MEGAcmd

Command Line Interactive and Scriptable Application to access MEGA

meganz
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MEGAcmd - Command Line Interactive and Scriptable Application

MEGAcmd provides non UI access to MEGA services. It intends to offer all the
functionality with your MEGA account via commands. It features synchronization
, backup of local folders into your MEGA account and a webdav/streaming server.

See Usage Examples.

Available packages for MEGAcmd in all supported platforms should be found
here. If the package fails to install, read below for the requirements.

It supports 2 modes of interaction:

  • Interactive - A shell to query your actions
  • Scriptable - A way to execute commands from a shell/a script/another program

In order to provide those 2 modes, it features one server (MEGAcmdServer), an interactive shell (MEGAcmdShell) and several commands that will launch the non-interactive client (MEGAcmdClient).

See Usage and Platform to understand how to use it in your particular system.

Building MEGAcmd

If you wish to build or install MEGAcmd, here are a list of requirements and instructions.

Requirements

The requirements are the same as those for the sdk (usually cryptopp, zlib, sqlite3, cares, libuv, ssl, curl, sodium, readline for platforms other than Windows. It is recommended to include pcre to have support for regular expressions.

In order to have support for thumbnails and previews, it is highly recommended to have ffmpeg (libavcodec-dev libavutil-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev) and mediainfo(libmediainfo-dev + libzen-dev) for media file attributes.

For convenience, here is a list of packages for common Linux Distros and precompiled third party dependencies for other Operative Systems:

  • Ubuntu 16.04

    • autoconf libtool g++ libcrypto++-dev libz-dev libsqlite3-dev libssl-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libreadline-dev libpcre++-dev libsodium-dev libc-ares-dev libfreeimage-dev libavcodec-dev libavutil-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev libmediainfo-dev libzen-dev

  • Ubuntu 18.04

    • autoconf libtool g++ libcrypto++-dev libz-dev libsqlite3-dev libssl-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libreadline-dev libpcre++-dev libsodium-dev libc-ares-dev libfreeimage-dev libavcodec-dev libavutil-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev libmediainfo-dev libzen-dev libuv1-dev

  • Debian 9

    • libcrypto++ libpcrecpp0v5 libc-ares-dev zlib1g-dev libuv1 libssl-dev libsodium-dev readline-common sqlite3 curl autoconf libtool g++ libcrypto++-dev libz-dev libsqlite3-dev libssl-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libreadline-dev libpcre++-dev libsodium-dev libc-ares-dev libfreeimage-dev libavcodec-dev libavutil-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev libmediainfo-dev libzen-dev
    • In some instanances you may need to run
      apt install --reinstall build-essential

  • Windows

    • For Windows, we have recently overhauled the build system and now all the steps are captured in this one script that will acquire and build all dependencies, as well as building MEGAcmd itself, using vcpkg and cmake. To get and use this script, follow these steps in a command prompt:
    • git clone --recurse-submodules --branch tag/youChoose https://github.com/meganz/MEGAcmd.git
    • cd megacmd/build/cmake
    • fullBuildFromScratchOnWindows x64-windows-mega

  • MacOS

Getting the source

Ensure you obtain the repository recursively.

git clone https://github.com/meganz/MEGAcmd.git
cd MEGAcmd && git submodule update --init --recursive

Building and installing

For platforms with Autotools, MEGAcmd can be built and installed with:

sh autogen.sh
./configure
make
make install
  • You will need to run make install as root

Note: if you use a prefix in configure, autocompletion from non-interactive usage
won’t work. You would need to source /YOUR/PREFIX/etc/bash_completion.d/megacmd_completion.sh
(or link it at /etc/bash_completion.d)

Alternatively you can build using Qt project located at contrib/QtCreator/MEGAcmd/MEGAcmd.pro.

For Windows/MacOS you will need to place the 3rdparty folder (included in the dependency bundle referenced above) into sdk/bindings/qt/.

