To follow up on the excellent suggestion by Kenosis 
Here is how
Rio's copy-to operator could be used to download a file.
require 'rio'
rio(url) > rio('output_dir')
The post mentions that the file is compressed. If it is a gzipped file
and one wished to have an uncompressed local copy, something like the
following could be used.
rio(url_of_gzipped_file).gzip > rio('output_dir')
Cheers
-Christopher
Kenosis wrote:
···
Might also be a good use of Rio (search this group for info on Rio.)
Ken
Jeffrey Schwab wrote:
> Une bévue wrote:
> > i'd like to know how to download a compressed file (4 to 15 mb) with
> > ruby, and how to choose the folder to receive it ???
>
> require 'open-uri'
>
> url = 'http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby/tree/browse_frm/' +
> 'thread/6db927bc86697398/f3cd16a2b541528c?rnum=1&_done=' +
> '%2Fgroup%2Fcomp.lang.ruby%2Fbrowse_frm%2Fthread%2F6db9' +
> '27bc86697398%2Ff3cd16a2b541528c%3F#doc_f3cd16a2b541528c'
>
> open("myfile.html", 'w') do |dst|
> open(url) do |src|
> dst.write(src.read)
> end
> end