Introducing the wget program

You may have already heard about or even used the wget program. It is a command line utility that can be used to download files from the Internet.

Here is a screenshot showing wget in its most simplest form:

wget options

In the output you can see that wget downloaded the index.html file from my jklewis.com website.

This is the default behavior of wget. The standard usage is:

  wget [options] URL

where URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator, or address of the website.

Here is just a short list of the many available options with wget:

Parameter	Explanation
-o	log file, messages will be written here instead of to STDOUT
-a	same as -o excepts it appends to the log file
-O	output file, copy the file to this name
-d	turn debugging on
-q	quiet mode
-v	verbose mode
-r	recursive mode

Let's try another example:

The -o option was used in this case. The return code was checked and a code of 0 means no failure. There was no output because it was directed...