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