Wget utility is a popular and feature-rich command-line based file downloader for Unix-like operating systems and Windows OS. It supports non-interactive downloading of files over protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP.
It’s designed to work reliably with slow or unstable network connections. Importantly, in case of network disruptions, it enables you to continue getting a partially-downloaded file by running a particular command again.
By default, wget downloads a file and saves it with the original name in the URL – in the current directory. What if the original filename is relatively long as the one shown below.
$ wget -c https://gist.github.com/chales/11359952/archive/25f48802442b7986070036d214a2a37b8486282d.zip
Taking the example above, to rename the downloaded file with wget command to something else, you can use the -O or --output-document flag with the -c or --continue options helps to continue getting a partially-downloaded file as we explained at the start.
$ wget -c https://gist.github.com/chales/11359952/archive/25f48802442b7986070036d214a2a37b8486282d.zip -O db-connection-test.zip
Note that -O flag tells wget to perform shell redirection other than instructing it to use the new name instead of the original name in the URL. This is what practically happens:
$ wget -cO - https://gist.github.com/chales/11359952/archive/25f48802442b7986070036d214a2a37b8486282d.zip > db-connection-test.zip $ ls
The file is written to standard output and then redirected by the shell to the specified file.
If you want to download videos from You-tube and other sites from the command line, you can install and use YouTube-DL in Linux.
