Child Item

Link is different than usual

Did something change recently? I can't get wget to download the link how it's supposed to anymore on a terminal I have. I also noticed the share link is different. It like keeps not either downloading all, corrupting, or something else. I have no clue though, but my only lead is that the link is now different. It now generates a key at the end of the link now? I'm not sure what's messing it up. I'm pretty sure it has to do with whatever dropbox might have changed. I can't fix what I have without this working.

Before:

Now:

Find more posts tagged with

Shared Links

Developer

Promoted

Comments

Здравко

Hi @TheGabester,

I haven't noticed any recent change regarding links. You first screenshot shows shared link pointing to a file, but the second one is NOT a shared link; it's preview link (or looks like so, at least) and, of course, you cannot use this link as a shared link (just it's not, nothing more). Where you got this link from? 🧐 Did you change the way you used to receive shared link recently somehow? 🤔

TheGabester

Nope. It just randomly changed to look like that. I have no idea what happened. I just took a look at my setting and I don't see anything wrong? I'm not sure what's up with the link. I can't download it to my server though. It's a zip file with mods I uploaded and it keeps breaking every time I use wget to grab it to download it errors. So, I'm not sure. I'm not able to unzip it cause it like either is corrupted or unfinished?

TheGabester

Here's what happens when I try to download it. It throws me a log which never happens with anything with wget and if I try to unzip it it throws an error pretty much saying it's broken.

Здравко

Hi again @TheGabester,

You didn't mention where you get that link from! 🧐 This a key moment. It's definitely not from a place where people normally get shared link from. 👈

As I said previously, it's NOT shared link!

@TheGabester wrote:
... I'm not able to unzip it cause it like either is corrupted or unfinished?

Really? 🤔 Can the reason be that the file you have downloaded is NOT a zip file? Did you try open the particular downloaded file in some text editor, for instance? Usually zip files cannot open correctly (or you can't see anything meaningful there, at least)... what about this file... 😯 Surprise! 😜

@TheGabester wrote:
... It throws me a log which never happens with anything with wget ...

Really? 🤔 I don't think so. On the screenshot cannot be seen clear (cosa you masked the command line end), but there seems to be a & symbol. wget usually uses terminal to throw out some messages, but when the command runs in detached mode (ampersand at the end forces this mode) output messages are always redirected to such a log file, so you can read them later if you want to. That's not something new; maybe you have started using it starting recently and before that you had run commands without ending ampersand. 😀

By the way, it doesn't even need the ampersand to be at the end. Since you have ampersand in the middle of URL and it's not tagged in any way (neither the entire URL is quoted), your command line is interpreted by your shell as more than a single command! Take this in mind when you type some command (by mistake commands number can grow up unintentionally with different side effects). 😉

@TheGabester wrote:
... and if I try to unzip it it throws an error pretty much saying it's broken.

Yes, as far as a text file can be broken. By the way, did you try unzip some arbitrary text file? Just create a test.txt and put inside your name for example or some other arbitrary text (it's good to be long enough). Rename it to something like: test.zip. Finally try unzip it. You will get pretty much the same message. 🤫 This message just describes step by step what unzip tries to do and exactly where the things are going wrong. In particular case at very beginning. zip files write at the end information for all other records that reside in places through the file. That's why when a zip file is going to be read, that process starts from the end; starts with looking for 'End-of-central-directory' - something mandatory for every zip file. I hope you don't need assurance that a text file doesn't contain such thing.

In meantime I tried wget with normal link to file and with a preview link to the same file. As can be expected the normal shared link works normally and the downloaded file opens as usual. Again as can be expected, the preview link provides text file (more precisely text/html type) regardless pointed file actual type.

At the end: Get some real shared link and use it. Don't forget to change link type from preview (all shared links are produced in this view) to raw or downloadable link (such that wget and other such clients can use; ?dl=0 -> ?dl=1 or ?raw=1 ). In spite not always necessary, such a change ensure more stable work in all cases.

Hope this clarifies matter and helps.