Download Large Files using Wget

Wget is a text based download manager, run from the terminal. Following is a guide on how to use it.

To use wget, it needs to be installed.

The easiest way to use wget, is to copy and paste the url to the a text editor, then copy and paste the wget commands from the text editor to the terminal.

See Copy and Paste with the Mouse.

Create a directory to save the files you download.

Let's create a new directory in /home/tc, called dl.

In the following examples, files will be downloaded to /home/tc/dl.

To download tinycore_3.6.iso, open the terminal and paste

cd /home/tc/dl
wget http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/tinycorelinux/3.x/release/tinycore_3.6.iso

To stop or pause a download, press ctrl+c.

To resume a download include, -c following wget. For example to resume downloading tinycore_3.6.iso, use

cd /home/tc/dl
wget -c http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/tinycorelinux/3.x/release/tinycore_3.6.iso

If downloading is stopped, wget will try again a total of 20 times. After that it will stop. If you want to change the number of times it tries again, insert -t followed by the number of times you want it to try.

For example if you were downloading Tiny Core 3.6, and wanted it to try again 80 times, you could use

cd /home/tc/dl
wget -c -t 80 http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/tinycorelinux/3.x/release/tinycore_3.6.iso

This has explained the basics of how to use wget, and may be used to download files.

You can actually do much more with wget. If you want, you can look for other examples on the Internet, and learn more about wget.