Valid criticism, ish, but that wasn't in what was previously asked for so well done on being like my day-job clients and failing to specify the problem complete

Valid criticism, ish, but that wasn't in what was previously asked for so well done on being like my day-job clients and failing to specify the problem completely :) You can specify multiple URLs on the same command in curl so using xargs in this way would do what you ask to an extent (the connection would be dropped and renegotiated at least between each batch) as long as you don't use any options that imply --max-lines=1. With the --max-procs option you could be requesting multiple files at once which may improve performance over wget -i – though obviously take care doing this against a single site (with wget -i too for that matter) as this can be rather unfriendly (if requesting from multiple hosts this is moot, as is the multiple files-from-one-connection point).