Using wget

Mar 13

ErinFLOSS, Technology 1 Comment

I use wget from time to time (via cygwin when I am in the office) but the most I have used on its parameter is the -c option. This post is a reminder of the options and tips that I could use and have used for the wget utility. Why not just consult the manpage? It is because it is easier to put it here for further reference. There are a thousand wget tutorial sites out there, so why waste space here? The answer to that is because I can. 😛

Usage: wget [options] URL

  • Instead of specifying the proxy using the environment variable http_proxy, consider putting it in /etc/wgetrc instead. Not advisable if you dont have a consistent single source of connection (e.g. prepaid cards,etc)
  • -c – continue the file being downloaded. nifty if you are downloading a big file although it requires the download site to support resuming.
  • –user-agent=”UA_STRING” – based on a tip from the PLUG list. Spoofs the user agent to look like the download request is from a browser. This is good for sites that disallow dowloads from download managers. Example would be -user-agent="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0b1; Windows NT 5.1*) "
  • –limit-rate=[number] – limits the download rate so wget does not hog all the bandwidth. Appending a k at the end of the number signifies kilobytes per second.

More updates as I use more options. 🙂