CLI Reference

Complete reference for using Pincer as a standalone command-line download tool.

See also: User Guide for quick-start examples · Session & Resume for persistence details

Basic Usage

For quick direct downloads without using the RPC server:

./target/release/pincer "https://example.com/file.zip"

This will download the file to the current directory using multiple threads by default.

Argument Reference

Flag	Long Form	Description	Default
`-s`	`--split`	Number of concurrent threads/connections (1-99).	`1`
`-d`	`--dir`	Target directory for the download.	Current Dir
`-o`	`--out`	Custom output filename.	From URL
`-f`	`--format`	Target format to convert the downloaded file to.	N/A
`-l`	`--log`	Enable detailed logging.	`false`
`-p`	`--port`	RPC server port.	`6842`
`-D`	`--daemon`	Run Pincer Engine as a detached background daemon.	`false`
`-h`	`--help`	Print help information.	N/A

Planned CLI Flags

The CLI parser (using lexopt) will be expanded to support additional flags:

-v or --version
-V or --check-integrity
-j or --max-concurrent-downloads
-c or --continue (Resumption)

Examples

High-Speed 16-Thread Download:

./pincer "https://example.com/movie.mp4" -s 16 -d ~/Downloads -o holiday_video.mp4

How Threading Works

Rust-Native Performance: Built on tokio for non-blocking I/O and zero-allocation disk writes.
Dynamic Thread Scaling: Supports up to 99 threads per task. The engine automatically splits the file into equal byte-ranges and assigns a dedicated worker to each.
Range Support Detection: If a server does not support Accept-Ranges, Pincer gracefully falls back to a single thread to ensure data integrity.

Download threads are dynamically controlled via the JSON-RPC interface when adding or modifying a task using options like split and min-split-size. See Configuration for all available options.

Verifying Multi-Threading (Worker Logs)

To verify that Pincer is correctly utilizing multi-threading, observe the internal worker logs during a CLI download.

Example Log Output (-s 16):

🚀 Pincer CLI Mode
URL: https://images.pexels.com/.../photo.jpeg
Threads: 16
-------------------------------------------
[INFO] [Worker 0] Assigned range: 0 - 47938 (47939 bytes)
[INFO] [Worker 1] Assigned range: 47939 - 95877 (47939 bytes)
...
[INFO] [Worker 0] Connection established. Segment range: 0 - 47938
[INFO] [Worker 2] Connection established. Segment range: 95878 - 143816
...
[========================================] 100.00%
✅ Download complete!

Keyboard shortcuts