Wget

GNU Wget (or just Wget) is a computer program that retrieves content from web servers, and is part of the GNU Project. Its name is derived from World Wide Web and get, connotative of its primary function. It currently supports downloading via HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP protocols, the most popular TCP/IP-based protocols used for web browsing.

Its features include recursive download, conversion of links for offline viewing of local HTML, support for proxies, and much more. It appeared in 1996, coinciding with the boom of popularity of the Web, causing its wide use among Unix users and distribution with most major Linux distributions. Written in portable C, Wget can be easily installed on any Unix-like system and has been ported to many environments, including Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, OpenVMS and AmigaOS.

It has been used as the basis for graphical programs such as GWget for the GNOME Desktop and KGet for the KDE Desktop. Wget is free software.

Using Wget
Basic usage

Typical usage of GNU Wget consists of invoking it from the command line, providing one or more URLs as arguments.

# Download Wget's source code from the GNU ftp site.
wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/wget/wget-latest.tar.gz

wget http://www.example.com/

Advanced usage

# Using wget to download content protected by referer and cookies.
# 1. get base url and save its cookies in file
# 2. get protected content using stored cookies
wget --cookies=on --keep-session-cookies --save-cookies=cookie.txt http://first_page
wget --referer=http://first_page --cookies=on --load-cookies=cookie.txt
--keep-session-cookies --save-cookies=cookie.txt http://second_page

For more information see the man page of wget.


Authors and copyright

GNU Wget was written by Hrvoje Nikšić with contributions by many other people, including Dan Harkless, Ian Abbott, and Mauro Tortonesi. Significant contributions are credited in the AUTHORS file included in the distribution, and all remaining ones are documented in the changelogs, also included with the program. Wget is now maintained by Micah Cowan.

The copyright to Wget belongs to the Free Software Foundation, whose policy is to require copyright assignments for all non-trivial contributions to GNU software.

Thanks to : wikipedia