wget is a Linux command-line utility used to download files and web pages from the internet. It supports several internet protocols including HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP to access and retrieve the files. You can use different options with the wget command to perform a variety tasks. The wget utility is very useful on slower and unstable internet connections. The wget command keeps trying until the entire file has been retrieved in the event of a download failure.

Features

In this post, we will show you how to use the wget command to download files in Linux.

First, log in to your Atlantic.Net Cloud Server. Create a new server, choosing any Linux operating system with at least 1GB RAM. Connect to your Cloud Server via SSH and log in using the credentials highlighted at the top of the page.

By default, the wget package comes pre-installed on all major Linux operating systems. If not installed, you can follow the below steps to install it.

For Debian and Ubuntu operating systems, install wget using the following command:

For RHEL, CentOS, Rocky Linux, and Fedora operating systems, install wget using the following command:

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The basic syntax to download a file using the wget command is shown below:

To download a single file, run the following command:

This will download a file named skypeforlinux-64.deb to your current working directory:

You can also download multiple files at once by specifying multiple URLs with the wget command.

This will download multiple files in your current working directory:

Generally, the wget command will download and save a file with its original name. You can use the -O option with the wget command to save a file with a different name.

This will download the file and save it with a different name:

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By default, the wget command downloads the file in your current working directory. You can use the -P option to download the file in a specified directory:

Output:

You can use the -i option to specify a file containing a list of URLs to be downloaded. First, create a file named download-list.txt:

Add all URLs from where you want to download files:

Save and close the file, then run the wget command by specifying download-list.txt file as shown below:

This will download all files one by one as shown below:

If you are trying to download a large file and it stops due to a slow or unstable internet connection, then, you can use the -c option to resume downloading the same file where it left off.

Output:

You can use the –no-check-certificate option to ignore SSL certificate checks while downloading files over HTTPS.

Output:

The wget command will also allow you to set a speed limit on a slower internet connection. You can use the –limit-rate option to set the speed limit.

For example, to set the speed limit to 10k, run the following command:

You should see the following output:

The wget command also allows you to specify a username and password if you want to download a file from the password-protected FTP server.

You can use the following syntax to download a file from the password-protected FTP server:

You can use the -m option to create a complete local copy of the website by downloading all website files including CSS, JavaScript, and images.

If you want to use the downloaded website for local browsing, you can use some extra options with the wget command:

In this post, we explained how to use the wget command with different options to download files from the remote URLs. You can now use the wget command according to your needs. Try it on dedicated servers from Atlantic.Net!