A Tutorial on Wget
Basics
Wget is one of the powerful tools available there to download stuff from internet. You can do a lot of things using wget. Basic use is to download files from internet.
To download a file just type
[bash]
wget http://your-url-to/file
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But you cannot resume broken downloads.use -c option to start resumable downloads
[bash]
wget -c http://your-link-to/file
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You can also mask the program as web browser using -U.
This helps when the sites doesn’t allow download managers.
[bash]
wget -c -U Mozilla http://your-link-to/file
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Download Entire Website
You can download an entire website using -r option.
[bash]
wget -r http://your-site.com
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But be careful. It downloads the entire website for you. Since this tool can put a large load on servers it obeys robot.txt you can mirror a site on you local drive using -m option.
[bash]
wget -m http://your-site.com
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You can select the levels up to which you can dig into the site and downloads using -l option.
[bash]
wget -r -l3 http://your-site.com
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This will download only up to 3 levels. Suppose you want download only sub folders in a website url use –no-parent option. With this option wget downloads only the sub folders and ignores,the parent folders
[bash]
wget -r –no-parent http://your-site.com/subfldr/subfolder
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Now coming to terrible ideas.. to the hell with webmasters, not allowing to download the website type to ignore the robots.txt.
[bash]
wget -r -U Mozilla -erobots=off http://url-to-site/
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p.s. masking like a browser is a crime in some countries…. or something like that, i have heard on net.
Fooling the Webmasters
Do you think the web master cannot stop u with above command. to fool him use
[bash]
wget -r -U Mozilla -erobots=off -w 5 –limit-rate=20 http://url-to-site/
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here -w 5 instructs wget to wait 5 secs before downloading another file and –limit-rate=20 makes wget to cap the download speed to 20KBps. So u can fool the webmaster ….
Download all PDFs
You can download all files of a particular format , like all pdfs listed on a webpage,
[bash]
wget -r -l1 -A.pdf –no-parent http://url-to-webpage-with-pdfs/
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This is most useful for students. When they find a webpage of a professor with the files they can use this command to download all pdfs or lecture notes.