A One-line CLI Bandwidth Test

There are plenty of speed test sites out there, but I like the simple things in life—like a command-line way of doing something that others do with Flash (yuk).

Here’s the command I have in my .aliases file:

wget http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test -O /dev/null

This is great because:

1. wget is pretty ubiquitous
2. Cachefly is the world’s fastest CDN with the most hops, so no matter where you are you’ll be able to get a true test of your connection by seeing how quickly you can pull from it.

…and then you just run it whenever you’re traveling or feeling a slowdown at home by typing:

bt

Enjoy.

Notes

1. Running it with bt assumes you’ve created an alias for it, which I have.
2. The alias is alias bt="wget http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test -O /dev/null".
3. The -O /dev/null option was suggested by foo in the comments. Thanks, foo!
4. My friend Tim F. reminds me that the 100MB file is usually sufficient, even though the 400MB option is there.