Download a file from website linux

If you are stuck to the Linux terminal, say on a server, how do you download a file from the terminal? There is no download command in Linux but there are a couple of Linux commands for downloading file. I am using Ubuntu here but apart from the installation, rest of the commands are equally valid for all other Linux distributions. You can download a single file, multiple files, entire directory or even an entire website using wget.

This means you can easily use it in scripts or even build tools like uGet download manager. Most Linux distributions come with wget preinstalled. On Ubuntu and Debian based distribution, you can use the apt package manager command:. You just need to provide the URL of the file or webpage. It will download the file with its original name in the directory you are in.

It will be a good idea to provide custom name to downloaded file. Suppose you are browsing an FTP server and you need to download an entire directory, you can use the recursive option. Wget is probably the most famous one among all the downloading options.

It allows downloading from http, https, as well as FTP servers. It can download the entire website and also allows proxy browsing. Running the above code gives us the following result. I have also needed to do this Linux noob. What I have done is to use Firefox on my Win desktop to accept the license then start download.

As soon as the download starts, open the download dialog and cancel the download. Then rightclick on the cancelled item and choose "copy download link". You can now use this link in the wget command paste it in the terminal window.

The Overflow Blog. Who owns this outage? Building intelligent escalation chains for modern SRE. Podcast Who is building clouds for the independent developer? Featured on Meta. Now live: A fully responsive profile. Reducing the weight of our footer. This can be done by inputting the following command into the terminal:. Let us show an example to further clarify this. We will be downloading a simple image in the png format from the internet.

See the image below for better understanding:. Wget also allows users to download multiple files from different URLs. This can easily be done by the following command:. Once again, we can show this using an example.

We will be downloading two HTML files from two different websites. For better understanding, please look at the image below:. Here filename refers to the name that you want to address the file as. Using this, we can also change the type of the file. This is shown in the image below:. Wget also allows users to recursively download their files which is basically downloading all the files from the website under a single directory.