Wget example download file

Such a command may look like this:. If you want to get only the first level of a website, then you would use the -r option combined with the -l option. It has many more options and multiple combinations to achieve a specific task. You can also find the wget manual here in webpage format. Redirecting Output The -O option sets the output file name. Downloading in the background. If you want to download a large file and close your connection to the server you can use the command: wget -b url Downloading Multiple Files If you want to download multiple files you can create a text file with the list of target files.

You would then run the command: wget -i filename. To do this use the --limit-rate option. Downloading in the background If you want to download in the background use the -b option. An example of how this command will look when checking for a list of files is: wget --spider -i filename. Example: -P downloaded --convert-links This option will fix any links in the downloaded files.

For example, it will change any links that refer to other files that were downloaded to local ones. You would use this to set your user agent to make it look like you were a normal web browser and not wget. Using all these options to download a website would look like this: wget --mirror -p --convert-links -P.

Was this article helpful? Using the tool, you can download files in background. Note that you can change the file name by using the -o lower-case option we've explained earlier. While using wget, you can also limit the downloading speed. This can be done using the -limit-rate option, which requires a value signifying the amount in terms of bytes per second. The amount could be in bytes, kilobytes with the 'k' suffix, or megabytes with the 'm' suffix.

Read timeout is the amount of time in seconds for which wget checks for data in case no data is being received before restarting the download. By default read timeout is seconds but you can change this by using the —read-timeout option. Whenever your download is interrupted due to bad internet connection or any other error, the tool tries to resume the download by itself.

By default, the utility tries 20 times and then stops. But if you want to increase or decrease the number of tries, you can do it by using the -t command line option. NOTE : This feature comes with the exception of fatal errors like "connection refused" or "not found" , which are not retried.

If you want, you can also make the wget command display additional information related to the download process.

This information is useful for debugging purposes if the tool isn't working properly. The feature can be accessed using the --debug or -d command line option. If you want, you can also modify the download progress indicator wget displays in output. There are two types of progress indicators: bar which is default and dot. However, if the output is not being displayed on terminal TTY then dot indicator is used as default. The --progress option lets you choose the type of indicator incase you want to override the default behavior.

For example:. Moving on, depending on the size of the file you are downloading, you can also adjust the way download progress meter is displayed. Note that the parameter you opt for binary, mega or giga usually depends on the size of the file being downloaded.

If you know the base URL is always going to be the same you can just specify the following in the input file:. If you have set up a queue of files to download within an input file and you leave your computer running all night to download the files you will be fairly annoyed when you come down in the morning to find that it got stuck on the first file and has been retrying all night.

You might wish to use the above command in conjunction with the -T switch which allows you to specify a timeout in seconds as follows:. The above command will retry 10 times and will try to connect for 10 seconds for each link in the file. You can use wget to retry from where it stopped downloading by using the following command:. If you are hammering a server the host might not like it too much and might either block or just kill your requests. You can specify a wait period which specifies how long to wait between each retrieval as follows:.

The above command will wait 60 seconds between each download. This is useful if you are downloading lots of files from a single source. Some web hosts might spot the frequency however and will block you anyway.

You can make the wait period random to make it look like you aren't using a program as follows:. Many internet service providers still apply download limits for your broadband usage, especially if you live outside of a city.

You may want to add a quota so that you don't blow that download limit. You can do that in the following way:. Note that the -q command won't work with a single file. So if you download a file that is 2 gigabytes in size, using -q m will not stop the file downloading. Note on a multi user system if somebody runs the ps command they will be able to see your username and password.

By default the -r switch will recursively download the content and will create directories as it goes. The opposite of this is to force the creation of directories which can be achieved using the following command:. If you want to download recursively from a site but you only want to download a specific file type such as a. The reverse of this is to ignore certain files. Perhaps you don't want to download executables.

In this case, you would use the following syntax:. To use cliget visit a page or file you wish to download and right click. A context menu will appear called cliget and there will be options to 'copy to wget ' and 'copy to curl'.

Click the 'copy to wget ' option and open a terminal window and then right click and paste. The appropriate wget command will be pasted into the window. It is worth therefore reading the manual page for wget by typing the following into a terminal window:.