That's not really it - I'm generally going to be right-clicking on the
link, copying the URL to the clipboard then pasting it into a terminal
session on a different system.
The thing is that many commandline http fetch clients do just that,
fetch a file. If that file redirects to a different URL they don't
follow that redirection.
So, for example, if the visible URL is
http://us2.php.net/get/php-4.3.3.tar.bz2/from/this/mirror and that
redirects to http://us2.php.net/distributions/php-4.3.3.tar.bz2
the URL that it would be useful to be able to copy would be
the latter.
If I try and use, say, curl to fetch the former I'll just get
the redirection page.
I would suggest you use wget or lynx or links to fetch the file. We do not give out direct links right away for a reason (counting downloads).
Goba