This guide will walk you through the steps for installing and using wget on Windows.

Transcription

1 Wget Windows Guide This guide will walk you through the steps for installing and using wget on Windows. The Eye is currently sponsored by 10gbps.io. Check out their services, they re awesome. :) Quick Jump: Getting Started Installing Usage - The wget help and man page - Download a single file - Download a folder - Other flags worth noting

2 Getting Started Wget is a command line program, this means that you use it by interacting with the command line. The command prompt on Windows machines is called CMD. There are two ways to get to the windows command prompt. The first is just by searching cmd and hitting enter. The second is by hitting the Windows + r keys and typing in cmd.exe and hitting enter. When you have cmd open it'll normally look like this: 1

3 Installing Now, we will be installing wget. If you have a 64 Bit system download this file and if your system is 32 Bit download this file. If you downloaded wget64.exe I would suggest renaming the file to wget.exe. This makes it easier to use later on. After you have downloaded the file, we need to place the file in our path. Navigate to C:\Program Files in Windows Explorer. Next create a folder called Binaries. Do this by right clicking on the blank half and and going to New > Folder 2

4 The folder will pop up and name it Binaries. Next, you will need to move the wget.exe file you downloaded into the Binaries folder. 3

5 Finally, we need to add the file to our path. You'll need to have the command prompt open for this step. When you have the command prompt open, you'll need to enter this set "PATH=%PATH%;C:\Program Files/Binaries" press enter when inputted. If it was successful, it shouldn't say anything back. NOTE: This will only set the path temporarily, to set it permanently, follow this. If you have followed these instructions correctly, when you type wget and hit enter in the command prompt it will tell you wget: missing URL this means everything is working properly! 4

6 NOTE: If you forgot to rename wget64.exe to wget.exe you will have to use wget64 instead of wget at the command prompt. NOTE: If you do not have administrator access you can use a different folder from C:\Program Files just make sure that you also change this in the path section. 5

7 Using wget This section will explain how to use wget when it's installed The wget help and man page If you are having an issue or want to find out how to do something new, you can almost always find this info in the wget man page. If you want to view basic help about wget from the command line you can enter wget -h. This will give you a list of available flags to use and their arguments. Additionally, you can find the wget man page [here]( this is a detailed guide and can be a bit easier to read than just wget -h. Download a single file If you want to download a single files with wget, it is typically very easy. At the command line, enter wget '<your url here>'. This will begin your download and show you a progress bar based on how complete the download is. 6

8 Wget will download files to the folder you are running the command from. If you want wget to download to another folder there are two ways to do this The first is by navigating there from the command prompt. To do this enter cd <path you want to go to>. The cd command stands for change directory. It is also worth noting that cd.. will change to the parent folder. 7

9 The second way it to tell wget. Do this by using the --directory-prefix=<path> flag. Download a folder Sometimes, there are lots of files in a folder you would like to download. Wget makes doing this easy. Passing the -m or mirror flag to wget will tell it to recurse into folder and download all the files on each flag. When you use the -m flag it is also suggested to use the -np flag or no parent. This prevents wget from downloading the entire site and going up folders. Wget will also download all the index.html files, the way to prevent this is by using -R 'index.html*', -R means reject. Another very helpful flag to include is the -c flag, or continue, this will resume downloads that got interrupted when downloading. We end up with the basic command wget -m -np -c -R 'index.html*' '<your url>' 8

10 Other flags worth noting These additional flags may help you also. -U - user agent This will set the user agent that is used when downloading, some sites block things like wget and this will usually work to work around that by setting them to a user agent of a valid browser. --no-check-certificate - Don't validate certificates If wget spits out certificate issues, this flag will tell wget to ignore them and download anway -O - output Tell wget where to download a specific file, this is helpful if you want to name the file something other than what it is on the site you're using. -q - quiet Download files without showing the output from the command -e robots=off - disable robots.txt This command disables checking the robots.txt file. Robots.txt is used to tell crawlers what not to download, by default wget will obey this and may leave files not downloaded. More about robots.txt can be found here. NOTE: Stopping Wget If you would like to stop a currently running command hit the Control + C keys. 9