the internet. When you access a webpage through your web browser, you’re probably using HTTP or its secured version HTTPS to view the page.
If you want to download files from an HTTP server, other tools are more applicable, such as Wget or cURL. Wget, a popular and powerful tool, is a free utility. It’s used for non-interactive download of files from the Web and is highly flexible as it supports protocols like HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP. cURL is also a command line tool and library, which supports a wide range of protocols including HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and many more. These tools are particularly useful when you require to handle redirections, cookies, or user authentication.
Using one of these tools is generally as simple as providing the URL of the file to be downloaded. For example, with Wget you might use a command like `wget http://example.com/file.zip`. In the case of cURL, it could be `curl -O http://example.com/file.zip`.
So, to conclude, while RSYNC is a powerful and versatile tool for file synchronization, it does not support the downloading of files from an HTTP server. For such tasks, tools like Wget or cURL are more appropriate and commonly used.
References:
1. Tridgell, Andrew; Mackerras, Paul (1996). “The rsync algorithm”. Technical Report TR-CS-96-05. Australian National University
2. Free Software Foundation (2008): “GNU Wget 1.14 Manual”, Free Software Foundation
3. Daniel Stenberg (2013): “Everything curl”, Haxx
