Plowshare a terminal solution for one click file sharing

Whenever accessing my remote servers I have always prefered using ssh over other methods such as RDP and VNC. The later tend to be bandwidth hogs given how slow our networks tend to be. Often times they are often unusable. There are, however services such as the so-called one click file hosts that require a lot of human interaction and are a bit difficult to access over the terminal. In my own opinion calling these services one click is a bit of a misnomer because they usually involve a lot of clicking if one is to access the desired file which is usually hidden behind a hoard of ads.Partial, as I am, to using the command line I decided to hunt for a script that one can use to access onec lick hosts easily from the command line.

Plowshare

Plowshare is a commandline based upload/download tool that supports most popular one click file hosts including Rapidshare, Rapidgator, Uploading and Pastebin. It is compatible with all BSD/Linux/Unix systems which means you can install it on your Ubuntu/Centos/Fedora box or virtual machine.

Installing

Installing the script varies from distribution to distribution but you generally need root or sudo privileges. On Ubuntu plowshare can be installed using the following commands:

1. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:plowsharepackagers/ppa
2. sudo apt-get update&&sudo apt-get install plowshare

On Fedora and Centos machines you only need to run yum as follows:

• yum install plowshare

Captchas

When accessing free version services of most one click hosts one of the steps involves solving a CAPTCHA to prove that your are human. Plowshare allows you to use online CAPTCHA solvers to solve the CAPTCHAs for you.  Popular services include Antigate.com and 9kw.eu. You should note that most of these services are not free so you will do better avoiding services that make use of these CAPTCHAs. Better still you can pay for premium services with one of the most popular hosts like Uploading. Plowshare allows you to access Premium features for the most popular hosts.

This tool is not just for downloading files on the command line. It is useful when you want to upload files via the command line as well. Popular mirror creating sites such as embedupload.com and mirrorcreator.com are supported.A complete Readme for the Plowshare tool is available at their Google Code page here.

I hope you find this tool useful and please feel free to share other command line tools that are not so mainstream but are still useful