Usage

Before explaining the two ways of interaction, it is important to understand how MEGAcmd works. When you login with MEGAcmd, your session, the list of synced folders, and some cache database are stored in your local home folder. MEGAcmd also stores some other configuration in that folder. Closing it does not delete those and restarting your computer will restore your previous session (the same as megasync won’t ask for user/password once you restart your computer).

You will need to logout properly in order to clean your data.

Now let’s get into details of the two usage modes. Both modes require that MEGAcmdServer is running. You can manually launch it. Fortunately, you can also open the interactive shell or execute any command and the server will start automatically.

Interactively:

Execute MEGAcmd shell. Platform section explains how to do that in the different supported systems. You should be facing an interactive shell where you can start typing your commands, with their arguments and flags.

You can list all the available commands with help.

And obtain useful information about a command with command --help

First you would like to log in into your account. Again, notice that doing this stores the session and other stuff in your home folder. A complete logout is required if you want to end you session permanently and clean any traces (see logout --help for further info).

Non-interactively:

When MEGAcmd server is running, it will be listening for client commands. Use the different mega-* commands available.

mega-help will list all these commands (you will need to prepend “mega-” to the commands listed there). To obtain further info use mega-command --help.

Those commands will have an output value != 0 in case of failure.
See megacmd.h to view the existing error codes.

Ideally, you would like to have these commands in your PATH variable
(See Platform for more info). For further info use mega-help --non-interactive.

Usage examples

Here are some examples of use (more info and usage examples are available at the User Guide).

Notice: the commands listed here assume you are using the interactive interaction mode: they are supposed to be executed within MEGAcmdShell.

  • A synchronization can be established simply by typing:
sync /path/to/local/folder /folder/in/mega

This will synchronize the contents in your local and your mega folder both ways.

  • You can also set remote backups of a local folder to keep historical snapshots of your files. So simple as:
backup /path/mega/folder /remote/path --period="0 0 4 * * *" --num-backups=10

This will configure a backup of “myfolder” into /remote/path that will be carried out at 4:00 A.M. (UTC) every day. It will store the last 10 copies.

Further info on backups here.

  • You serve a location in your MEGA account via WebDAV:
webdav /path/mega/folder
  • Or stream a file in your MEGA account:
webdav /path/to/myfile.mp4

Further info on webdav and streaming here.

  • Download the contents of a shared link:
get https://mega.nz/#F!ABcD1E2F!gHiJ23k-LMno45PqrSTUvw /path/to/local/folder

Now let’s do something more complicated with non-interactive usage using some GNU tools (similar stuff can be easily done in Windows as well):

  • We want to provide something crypto secured with only 10 minutes of access:
mega-put /path/to/my/temporary_resource /exportedstuff/
mega-export -a  /exportedstuff/temporary_resource --expire=10M | awk '{print $4}'
  • Or imagine we’d like to public the enterprise promotional videos of May 2015 that we have previously stored in MEGA:
for i in $(mega-find /enterprise/video/promotional2015/may --pattern="*mpeg"); do 
mega-export -a $i | awk '{print $4}'; 
done

Platforms

Linux

If you have installed MEGAcmd using one of the available packages at here.

Or have it built without --prefix, both the server (mega-cmd-server), the shell (mega-cmd) and the different client commands (mega-*) will be in your PATH (on a fresh install, you might need to open your terminal again).

If you are using bash, you should also have autocompletion for client commands working.

If that is not you case, include the location for the binaries in your PATH variable.

Windows

You can have MEGAcmd installed using the installer from here.

If you are interested in installing MEGAcmd without human intervention, notice that this installer supports silent installation, you just need to execute in your command prompt:

MEGAcmdSetup.exe /S

Once you have MEGAcmd installed, you just need to execute it (via Desktop icon or Start Menu) to open the shell. This will open MEGAcmdServer in the background (a process named MEGAcmdServer.exe).

For a better user experience (specially in Windows 7) we recommend executing MEGAcmd from PowerShell.

Open PowerShell and execute:

$env:PATH += ";$env:LOCALAPPDATA\MEGAcmd"
MEGAcmdShell

For non-interactive usage, there are several mega-*.bat client commands you can
use writting their absolute paths, or including their location into your environment PATH
and execute them normally (mega-*).

