Download a list of PDFs with Firefox

12 มีนาคม 2562

I failed to download a list of PDFs by Wget, cURL, and Slimerjs. So I used Firefox and shell script.

First, I disable Pdfjs to force Firefox to download PDFs.

I wrote a shell script for opening a URL with PDF file, and then I use xdotool to close the Firefox window. For xdotool command, thank Jon G - Megaphone Tech for his comment at Unix Exchange.

#!/bin/sh

for url in `sort -u eng_pdf_urls.txt | grep -i pdf`
do
    echo $url
    firefox -P exp1 "$url" &
    sleep 10
    echo CLOSE
    xdotool search "Mozilla Firefox" windowactivate --sync key --window 0 --clearmodifiers alt+F4
    sleep 10
done

I didn't use headless because I don't know how to close it properly. I tried timeout command but Firefox detected it as an improper shutdown.