Whether you need a quick-and-dirty way to download a file via HTTP, HTTPS or FTP; or test a web page or recursively download a whole site, WGET is a great tool for the task.

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., on both Windows- or *nix-based systems.

GNU Wget has many features to make retrieving large files or mirroring entire web or FTP sites easy, including:

• Resume aborted downloads, using REST and RANGE
• Use filename wild cards and recursively mirror directories
• NLS-based message files for many different languages
• Optionally converts absolute links in downloaded documents to relative, so that downloaded documents may link to each other locally
• Runs on most UNIX-like operating systems as well as Microsoft Windows
• Supports HTTP proxies
• Supports HTTP cookies
• Supports persistent HTTP connections
• Unattended / background operation
• Uses local file timestamps to determine whether documents need to be re-downloaded when mirroring
• GNU Wget is distributed under the GNU General Public License.

Wget has an extensive set of options, the full list of which can be viewed from the command line with “wget –help.”  Here are a few useful examples

Example 1 – Download the default page for given site to your current directory:

wget powercram.com

Example 2 – Recursively download the default page plus an additional level based on links from the default page:

wget -r -l 2 powercram.com

Example 3 – This will do as in example 2, additionally specifying username and password if required by site:

wget -r -l 2 --random-wait --http-user=powercram --http-password=powercram powercram.com

Example 4 – WGET can be used to recursively mirror your site, including download all the images, css and javascript, etc., and localize all of the URLS (so the site works on your local machine).  You can even save all the pages as .html files.

– To mirror your site:

wget -r http://www.powercram.com

– To mirror the site and localize all of the URLs:

wget --convert-links -r http://www.powercram.com

– To mirror the site and save the files as .html:

wget --html-extension -r http://www.powercram.com

Download WGet for Windows, install it, play with it and have some fun.

GNU wget runs on any version of Windows, including 2000, 2003, XP, Vista, Windows 7.

More

• How To Use Wget – Includes Several Examples Using Wget