Curl & Wget

1. A curl command is a command line tool that helps to transfer the data from server to client and vice versa.

Syntax: curl [OPTIONS] [URL]

By default curl is already installed in Linux.

Eg 1: If you want to see the content of website

ubuntu@ip-172-31-35-243:~$ curl https://linux.org/

Eg 2: You can save the content in other file.

ubuntu@ip-172-31-35-243:~$ curl -o file1.txt https://linux.org/

Eg 3: This command will download the file.txt from example.com and save it with the same file (file.txt) in the current directory

curl -O http://example.com/file.txt

Eg 4: It resumes the previously interrupted download. This is useful when the file download is incomplete and you want to resume the download where it was left.

curl -C http://example.com/file.txt

Eg 5: If example.com redirects to newsite.com, it will output the redirect message and not follow the new URL.

curl http://example.com

It will redirect to newsite.com and follow the content of redirect link

curl -L http://example.com

It fetches the HTTP headers of URL without downloading the actual content.

curl -I http://example.com

2. The wget (Web Get) command is used to download the file from server or retrieve the resources from web server. It fetches the data from URL

Syntax: wget [OPTIONS] [URL]

Eg 1: Download the file from the specified URL

wget http://example.com/file1.txt → save the file with file1.txt

Eg 2: If you want to save the file with other name

wget -O local.txt http://example.com/file1.txt

Eg 3: It will download the file from its subdirectories.

wget -r http://example.com

Eg 4: To limit the download speed

wget —limit-rate=100k http://example.com/file.zip