There is the odd occasion where I want to download files incognito, that is, where my IP address is masked. To use Tor as a proxy for HTTP requests with curl or wget, install Tor.
$ sudo apt install tor
Check that Tor is running:
$ systemctl status tor
● tor.service - Anonymizing overlay network for TCP (multi-instance-master)
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/tor.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: active (exited) since Mon 2024-05-13 12:30:39 BST; 20h ago
Process: 870 ExecStart=/bin/true (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Main PID: 870 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
CPU: 765us
May 13 12:30:39 my-pc systemd[1]: Starting Anonymizing overlay network for TCP (multi-instance-master)...
May 13 12:30:39 my-pc systemd[1]: Finished Anonymizing overlay network for TCP (multi-instance-master).
Tor listens on TCP port 9050 by default. To download a single file, this command can be used:
$ curl --socks5-hostname localhost:9050 "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/Cat_August_2010-4.jpg/1920px-Cat_August_2010-4.jpg" -o "/home/cybrkyd/Pictures/Cat_August_2010-4.jpg"
To download multiple files, a shell script can be used to read URLs from a plain text file.
#!/bin/bash
# Read each URL from pix.txt and download using curl over TOR
while IFS= read -r url; do
filename=$(basename "$url") # Extract the filename from the URL
curl --socks5-hostname localhost:9050 -o "/home/cybrkyd/Pictures/$filename" "$url"
done < pix.txt
- pix.txt: this file contains the URLs of the files to be downloaded, with one URL per line
- The script will loop through pix.txt and download all files
Tor is slow. If you have hundreds of files to download, set the script to run and go do something else. Make a cup of tea or coffee!
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