From: "DanDiebolt.exe" Date: 2009-02-09T09:32:18+09:00 Subject: Re: How to monitor wget command progress in ruby? --0-1502869236-1234139596=:6549 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Look at the chart on that page. If you want to read character by character wget's stdout pipe = IO.popen("command", "r") Sorry I don't have time to write an example but this should point your in the right direction --0-1502869236-1234139596=:6549--