Download A File and wget

By  on  

Using the cURL package isn't the only way to download a file. You can also use the wget command to download any URL.

The Bash Script

wget https://davidwalsh.name/ -O davidwalsh.name.txt

I'm guessing that wget and cURL aren't the only ways to download a file, but these are two easy ways to do so.

Also, look forward to more posts featuring wget -- it has a plethora of uses!

Recent Features

  • By
    Responsive Images: The Ultimate Guide

    Chances are that any Web designers using our Ghostlab browser testing app, which allows seamless testing across all devices simultaneously, will have worked with responsive design in some shape or form. And as today's websites and devices become ever more varied, a plethora of responsive images...

  • By
    Serving Fonts from CDN

    For maximum performance, we all know we must put our assets on CDN (another domain).  Along with those assets are custom web fonts.  Unfortunately custom web fonts via CDN (or any cross-domain font request) don't work in Firefox or Internet Explorer (correctly so, by spec) though...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Send Email Notifications for Broken Images Using jQuery AJAX

    It's usually best to repair broken image paths as soon as possible because they can damage a website's credibility. And even worse is having a user tell you about it. Using jQuery and PHP, you can have your page automatically notify you of broken...

  • By
    New MooTools Plugin:  ElementFilter

    My new MooTools plugin, ElementFilter, provides a great way for you to allow users to search through the text of any mix of elements. Simply provide a text input box and ElementFilter does the rest of the work. The XHTML I've used a list for this example...

Discussion

  1. Ahh yes, wget and cURL are soon becoming my most used utilities. Very great programs.

    It is a little trickier but you can also download flash videos on sites that allow you to buffer, like YouTube. I havn’t yet been able to download flash videos that only allow streaming, like hulu.

    Using wget to Download Youtube Videos

  2. xpix

    Why would you use something like that to download a page?

  3. @xpix,
    You would use something like that to download a page for processing. Through a script.

    For example if you wanted to automatically get the latest ISO of a Linux distro you could set up a cron job to check for updates every single day and download the latest version through wget.

    You could use wget to download a stats page, run a regular expression and print out certain pieces.

    Another example, you can use it to interact with almost all of Google’s services.

    wget --post-file template_entry.xml --header "Authorization: GoogleLogin auth=ABCDEFG" --header "Content-Type: application/atom+xml" "http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/brad.gushue"");

    The above code would post a new album to your picasa web albums.

    The possibilities are limitless.

  4. Not Me

    So what does Cygwin have to do with any of these posts?

  5. @Anon: I use Cygwin on my Windows computer. Obviously, you don’t need Cygwin if you run Linux.

  6. Not Me

    Or the Mac OS, or any flavor of Unix, or ….

  7. xpix

    Thanks for the answer Mark.

    I am building quite simple application and I never felt the need to to do any of that.

  8. I’ve used both wget and curl for downloading jobs, never found any difference between the two.

  9. TeMc

    @Not Me:

    Not though that Mac OS X (atleast 10.5 Leopard, and maybe 10.6) does not support the wget command by default.

    You have to install
    * XCode Developer Tools (do not untick “UNIX” in the install) version 3.1.4 (for Leopard) or 3.2 (for Snow Leopard)
    * MacPorts 1.8.2 (as of writing) for Leopard and another version for Snow Leopard
    * and then install the wget-command into that.

    Tho the above will open a lot of possibilities, it’s not unfair to say that it’s a pain to do all that to get to 1 specific applicatoin :-(

    (for allya Googlers:
    – Get a free account at the Apple Developer Connection and download the xCode Developer Tools (if you’re using Leopard, you’ll notice the version on the ADC-site is by default 3.2 for Snow Leoaprd, read here ( http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os-x-darwin-development/165766-xcode-leopard.html#post901636 ) to know how to get the old Leopard version
    – Then http://macports.org/ should get you going towards MacPorts and http://wget.darwinports.com/

    PS: DarwinPorts is the old name of MacPorts. Some tools still refer to DarwinPorts.

    TeMc

  10. Michael

    If a URL forces you to download a CSV file, how do we use PHP to download that onto a folder in the sever?

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!