Axel is a command line based tool that really accelerates your download speeds on Linux by over 20 times your current download speed (the one which you get while you download using wget or firefox). Now let us see how axel manages to accelerate your downloads and how you can start using it on your system.

Installing Axel

If you are on a Debian or and Ubuntu system then you can directly install Axel using the following command:

sudo apt-get install axel

In case you are on other linux distributions then you can download the installer package and check this guide on how to installing the package.

Using Axel

Axel is a command line tool. It is so good that you can actually make it your full time replacement for wget. Here are some common options that you may use with axel, while downloading a file, in the command line.

Basic Usage

axel www.abc.com/file.zip

Limiting download speed

axel -s specify-limit-in-bytes-per-sec www.abc.com/file.zip

Limiting Connections

axel -n specify-number-of-connections www.abc.com/file.zip

Suppress the line-byline status output

axel -q www.abc.com/file.zip

Vivek has done a nice comparision between wget and axel and their performance which you might like to check.