GNU Wget

A non-interactive network downloader.

Wget downloads files over HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP, with support for recursive retrieval (mirroring entire sites), retries, automatic continuation of partial downloads, cookies, and proxy traversal. It is the canonical "download a URL from a script" tool on Linux: small, scriptable, and ubiquitous.

Hrvoje Nikšić wrote the original wget in 1995, drawing on the earlier geturl utility he had also written. The GNU project adopted it in 1996 and continues to maintain it. The codebase is mature and slow-moving by design — most of the development energy in this space has shifted to curl, which has a richer protocol palette.

Wget and curl coexist on most Linux systems. Wget's strengths are its simple invocation for "fetch this URL to a file" and its built-in recursive retrieval; curl's strengths are its breadth of protocols and its API-style flag handling. Many distribution install scripts (including Ubuntu and Fedora documentation) routinely call out wget by name as the canonical fetcher.

License: GPL-3.0-or-later

Category: CLI tools

Website: https://www.gnu.org/software/wget/

Install

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install wget
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install wget
Arch:          sudo pacman -S wget
macOS:         brew install wget

Authors

Hrvoje Nikšić (creator)
GNU Project

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