woof – share files easily

Computers nowadays are an essential part of our everyday life, yet a simple “just send that file over” often still is a problem. There obviously are numerous solutions, most of them are however tailored to set up permanent access, e.g. samba shared, fileservers. Setting these up involves quite some work – too much work for just sharing one file once. Enter woof. woof allows you to share single files and directories with great ease, all you need is a linux shell and python installed.

Quickstart Guide:

1. Download woof and save it to a location in your PATH (e.g. /usr/local/bin).
2. Make it executable (e.g. chmod +x /usr/local/bin/woof).
3. Run it, using the file or directory you want to share as parameter (e.g. woof picture_of_me.png).
4. woof will now print an URL like this “Now serving on http://88.198.138.65:1234/”. Give this URL to the recipient of the file.
5. The recipient can now paste this URL to his browser, which will then start downloading the shared file or directory (in that case, a .tar.gz will be created).
6. woof will print a line similar to this for every request: “139-208-103-86.dynamic.dsl.tng.de – – [11/Dec/2008 13:02:39] “GET /picture_of_me.png HTTP/1.1” 200 -“

Options:

The following Options are available:

• -i <ip address>: choose a particular IP on a multi-homed system
• -p <port>: choose a port
• -c <count>: Amount of requests to serve, before woof terminates itself. Usually best set to 1.
• -u: Skip compression.
• -s: Instead of a file or directory, woof can also distribute itself. Use -s instead of the parameter for a file or directory.

Configuration Files:

Instead of having to type your commonly used options everytime you use woof, you can also place them in INI-style configuration files at /etc/woofrc or ~/.woofrc:

[main]
ip = 88.198.138.65
port = 1234
count = 1
compressed = true

More Information:

This post is only meant as a quick reference – a far more detailed guide written by Mayank Sharma can be found at linux.com.