Force a direct download from a shared DropBox file

While working with DropBox today, I created shared links to a file, and the links looked like this:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/abcxyz123/filename.zip?dl=0

This link goes to a nice DropBox web page that provides a lot of information — information that would confuse a less-sophisticated user. Why can’t we just get them right to the download?

You can. In the DropBox shared file link, change the “dl=0” at the end of the URL to “dl-1”.

So the same URL above as a direct download would be:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/abcxyz123/filename.zip?dl=1

It’s always fun hacking URLs!