How can the script be optimized?

Question

Python

I needed to download the whole album from VK. 120+ photos, too lazy. I installed a plugin for Chrome, got a list of links to photos, put them in a text file.
I think, let me write a PHP script that will do everything for me. But then I remember that I want to learn Python, so without thinking twice I decided on the tool. Remembering the recently read Dive into Python and googling a couple of questions regarding the jump itself, I wrote the following code.

# Imports
import urllib
import os

# Initialize downloader
web = urllib.URLopener()

# Path/files
cwd = os.getcwd()
urls = os.path.join(cwd, 'data.txt')

# Read the file
sock = open(urls)
data = [item.strip() for item in sock.readlines()]
sock.close()

# Download files
for url in data:
    # Get the filename
    basename = os.path.basename(url)
    
    # Destination..
    dest = os.path.join(cwd, 'temp', basename)

    # Process download
    web.retrieve(url, dest)

    # Print we are done
    print 'Done %s' % dest

The question is: what could be done better? Maybe somewhere it could be easier?
I already see that it is not necessary (or is it necessary?) to specify the absolute path to the files, but this is my habit with PHP.

Answer 1

> The question is: what could be done better? Maybe somewhere it could be easier?
Use wget.
-i, --input-file=FILE download URLs found in local or external FILE.

Answer 2

For training, you can do exception handling so that the script does not crash on the first broken link, but throws an error in stderr

Answer 3

If the goal is to practice programming, then you can rewrite it for parallel downloading.
In general, look towards asyncore or greenlets.

Answer 4

Any rocking chairs (for example Download Master) can take a list of files for downloading directly from the buffer. Specifically DM (the current it is now) can also import a list of addresses for downloading from a file.