Downloading files with wget, curl and ftp

You will often need to download files using the shell interface. There are multiple options on Unix-like systems that will allow you to do that. Below are a few examples.

wget

wget can be used to download files from internet and store them. The following command downloads a compressed archive from the web and stores it in the current directory.

$ wget http://www.openss7.org/repos/tarballs/strx25-0.9.2.1.tar.bz2

The -O option can be used to change the output file name.

$ wget -O strx25.tar.bz2 http://www.openss7.org/repos/tarballs/strx25-0.9.2.1.tar.bz2

You can also use wget to download a file list using -i option and giving a text file containing file URLs. Here is an example:

$ cat download-file-list.txt
                    URL1
                    URL2
                    URL3
                    URL4

                    $ wget -i download-file-list.txt

curl

ftp