Download full macos installers with curl --limit-rate and can resume partial dow...

Author

Intended for home users to get huge installers very slowly without hogging bandwidth. Supposedly softwareupdate also throttles downloads based on machine usage, but this script always forces throttling.

This script can download on a 10.11 laptop, for example, the entire 6gig+ full mojave installer very slowly in background, via curl with a --limit-rate 377k throttling. Edit the value to suit your needs for example "3M" should finish 6gig download in about 6 hours . At the 377k/sec as is, it might take a 1 or 2 days for entire 6gigs per https://www.download-time.com/. Re-run the command if need be to resume downloads after laptop wakes up. Should probably be run from /tmp so a reboot would delete any partial/incomplete downloads. Just remember to move downloads out of tmp before a restart, because macos clears /private/tmp upon every startup.

This is a hack of munki//installinstallmacos.py script
My python skills are horrible, or I would try to fork the munki script, and add proper command line argument "--limit-rate" to pass to
curl, and fix the url issue. I may try making feature request in issues...

The munki script on 10.11 macbook-air died saying Could not find a default catalog url for this OS version. unless a complicated --catalogurl was passed.

This fetch-macOS.py would get 10.14 but had no rate-limit nor resume ability. so I used the "something" url from it. Only other tweaks: comment out the check if running as root, and added --limit-rate 377k to curl command it uses.

Quickstart

Save to fetch-macos-throttled-resume.py in your Downloads folder.
Optionally edit the --limit-rate value which is very slow in this example 377k

$   chmod a+x  ~/Downloadsfetch-macos-throttled-resume.py
$   cd /tmp;   ~/Downloads/fetch-macos-throttled-resume.py
...
 #    ProductID    Version    Build   Post Date  Title
 1    061-77704    10.15.4  19E242d  2020-02-26  macOS Catalina Beta
 2    001-15219    10.15.5  19F2200  2020-06-15  macOS Catalina
 3    001-04366    10.15.4  19E2269  2020-05-04  macOS Catalina
 4    041-91758    10.13.6    17G66  2019-10-19  macOS High Sierra
 5    041-88800    10.14.4  18E2034  2019-10-23  macOS Mojave
 6    061-26589    10.14.6   18G103  2019-10-14  macOS Mojave
 7    061-86291    10.15.3  19D2064  2020-03-23  macOS Catalina
 8    041-90855    10.13.5   17F66a  2019-10-23  Install macOS High Sierra Beta
 9    061-26578    10.14.5  18F2059  2019-10-14  macOS Mojave
10    061-44345    10.15.2   19C39d  2019-11-15  macOS Catalina Beta

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