I periodically need to retrieve new CentOS and Fedora releases. Sometimes I need to snag CDs (I still support machines without DVD drives), and in other cases I need DVDs. Typically when I’m playing around with new releases I grab both, and use the wget to retrieve them all at once. If you pass wget a FTP URL that contains a *, it will retrieve all of the files in the directory you are retrieving files from. Here is an example:
$ wget ftp://foo/pub/centos/5.6/isos/x86_64/
This will grab all of the files in the x86_64 directory and place them in the current working directory. You can also disable prompting and use the mget command with your favorite FTP client, but I find wget to be a bit more versatile since you can use the "-c” option to continue failed transfers. What is your favorite method to retrieve files?