I needed a simple http file server to serve files around my home network.

A bit of googling found this. It trivial but so, so useful.

It uses the Ruby Webrick server so you have to have Ruby installed.

Assuming the path of the filesystem you want to sere is /home/me/heretheyare, run this in a terminal:

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ruby -rwebrick -e 'WEBrick::HTTPServer.new(:Port=>1234,:DocumentRoot=>"/home/me/heretheyare").start'

Use your browser, wget, whatever to pull the file(s) you need. Remember to include the port (if its not 80).

It should work on Windows but I haven’t tried; I use it on Ububntu.