pip install rfcdl

./setup.py install

sudo dnf copr enable eikendev/rfcdl
sudo dnf install python3-rfcdl

This tool can be used to download a large number of RFC documents in a short period of time. I used it to keep a local mirror of all RFCs on my machines continuously synchronized.

For a quick introduction, let me show how you would use the tool to get started.

This is how you download the RFCs initially.

rfcdl -d ~/download/rfc/

As can be seen above, you have to specify a directory where all RFC documents will be saved in. Upon the next invocation of rfcdl, only the RFCs missing in that directory will be downloaded.

This can then be combined with an alias that lets you read the local copy of any RFC. The following command opens the RFC 8032 for me in less.

rfc 8032

Check out my dotfiles to see how this is implemented.

If you only want to download a random subset of all RFCs, use the --samples flag. This can be used for testing. For instance, the following will download 20 random RFC documents.

rfcdl -d ~/download/rfc/ --samples 20

Since rfcdl downloads multiple files in parallel by default, one can specify how many simultaneous downloads are allowed using the --limit flag. The following invocation will only download at most ten files in parallel.

rfcdl -d ~/download/rfc/ --limit 10

To explicitly state how many times rfcdl should download a file upon error, the --retries flag can be used. This can be useful in case one expects a bad connection. This is how you could tell the tool to try to download each file at maximum five times.

rfcdl -d ~/download/rfc/ --retries 5

A configuration file can be saved to ~/.config/rfcdl/config.ini to avoid specifying the path for each invocation. Of course, $XDG_CONFIG_HOME can be set to change your configuration path. Alternatively, the path to the configuration file can be set via the --config-file argument.

[GENERAL]
RootDir = ~/download/rfc/

The source code is located on GitHub. To check out the repository, the following command can be used.

git clone https://github.com/eikendev/rfcdl.git