Wget for fun

Wget is nice little piece of software that everyone should know. With it you can check site, download from FTP an entire collection of files or a photo gallery. Just open your terminal and these steps
GNU Wget is a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, the most widely-used Internet protocols. It is a non-interactive commandline tool, so it may easily be called from scripts, cron jobs, terminals without X-Windows support, etc.

GNU Wget has many features to make retrieving large files or mirroring entire web or FTP sites easy, here are some interesting options.

All these commands must be used from linux terminal.

Basic use download a package knowing its http (or ftp) URL:

wget http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/patch-2.6.23.bz2

Using Wget for Recursive Downloads

wget -r http://my.site.todownload.com/

The -r command tells wget to recursively download everything from the listed url.

Using Wget for Recursive Downloads but limit the number of levels to 2

wget -r -l2 http://my.site.todownload.com/

Now the -r does the same as above the -l tells wget to limit to that
number of levels here 2 levels deep (otherwise the defualt is 5)

Using Wget for Recursive Downloads but limit the type of files you want to download

wget -r -A.pdf -R.htm http://my.site.todownload.com/

This one tells wget to do a recursive get and Accept all files with .pdf extension and reject all files with .htm extension

Using Wget for Recursive Downloads from a FTP with authentication

wget -r ftp://username:password@my.site/path/to/download

Here you tell wget to download from FTP with userid and password

Using Wget to check dead link on your site

wget spider -r -o log.txt http://yourdomain.com

In this example we tell Wget to act like a web spider (Wget will
behave as a Web spider, which means that it will not download the
pages, just check that they are there), and put results in the file
log.txt, so you can open it and search for a list of broken links.

Using Wget to download a photo gallery

for i in `seq -w 1 100`; do wget http://www.mysite.com/images/DSCF00$i.jpg; done

In this example we run a cycle that go from 1 to 100 and every time
download a different URL, really useful for quickly download a gallery
with no links.

Finally, I forgot to tell you that wget is also usable by Mac and Windows (requires Cygwin)

And let me know if you use wget in a fanciful way