Resume downloads, limit speed and more with wget
Written by Guillermo Garron
Date: 2008-05-15 10:36:30 00:00
wget is a command line tool used to download files, or complete webpages, it is a great utility with lots of options, as you can see if you read the wget man page
Some months ago, I have written about how to download files with wget, now I want to add some other tips to those already explained that day.
Resume a download
If you need to stop a current download, and pretend to resume it later, you should use the -c option i.e.:
wget http://some.server.com/file -c
Traffic shaping, or limiting the speed of the download
I really use this feature a lot, as my home ADSL is not as big as I would like, I have to use the speed limiter, when downloading ISOs, otherwise I just can not continue working, to limit the speed of the download use the –limit-rate option.
wget http://some.server.com/file --limit-rate=20k
That line is going to limit the download speed to 20 Kbytes per second, or 160 kbps.
Let wget working after log out from ssh connection
I usually connect through ssh to my office (better ADSL than my home’s) and download the files there over the night, the next day I bring them home.
So, to make wget continue working after the log out, because I do not want to let my home PC on all night long, so the command is:
wget -b http://some.server.com/file
Logging the output to a file
This is useful when you are working with wget in the background, to be able to know what was wrong if anything goes wrong, use the -o option and specify a file to store the logs.
wget http://some.server.com/file -o $HOME/log.txt
Of course you can combine the options, and put something like this:
wget -b -c http://some.server.com/file --limit-rate=20K -o $HOME/log.txt