Download Files Non-interactively

wget

The Net is a treasure trove of pictures, movies, and music that are available for downloading. The problem is that manually downloading every file from a collection of 200 MP3s quickly grows tedious, leading to mind rot and uncontrollable drooling. The wget command is used to download files and websites without any interference; you set the command in motion and it happily downloads whatever you specified, for hours on end.

The tricky part, of course, is setting up the command. wget is another super-powerful program that really deserves a book all to itself, so we don’t have space to show you everything it can do. Instead, you’re going to focus on doing two things with wget: downloading a whole mess of files, which is looked at here, and downloading entire websites, which is covered in the next section.