Wget is a computer software package for retrieving content from web servers using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP protocols. It is a non-interactive commandline tool, so it may easily be called from scripts, cron jobs, terminals without X-Windows support, etc. Its features include recursive download, conversion of links for offline viewing of local HTML, and support for proxies.
Lets have a look at some examples of using wget:
1. Download a webpage
$ wget http://www.examplewebsite.com/
2. Download a file from ftp server
$ wget ftp://ftp.examplewebsite.com/source-code.tar.gz
If you specify a directory, Wget will retrieve the directory listing, parse it and convert it to html
$ wget ftp://ftp.examplewebsite.com/
cURL is a computer software project and it produces two products – libcurl and curl.
libcurl
A free and easy-to-use client-side URL transfer library, supporting DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMTP, SMTPS, TELNET and TFTP.
libcurl supports HTTPS certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, kerberos, HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, user+password authentication, file transfer resume, http proxy tunneling and more!
curl
A command line tool for getting or sending files using URL syntax. Since curl uses libcurl, curl supports the same wide range of common Internet protocols that libcurl does.
Both cUrl and Wget can be used to download files, but the question comes which one to use. cUrl and Wget have some similarities and as well as differentiating factors, the one to use depends on your need.
