CURL

cURL is a command line tool for transferring files with URL syntax, supporting FTP, FTPS, SCP, SFTP, HTTP, HTTPS, TFTP, TELNET, DICT, FILE and LDAP.

• http://curl.haxx.se/

curl from PHP: PHP: CURL, Client URL Library Functions

# Performance Comparison*
# 10 per minute for fopen/fread for 100 HTTP files
# 2000 per minute for PHP/CURL for 2000 HTTP files