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curl vs wget

Contents

  • curl strengths
  • wget strengths
  • Interesting wget options
  • Conclusiong
  • See also

I recently had to download large files (see post). Before I used a download helper, I used curl. It is a standard tool for downloading files. But there is another standard tool: wget. Let's see what I find in the first 10 Google hits about their differences.

  curl wget
Initial Release 1997 1996
License MIT/X derivate  GNUv3
Written in C C
OS cross-platform cross-platform
Protocols FTP, FTPS, Gopher, HTTP, HTTPS, SCP, SFTP, TFTP, TELNET, DICT, LDAP, LDAPS, FILE, POP3, IMAP, SMB/CIFS, SMTP, RTMP, RTSP HTTP, HTTPS, FTP
Usage curl -O [URL] wget [url]

curl strengths

  • curl supports much more protocols and platforms (OS/400, TPF - never heard of them before)
  • curl supports more authentication methods
  • curl supports gzip and deflate Content-Encoding and does automatic decompression

wget strengths

  • Recursive! Wget's major strong side compared to curl is its ability to download recursively, or even just download everything that is referred to from a remote resource, be it a HTML page or a FTP directory listing.
  • wget can recover from a prematurely broken transfer and continue downloading.
  • Wget enables more features by default: cookies, redirect-following, time stamping from the remote resource etc. With curl most of those features need to be explicitly enabled.

Interesting wget options

  • -b: Put the download in background. Interersting for large downloads.
  • --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0"
  • -i [filename]: Specify a filename with newline separated URLs to download
  • --mirror -p: Download a webpage
  • --convert-links: Convert links for offline viewing
  • -P ./LOCAL-DIR: where to store the webpage
  • --reject=gif: Don't download gif files
  • -Q5m: Stop downloading when the file size exceeds 5 MB

Conclusiong

Use wget when you want to download a single file or a website. Use curl for more fancy stuff.

See also

  • Daniel Stenberg: curl vs Wget
  • Unix.SE: What is the difference between curl and wget?

Published

Mär 14, 2017
by Martin Thoma

Category

Cyberculture

Tags

  • curl 1
  • download 2
  • wget 1

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