Linux Pocket Guide, 2nd Edition

Name

wget — stdin  stdout  - file  -- opt  --help  --version

Synopsis

wget [options] URL

The wget command hits a URL and downloads the data to a file or standard output. It’s great for capturing individual web pages, downloading files, or duplicating entire web site hierarchies to arbitrary depth. For example, let’s capture the Yahoo home page:

$ wget http://www.yahoo.com
23:19:51 (220.84 KB/s) - `index.html' saved [31434]

which is saved to a file index.html in the current directory. wget has the added ability to resume a download if it gets interrupted in the middle, say, due to a network failure: just run wget -c with the same URL and it picks up where it left off.

Perhaps the most useful feature of wget is its ability to download files without needing a web browser:

$ wget http://www.example.com/files/manual.pdf

This is great for large files like videos and ISO images. You can even write shell scripts to download sets of files if you know their names:

$ for i in 1 2 3; do wget http://example.com/$i.mpeg; done

Another similar command is curl, which writes to standard output by default—unlike wget, which duplicates the original page and file names by default.

$ curl http://www.yahoo.com > mypage.html

wget has over 70 options, so we’ll cover just a few important ones. (curl has a different set of options; see its manpage.)

Useful options

-i filename	Read URLs from the given file and retrieve them in turn.
-O filename	Write all the captured HTML to the given file, one page appended after the ...