Wget usually comes pre-installed with most of the Linux Distributions. It is to be noted that the command given above is for only Debian based Linux systems such as Ubuntu. If a user has a Red Hat Linux system such as Fedora, then the user needs to enter the following command into the command line:.
As mentioned before, Wget has multiple features incorporated inside of it. The most basic operation that Wget offers to users is downloading files by simply using its URL.
This can be done by inputting the following command into the terminal:. Let us show an example to further clarify this. We will be downloading a simple image in the png format from the internet.
See the image below for better understanding:. Wget also allows users to download multiple files from different URLs. This can easily be done by the following command:.
Once again, we can show this using an example. We will be downloading two HTML files from two different websites. For better understanding, please look at the image below:. Here filename refers to the name that you want to address the file as.
Using this, we can also change the type of the file. This is shown in the image below:. Wget also allows users to recursively download their files which is basically downloading all the files from the website under a single directory. For more information regarding Wget, users can input the following command into the terminal to get access to all the Wget commands that appear to be available:.
Curl is another command line tool that can be used to download files from the internet. Unlike Wget, which is command line only, features of Curl are powered by libcurl which is a cross-platform URL transfer library.
Curl not only allows downloading of files but can also be used for uploading and exchanging of requests with servers. However, Curl does not support recursive downloads which Wget offers.
Similarly, like Wget, Curl comes pre-installed with most of the Linux Distributions. This can simply be checked by running the following command:. Just like Wget, Curl has multiple features incorporated inside of it. The most basic is its ability to allow users to download files from a single URL from the internet.
Suppose you are browsing an FTP server and you need to download an entire directory, you can use the recursive option. Yes, you can totally do that. You can mirror an entire website with wget. By downloading an entire website I mean the entire public facing website structure. If you aborted the download by pressing C for some reasons, you can resume the previous download with option -c. Like wget, curl is also one of the most popular commands to download files in Linux terminal.
To install curl on Ubuntu and other Debian based distributions, use the following command:. If you use curl without any option with a URL, it will read the file and print it on the terminal screen. It is simpler to download multiple files in Linux with curl. You just have to specify multiple URLs:. Keep in mind that curl is not as simple as wget. While wget saves webpages as index. This is because some times the links redirect to some other link and with option -L, it follows the final link.
As always, there are multiple ways to do the same thing in Linux. Downloading files from the terminal is no different. There are more such command line tools. Terminal based web-browsers like elinks , w3m etc can also be used for downloading files in command line.
Personally, for a simple download, I prefer using wget over curl. It is simpler and less confusing because you may have a difficult time figuring out why curl could not download a file in the expected format. Also a movie buff with a soft corner for film noir. It has many other features like resuming unfinished DLs among many others. One of my absolute favorite features is that Aria2 can also be used to both download and upload Torrents as a peer and seeder! It can do this by first downloading the.
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