
The IA Client – The Swiss Army Knife of Internet Archive - bryanrasmussen
http://blog.archive.org/2019/06/05/the-ia-client-the-swiss-army-knife-of-internet-archive/
======
dessant
If you're looking for a convenient way to search web pages on the Internet
Archive, you may also use my browser extension for viewing archived and cached
versions of web pages, it supports 15 data sources, and page archiving is also
planned.

[https://github.com/dessant/view-page-
archive](https://github.com/dessant/view-page-archive)

~~~
gitgud
Great idea! And a good way to solve a repetitive task I run into often.

------
IntelMiner
I was a little disappointed with the IA app. It works fairly well for the most
part, but it seems to lag behind in features for the site

I wanted to download all of the Computer Chronicles. Both for viewing offline
and to have my own "set" of files. I even re-encoded them to HEVC (from
MPEG-2) and put them up here
[https://intelminer.com/torrents/TV%20SHOWS/Computer%20Chroni...](https://intelminer.com/torrents/TV%20SHOWS/Computer%20Chronicles/)

Getting them from the Archive through was an exercise in frustration. IA
offers (and heavily recommends) using the torrent download option to ease on
bandwidth cost

Unfortunately for what ever reason, there's no way to pull down the .torrent
files using this method.

In the end I had to simply pull the MPEG-2 videos down one by one over the
course of several months (due to speed limiting on IA's end)

~~~
textfiles
I just tried this in bash:

for each in `ia search collection:computerchronicles --itemlist`; do ia
download $each --glob=*.torrent; done

I have myself a directory of torrents.

~~~
IntelMiner
I'm glad it works now. At the time it didn't seem to list .torrent as a valid
option though

------
mcguire
Is there a tutorial or introduction to the Internet Archive? There's a giant
mass of fascinating stuff, but I've always had a hard time getting a handle on
it.

~~~
textfiles
I'm working on one, but there isn't one as such, no.

------
basicplus2
now just need to be able to access it like traversing the "real" internet with
a time travel button

------
noirscape
It's a decent client, but be aware that you might want to increase the file
descriptor limit, the client at the moment doesn't properly close files from
my experience in using it to upload a fairly large folder structure.

A simple `ulimit -n` with the raised descriptor limit should take care of it.

~~~
jjjake
I think this should fix that:

[https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive/commit/1ac200cbbbe...](https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive/commit/1ac200cbbbe3bb039b50ffc1181798e3471281cc)

This change will be in the next release, v1.8.5.

~~~
noirscape
Ah, that is good to see then!

(sorry it took me a bit to respond, I'm not on HN all that often.)

------
ignaloidas
Meta: is "The Swiss Army Knife of $Something" the new "$Something for humans"
? I really hate these phrases as they technically can be put in front of
almost anything and stay semi-accurate, but not give any additional
information, besides being marketing-speak

~~~
eitland
It is not new :-)

> "Perl is the Swiss Army chainsaw of scripting languages" \-
> [https://www.perl.com/pub/2000/10/begperl1.html/](https://www.perl.com/pub/2000/10/begperl1.html/)
> > > Doug Sheppard, 2000-10-16

(Earliest quote I could find in three minutes.)

~~~
textfiles
I chose the phrasing because I deemed it accurate for the situation. This
script has multiple functions and does a number of distinct things well
depending on how it is invoked.

------
geephroh
My org has been using the client and python library for a couple of years to
interact with IA. It's a fantastic tool -- Jake Johnson's a superhero in my
book!

------
msla
Last time I checked, you could only give the download subcommand one option at
a time, so I wrote this shell script:

    
    
        #!/usr/bin/env zsh
    
        for i in "$@"
        do
             ia download $(basename $i)
        done

