single file download

Having single file download would be cool. A couple options:

1. dat download <key>/file.txt, dat <key>/file.txt - download file with in memory metadata
2. dat clone <key>/file.txt - download file with sparse state

The first would be easier and can be implemented now. Second requires some sparse state tracker. This is because if you have a .dat folder and run dat sync it will try to download the whole dat by default, even if you only cloned a single file. We need some way to track:

1. If a dat was initialized in sparse mode
2. What files have been requested for download

This should probably happen in dat-node, since Desktop would have the same issue of sparse downloads ending up with the whole dat.

[dcposch]

Tools like dat ls / dat download would def make it easier to work with large dat repositories.

I have a medium-size dat repository (dat://dcpos.ch, ~10GB). Parts of it aren’t loading correctly in Beaker. To narrow down whether this is a Beaker or Dat issue, I tried downloading those files via command-line dat… and found there’s no way short of dat clone-ing the whole thing.

http:// has wget and curl, IMO dat:// needs an equivalent.

[pfrazee]

Neither dat ls or dat download should be terribly hard to implement.