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How to install wget on your Mac#
There are many alternatives to Wget for Mac if you are looking to replace it. The most popular Mac alternative is aria2, which is both free and Open Source.If that doesn't suit you, our users have ranked 48 alternatives to Wget and many of them are available for Mac so hopefully you can find a. Installing wget on Mac OS X El Capitan 10.11. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.
Ok, so Mac is cool and stuff, but it doesn't come with
wget
by default, which in my opinion sucks. wget
is a very useful tool and is used for downloading installation files among other stuff; it ought to be there on your Mac.Getting
wget
on Mac OS X is pretty easy, so worry not. Just follow my instructions. Before that make sure you have a C/C++ compiler on your system, if you have XCode, you are all set and ready.The first step, of course, is downloading the
wget
source code. We'll have to use our browser to download that since we don't have wget
yet. Get the wget
source from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/wget/, scroll down for the latest version. The latest version as of writing this post is wget-1.13.tar.gz.Once you have downloaded the source, unarchive it using Archive Utility (just double-click the downloaded file to get a new folder which looks like
wget-1.13
). Now open a terminal, cd
to wget-1.13
directory, and do the following:There you! Now you have
wget
installed on your Mac. Confirm it this way.Did
wget
fail to install because of some dependencies? Maybe you wanna go a less hardcore but very easy way, and manage all the packages on your system using Homebrew instead. Installing wget using Homebrew is as easy as doing this:Homebrew is highly recommended for managing the UNIX packages on your Mac. I could have straightaway told you the Homebrew way but you'd have missed some valuable lessons if I did. The instructions for installing Homebrew can be found here. Get it!
What does WGET Do?
Once installed, the WGET command allows you to download files over the TCP/IP protocols: FTP, HTTP and HTTPS.
If you’re a Linux or Mac user, WGET is either already included in the package you’re running or it’s a trivial case of installing from whatever repository you prefer with a single command.
Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple in Windows (although it’s still very easy!).
To run WGET you need to download, unzip and install manually.
Install WGET in Windows 10
Download the classic 32 bit version 1.14 here or, go to this Windows binaries collection at Eternally Bored here for the later versions and the faster 64 bit builds.
Here is the downloadable zip file for version 1.2 64 bit.
If you want to be able to run WGET from any directory inside the command terminal, you’ll need to learn about path variables in Windows to work out where to copy your new executable. If you follow these steps, you’ll be able to make WGET a command you can run from any directory in Command Prompt.
Run WGET from anywhere
Firstly, we need to determine where to copy WGET.exe.
After you’d downloaded wget.exe (or unpacked the associated distribution zip files) open a command terminal by typing “cmd” in the search menu:
We’re going to move wget.exe into a Windows directory that will allow WGET to be run from anywhere.
First, we need to find out which directory that should be. Type:
path
You should see something like this:
Thanks to the “Path” environment variable, we know that we need to copy wget.exe to the
c:WindowsSystem32
folder location.Go ahead and copy WGET.exe to the System32 directory and restart your Command Prompt.
Restart command terminal and test WGET
If you want to test WGET is working properly, restart your terminal and type:
wget -h
Wget Os X
If you’ve copied the file to the right place, you’ll see a help file appear with all of the available commands.
So, you should see something like this:
Now it’s time to get started.
Get started with WGET
Seeing that we’ll be working in Command Prompt, let’s create a download directory just for WGET downloads.
To create a directory, we’ll use the command
md
(“make directory”).Change to the c:/ prompt and type:
md wgetdown
Then, change to your new directory and type “dir” to see the (blank) contents.
Now, you’re ready to do some downloading.
Example commands
Once you’ve got WGET installed and you’ve created a new directory, all you have to do is learn some of the finer points of WGET arguments to make sure you get what you need.
The Gnu.org WGET manual is a particularly useful resource for those inclined to really learn the details.
If you want some quick commands though, read on. I’ve listed a set of instructions to WGET to recursively mirror your site, download all the images, CSS and JavaScript, localise all of the URLs (so the site works on your local machine), and save all the pages as a .html file.
To mirror your site execute this command:
wget -r https://www.yoursite.com
To mirror the site and localise all of the urls:
wget --convert-links -r https://www.yoursite.com
To make a full offline mirror of a site:
wget --mirror --convert-links --adjust-extension --page-requisites --no-parent https://www.yoursite.com
To mirror the site and save the files as .html:
wget --html-extension -r https://www.yoursite.com
To download all jpg images from a site:
Wget Command Not Found Mac
wget -A '*.jpg' -r https://www.yoursite.com
For more filetype-specific operations, check out this useful thread on Stack.
Set a different user agent:
Some web servers are set up to deny WGET’s default user agent – for obvious, bandwidth saving reasons. You could try changing your user agent to get round this. For example, by pretending to be Googlebot:
Wget For Mac Os X
wget --user-agent='Googlebot/2.1 (+https://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)' -r https://www.yoursite.com
Wget “spider” mode:
Wget can fetch pages without saving them which can be a useful feature in case you’re looking for broken links on a website. Remember to enable recursive mode, which allows wget to scan through the document and look for links to traverse.
wget --spider -r https://www.yoursite.com
Wget For Mac Os
You can also save this to a log file by adding this option:
Wget For Mac
wget --spider -r https://www.yoursite.com -o wget.log
Install Wget For Mac
Enjoy using this powerful tool, and I hope you’ve enjoyed my tutorial. Comments welcome!