How can I use rsync to extract files from an HTTP url?

Question

There are tons of files here: http://data.pudo.org/flexicadastre/

I want to have a local folder containing the same files as in this url.

I tried:

rsync -av http://data.pudo.org/flexicadastre/ . 

But I get:

 ssh: Could not resolve hostname http: nodename nor servname provided, or not known rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [receiver] rsync error: unexplained error (code 255) at /SourceCache/rsync/rsync-45/rsync/io.c(453) [receiver=2.6.9] 

I usually use rsync to synchronize local folders or folders via FTP or SSH, but this is different and I'm not sure how to handle this. This site looks like FTP to me, but it is accessible via HTTP. I can’t understand how this works. May rsync is not possible in this scenario, and should I use something else?

Answer 1

Cannot use rsync on http addresses.

To use the rsync algorithm, client rsync must interact with the rsync server-side process. This is done either directly, or through ssh, or (less common) rsh. HTTP is not an option.

It is not possible to execute rsync in this scenario, and should I use something else?

It looks like you only want to mirror the data from HTTP to the local file system. There are several programs that do this as wget or lwp-mirror, and possibly many others.