Using WGET to download files

[admin]

Wget is a very versatile tool for downloading multiple files from a web page. For e.g very often u see web pages that have listed files in *.pdf or *.tar.gz, and they are just too many of them to be downloaded by cinventional method.
WGET comes to the rescue. This is a tool available on major linux distros.A similar tool "Teleport" is available on Windows.

for e.g. consider the following web site.
http://www.ulib.org/webRoot/Books/Nu.../bookcpdf.html

There are many pdf's listed that need to be downloaded. This can be done using the following command

%>wget -r -l 1 -A pdf -nd http://www.ulib.org/webRoot/Books/Nu.../bookcpdf.html

Here -r flag denotes that recursively go through each link.
-l 1 specifies that recurive depth is just 1
-A pdf specifies that the files to be downloaded have a pdf extension.. Additional extenstions can be specified by seperating them using a comma
-nd specifes that no directories should be formed. Hence all the files will be downloaded to the CURRENT directory


More info on this tool can be had by using the following command:

%>wget --help

[admin]

Downloading multiple files in background

To download multiple files using wget in background create a text file with urls.

Eg:

url.txt


http://www.bizhat.com/movie1.mpg
http://www.bizhat.com/movie2.mpg
http://www.bizhat.com/movie3.mpg
http://www.bizhat.com/movie4.mpg



now in shell prompt run

# wget -b -i url.txt

You will see some thing like

[root@host1 movie]# wget -b -i url.txt
Continuing in background, pid 30181.
Output will be written to `wget-log'.
[root@host1 movie]#

Now check the file

wget-log in current directory to know the status of wget file downloading.

You will get the command like back, so u can continue working on shell prompt, wget work in background.