wget is a utility for download files/content from the Web servers. It supports most of the protocols that are related to the Web such as HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP protocols.
wget utility is freely available package and the license is under GNU GPL License.
Its name is derived from World Wide Web and get (HTTP GET method).
Originally wget is written in C language, so it can be easily installed in any Unix like systems and even on Microsoft Windows systems.
Do you know?
In 2010 US Army intelligence analyst PFC Chelsea Manning used wget to download the 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables and 500,000 Army reports that came to be known as the Iraq War logs and Afghan War logs sent to Wikileaks.
wget is non-interactive, that means it will work as a background process whereas the user is not necessarily logged on. This permits you to begin a retrieval and disconnect from the system, letting wget complete the work.
wget will follow links in HyperText Markup Language pages and build native versions of remote web sites, absolutely recreating the directory structure of the original site. This is often generally cited as “recursive downloading” while doing that, wget respects the Robot Exclusion commonplace (/robots.txt) unless the option -e robots=off is used.
wget are often tutored to convert the links in downloaded HyperText Markup Language files to the native files for offline viewing.
Interesting Fact:
wget makes an appearance in the 2010 Columbia Pictures motion picture release, The Social Network. The lead character, loosely based on Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, uses wget to aggregate student photos from various Harvard University housing-facility directories.
After looking at above two facts, now you are more interested to learn wget!
wget has designed for hardiness over slow or unstable network connections i.e. its very robust. If a transfer fails because of any network issue, it’ll keep retrying till the full file has been retrieved.
If the server supports reconnecting, it’ll instruct the server to continue the transfer from wherever it left off.
Syntax:
The simplest way to use wget is to simply provide it with the location of a file to download over HTTP.
For example, to download the file “http://wingsoftechnology.com/sample.png”, this command
wget http://wingsoftechnology.com/sample.png
would download the file into the current working directory.
There are many options which allow you to use wget in different ways.
Do you want to check how wget useful practically?
Read: 10 practical examples using wget command in Unix
