GNU Wget is a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, the most widely-used Internet protocols. It is a non-interactive commandline tool, so it may easily be called from scripts, cron jobs, terminals without X-Windows support, etc.
GNU Wget has many features to make retrieving large files or mirroring entire Web or FTP sites easy, here are some interesting options.
All these commands must be used from linux terminal.
Basic use download a package knowing its http (or ftp) URL:
wget http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/patch-2.6.23.bz2
Using Wget for Recursive Downloads
wget -r http://my.site.todownload.com/
The -r command tells wget to recursively download everything from the listed url.
Using Wget for Recursive Downloads but limit the number of levels to 2
wget -r -l2 http://my.site.todownload.com/
Now the -r does the same as above the -l tells wget to limit to that
number of levels here 2 levels deep (otherwise the defualt is 5)
Using Wget for Recursive Downloads but limit the type of files you want to download
wget -r -A.pdf -R.htm http://my.site.todownload.com/
This one tells wget to do a recursive get and Accept all files with .pdf extension and reject all files with .htm extension
Using Wget for Recursive Downloads from a FTP with authentication
wget -r ftp://username:password@my.site/path/to/download
Here you tell wget to download from FTP with userid and password
Using Wget to check dead link on your site
wget spider -r -o log.txt http://yourdomain.com
In this example we tell Wget to act like a web spider (Wget will
behave as a Web spider, which means that it will not download the
pages, just check that they are there), and put results in the file
log.txt, so you can open it and search for a list of broken links.
Using Wget to download a photo gallery
for i in `seq -w 1 100`; do wget http://www.mysite.com/images/DSCF00$i.jpg; done
In this example we run a cycle that go from 1 to 100 and every time
download a different URL, really useful for quickly download a gallery
with no links.
Finally, I forgot to tell you that wget is also usable by Mac and Windows (requires Cygwin)
