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How do I schedule a steam download manually? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 6 months ago by MindTraveller@lemmy.ca to c/steam@lemmy.ml

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There's this game I'm trying to download, and it's big enough that it's going to take several days of continuous downloading to get. I have about half of it so far. I want it to download during my scheduled auto update hours, and pause in the morning when I wake up. Sounds simple, right?

Problem is, it won't. I can either drag it to "up next", in which case it downloads immediately, or I can drag it to "unscheduled", in which case it won't download at all, even if I leave my PC on all night. I can't click and drag it into the scheduled category. How do I get it in there so it'll download when I'm asleep, but won't hog the pre-bedtime bandwidth?

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[–] seathru@lemmy.sdf.org 18 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

Probably not exactly what you're looking for but I use a batch file to accomplish this (in linux but windows should be similar). For example:

#!/bin/bash
sleep 2h && steam
sleep 8h && killall steam

Executing that will wait 2 hours, start steam so it can download whatever it wants while I sleep, then shut steam down 6* hours later before other people start needing to use the internet.

*maybe 8 hours, I can't remember now if it runs commands sequentially or in parallel.

Edit: better single line command for linux:

(sleep 2h; steam) & (sleep 8hr; killall steam) &

[–] driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 7 points 6 months ago

Wouldn't be better to use crontab for that?

[–] subtext@lemmy.world 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I believe it should be 8 hours no?

sleep should be blocking and should stop the next line (or part after an &&) from executing.

[–] seathru@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 6 months ago

In the first example yes. In the second example the commands should run in parallel and be 6hr. I really should brush up on bash, I know just enough to be dangerous.