wget is a simple command line-based tool that allows you to download files from the command line. It is a very powerful tool for downloading with a lot of options, but it can also be really helpful in diagnosing common downloading problems.
Unfortunately, as it is a command line tool, it can be daunting for users to use. This post is intended as a really simple reference for people who have been asked to download something via wget and want some step-by-step instructions to follow:
STEP 1: Download wget
a) Go to the wget for Windows page by Bart Puype and look for the wget download link and download it to your computer – preferably to your desktop. If you choose to download it elsewhere, you’ll need to know where you downloaded it to for the next step.
The download link looks like this:
STEP 2: Open a command prompt
wget is a command line utility, which means you can’t just double click on it and have it work. You need to open a command prompt and run it from there.
a) Hit the following key combination: Windows Key and R (that is, hold down the Windows key and hit “R”). A small “run” dialog will open in the bottom left of your screen.
b) In the run dialog, type cmd.exe and then hit the “OK” button:
c) After doing this, a black window will open on your screen looking something like the below:
STEP 3: Find and test wget
By default, your “run” command will have you sitting at your user profile directory. If you followed the instructions above, you downloaded wget.exe into your Desktop directory. Now you need to run the following commands, which you should be able to just type directly (without the quotes):
a) Type “cd desktop” and hit enter to change into the directory in which wget.exe is residing (if you did not download to your Desktop, you’ll need to figure out where you did download it to, and manually change to that directory).
b) To check if wget is working, type: “wget” and hit enter. It should look like the below:
If it does not, then something is wrong and you probably need to start again!
STEP 4: Get your download URL ready
If you’ve gotten this far, wget is correctly installed and ready to be used. All you need now is a URL to download.
A URL is the thing that you are clicking on that starts the actual file download process. When you click on a file download URL, you’ll get that little “save as” dialog in your browser which you then use to tell your browser where to put the file.
a) Instead of left-clicking on the URL you want to test to start the download, right-click on it. You will get a menu that looks like this (in Internet Explorer):
Select “copy shortcut”. Note if you are using a different browser like Firefox the text might be different (Firefox is “Copy Link Shortcut” for example).
STEP 5: Use wget to download a file
Now we have everything we need!
a) Click back to your command prompt window, which should be sitting there ready and waiting.
b) Type “wget” – but don’t hit enter!
c) Hit the space bar, so you have a space after the wget command.
d) In the top left of the command prompt window, there’s a little “C:\” icon. Click that and go through the menu that results until you find the ‘Edit’ submenu, then hit ‘Paste’:
e) If you have copied the link correctly, it should get pasted into the command line prompt, so you should end up with a something on the command line that looks like: “wget http://your.url.here.com/filename.zip”
f) Hit enter! The download will start and information will start spewing to the command prompt showing how fast it is downloading and how long it has left. If you get errors then you might not have pasted the right URL or there might be some other problem.
