Linux download file commandline

The Command Line tool provided by Linux is one of its most powerful features that it offers to users and is also what makes it so fascinating and amazing to use.

A command line is simply a text-based interface that takes in commands and forwards them to the OS which runs them. It is due to this flexible nature of it that it has gained an edge over the Graphical User Interface GUI and as a result, many users have switched to the Command Line for doing various tasks, one of which is the downloading of files.

One of the most popular command line tools for downloading files from the internet is Wget. It also provides users with a variety of features ranging from recursive downloading to playing and pausing the downloads as well as limiting its bandwidth. Moreover, it is cross-platform which gives it quite the edge over many other command line downloaders as well as graphical downloaders. 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. One of the above should do the trick for you. Users on Windows can access wget via this website , and for Mac users we have a full guide on how to install wget in macOS.

The most basic operation a download manager needs to perform is to download a file from a URL. If you want to download a website you can specify the depth that wget must fetch files from. Say you want to download the first level links of Yahoo! The -r activates the recursive retrieval of files. The -l stands for level, and the number 1 next to it tells wget how many levels deep to go while fetching the files.

Try increasing the number of levels to two and see how much longer wget takes. What you need to do is something like this:. Another very useful option in wget is the resumption of a download. By Gary Newell Gary Newell. Tweet Share Email. Linux Switching from Windows. Was this page helpful? Thanks for letting us know!

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