On Mon, 18 Dec 2000 Joern.Hartroth_at_comma-soft.com wrote:

> What is not so obvious is how the raw feature of supporting multiple URL
> target specifications in this syntax or the next can be combined with
> persistent connections in an efficient way. For instance, what is to keep
> a user from calling curl with, say,
>
> curl -o a http://this/a.html -o b http://that/b.html -o c http://this/c.html
>
> or some other combination of URLs that share several hosts in no particular
> order. For the sake of connection-efficiency curl would be required to
> perform out-of-order fetches of the specified set of URLs (sort according to
> hosts), but wouldn't that possibly be confusing for a casual user?

I agree completely here, the specified order on the command line must not
necessarily be the order in which the files are actually downloaded. It would
also be the similar thing if you'd request files with mixed protocols like:

  curl http://this/a.html ftp://this/b.txt http:// http://this/c.html

> Alternatively, the parser could forbid duplicate URLs pointing to the
> same host on the curl command line, but again such a restriction feels a
> bit clumsy.

Right, that wouldn't be very friendly to the users.

-- 
  Daniel Stenberg -- curl project maintainer -- http://curl.haxx.se/