Wget command in Linux/Unix

Wget is the non-interactive network downloader which is used to download files from
the server even when the useer has not logged on o the system and it can work in
background without hindering the current process.

GNU wget is a free utility for non-interactive download of files from the Web.
It supports HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP protocols, as well as retrieval through HTTP
proxies.
wget is non-interactive, meaning that it can work in the background, while the
user is not logged on. This allows you to start a retrieval and disconnect from the
system, letting wget finish the work. By contrast, most of the Web browsers require
constant user�s presence, which can be a great hindrance when transferring a lot of
data.
wget can follow links in HTML and XHTML pages and create local versions of
remote web sites, fully recreating the directory structure of the original site.
This is sometimes referred to as recursive downloading. While doing that, wget
respects the Robot Exclusion Standard (/robots.txt). wget can be instructed to
convert the links in downloaded HTML files to the local files for offline viewing.
wget has been designed for robustness over slow or unstable network
connections; if a download fails due to a network problem, it will keep retrying
until the whole file has been retrieved. If the server supports resuming, it will
instruct the server to continue the download from where it left off.

Syntax :

wget [option] [URL]

Example :
1. To simply download a webpage:

wget http://example.com/sample.php

2. To download the file in background

wget -b http://www.example.com/samplepage.php

3. To overwrite the log wile of the wget command

wget http://www.example.com/filename.txt -o /path/filename.txt

4. To resume a partially downloaded file

wget -c http://example.com/samplefile.tar.gz

5. To try a given number of times

wget --tries=10 http://example.com/samplefile.tar.gz

Options :

1. -v / �version : This is used to display the version of the wget available on

your system.

Syntax

$wget -v
2. -h / �help : This is used to print a help message displaying all the possible
options of the line command that is available with the wget command line options

Syntax

$wget -h [URL]

3. -o logfile : This option is used to direct all the messages generated by the
system to the logfile specified by the option and when the process is completed all
the messages thus generated are available in the log file. If no log file has been
specified then the output messages are redirected to the default log file i.e. wget
-log

Syntax

$wget -o logfile [URL]

4. -b / �background : This option is used to send a process to the background as

soon as the process has started so that other processes can be carried out. If no
output file is specified via the -o option, output is redirected to wget-log by
default.

Syntax

$wget -b [URL]

5. -a : This option is used to append the output messages to the current output log
file without overwriting the file as in -o option the output log file is
overwritten but by using this option the log of the previous command is saved and
the current log is written after that of the previous ones.

Syntax

$wget -a logfile [URL]

6. -i : This option is used to read URLs from file. If -i is specified as file,

URLs are read from the standard input.If this function is used, no URLs need be
present on the command line. If there are URLs both on the command line and in an
input file, those on the command lines will be the first ones to be retrieved. The
file need not be an HTML document if the URLs are just listed sequentially.

Syntax

$wget -i inputfile
$wget -i inputfile [URL]

7. -t number / �tries=number : This option is used to set number of retries to a

specified number of times. Specify 0 or inf for infinite retrying. The default is
to retry 20 times, with the exception of fatal errors like connection refused or
link not found, which are not retried once the error has occurred.

Syntax

$wget -t number [URL]

8. -c : This option is used to resume a partially downloaded file if the resume

capability of the file is yes otherwise the downloading of the file cannot be
resume if the resume capability of the given file is no or not specified.

Syntax

$wget -c [URL]

9. -w : This option is used to set the system to wait the specified number of
seconds between the retrievals. Use of this option is recommended, as it lightens
the server load by making the requests less frequent. Instead of in seconds, the
time can be specified in minutes using the m suffix, in hours using h suffix, or in
days using d suffix. Specifying a large value for this option is useful if the
network or the destination host is down, so that wget can wait long enough to
reasonably expect the network error to be fixed before the retry.

Syntax

$wget -w number in seconds [URL]

10. -r : this option is used to turn on the recursive retrieving of the link
specified in case of fatal errors also. This option is a recursive call to the
given link in the command line.

Syntax

$wget -r [URL]

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