“Ad-hoc webserver” for static files on UNIX/MacOSX?

Question

Is there such a thing as a tiny little webserver that I can invoke from the command line that just fetches files from the local filesystem and serves them via HTTP on specific p

Answer 1

$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer [port]

will start a webserver in the current directory serving whatever files are found there.

In a few cases this won't work well, for example the server is single-threaded (so no simultaneous downloads) and doesn't handle byte-range requests (clients expecting Range: support often fail badly).