Apple - Is there a way via the command line to cause .icloud files to download?

The command you are looking for is brctl (located in /usr/bin). man brctl will tell you all you need, but basically just brctl download /path/to/filename (without the .icloud extension) and evict will purge the locally cached copy.

To my knowledge, there is no command included that allows you to directly download an iCloud file or folder.

But since I had exactly the same problem as you, I found that it was possible to do it in Swift with the startDownloadingUbiquitousItem function.

So I wrote a really simple Swift script for downloading both folder and file. You can download it on Github: iCloud Downloader

I hope I have answered your issue.

Scott Garret and Allan’s answer above is very close.

In the terminal, however, each *.icloud file is prefixed with a . when NOT downloaded.

For example, a directory called foo with optimised (i.e., offloaded to icloud) files a.txt and b.txt will look like this

$ cd foo
$ find . -name '.*icloud’
./.a.txt.icloud
./.b.txt.icloud

To resolve (i.e., download) the files from icloud, you need to pass the path to the resulting path to /usr/bin/brctl.

Thus, the following works.

find . -name '.*icloud' | perl -pe 's|(.*)/.(.*).icloud|$1/$2|s' | while read file; do brctl download "$file"; done

You can monitor the download activity as per this answer as follows :

brctl log --wait --shorten