8.2.4 mirror

This Perl script, and its (optional) manager program called mirror-master, can be used to fetch user-specified parts of a directory tree from a specified host via anonymous FTP.

mirror is particularly useful for downloading large volumes of software. After the first time files have been downloaded from a site, a file called .mirrorinfo is stored on the local host. Changes to the remote file system are tracked automatically by mirror, which compares this file to a similar file on the remote system and downloads only changed files.

The mirror program is generally useful for updating local copies of remote directory trees. The files fetched need not be Debian files. (Since mirror is a Perl script, it can also run on non-Unix systems.) Though the mirror program provides mechanisms for excluding files names of which match user-specified strings, this program is most useful when the objective is to download whole directory trees, rather than selected packages.