If they've blocked robots, it's probably more polite to write a small script that includes small sleep delays between fetching files. Here urllib2 is your friend: http://docs.python.org/library... though admittedly a bit more work then your wget commands. - Ruchira S. Datta

how is using the "--wait" option in wget any different from what you suggest? - Chris Miller

ah, my eyes skipped right over that--it probably isn't (unless you wait a random interval, but I don't do that often). Thanks! - Ruchira S. Datta