If you use PowerShell and you have installed the official MEGAcmd, you can do that simply with:

$env:PATH += ";$env:LOCALAPPDATA\MEGAcmd"

Client commands completion requires bash, hence, it is not available for Windows.

Caveats

Although there have been several efforts in having non-ASCII unicode characters supported
in Windows, there still may be some issues. Pay special attention if you are willing to use pipes or
send the output of a command into a file from your client commands. See help --unicode
for further info regarding that.

MacOS

Install MEGAcmd from here.

For MacOS, after installing the dmg, you can launch the server using MEGAcmd in Applications. If you wish to use the client commands from MacOS Terminal, open the Terminal and include the installation folder in the PATH.

Typically:

export PATH=/Applications/MEGAcmd.app/Contents/MacOS:$PATH

And for bash completion, source megacmd_completion.sh:

source /Applications/MEGAcmd.app/Contents/MacOS/megacmd_completion.sh

NAS systems

Currently we have build scripts for Synology and QNAP, which can be found in the build/<system> folder along with instructions on how to set up the build. Typically this results in a ‘package’ which can then be manually installed in the NAS. To use MEGAcmd on those systems, ssh into the device and run the commands as normal (having first added their folder to your PATH variable).

*Important note for MacOS Catalina or above: since Catalina, MacOS uses zsh as default shell. If you want to have auto completion, we strongly recommend you to use bash shell (just execute bash in your terminal).

Features:

Autocompletion:

MEGAcmd features autocompletion in both interactive and non-interactive (only for bash) mode. It will help completing both local and remote (Mega Cloud) files, flags for commands, values for flags/access levels, even contacts.

Verbosity

There are two different kinds of logging messages:

  • SDK based: those messages reported by the sdk and dependent libraries.
  • MEGAcmd based: those messages reported by MEGAcmd itself.

You can adjust the level of logging for those kinds with log command.

However, passing -v (-vv, -vvv, and so on for a more verbose output)
to an specific command will use higher level of verbosity of MEGAcmd based messages.

Further info on verbosity here.

Regular Expressions

If you have compiled MEGAcmd with PCRE (enabled by default), you can use PCRE compatible expressions in certain commands with the flag --use-pcre. Otherwise, if compiled with c11, c11 regular expressions will be used.

If none of the above is the case, you can only use wildcards: “*” for any number of characters or “?” for a single unknown character.

You can check the regular expressions compatibility with find --help:

find --help
...
Options:
 --pattern=PATTERN	Pattern to match (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions)

Notice: if you use MEGAcmd in non interactive mode, notice that shell pattern will take precedence. You will need to either escape symbols like * (\*) or surround them between quotes (e.g: “*.txt”).

MEGAcmd Updates

MEGAcmd updates automatically for Windows & MacOS.

For Linux, whenever there is a new update, it will be published in the corresponding repository and your system’s updating tool will let you update it.

Disable automatic updates

You can type update --auto=OFF to disable automatic updates. update --auto=ON will re-enable them.

If you want to see the state of automatic updates you can use update --auto=query. This will inform if automatic updates are enabled or not.

Notice that MEGAcmdServer must be running in order to have automatic updates working.

You can also update manually by typing update within MEGAcmd. This will check if there are updates available and proceed to update if affirmative. Whenever MEGAcmd is updated it will be restarted (all open instances of MEGAcmdShell will be restarted too).

Alternatively you can also execute MEGAcmdUpdater.exe in Windows or MEGAcmdUpdater (located at /Applications/MEGAcmd.app/Contents/MacOS) in MacOS.

Known Bugs

Currently there are certain discrepancies with PATHS when logging into a public folder.

For instance, imagine a folder named toshare with a subfolder named x. If we login in to toshare and execute find /x, this will be the output:

/toshare/x

Whereas if we execute find /toshare/x, we receive an error, since folder absolute path
refers to / as root path.

[err: 12:21:51] Couldn't find /toshare/x

It might better be referred as /toshare/x.