GNU Wget For Mac

GNU Wget is an easy to use command line utility that can be triggered via the OS X Terminal app in order to download files by using the HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP protocols. By default, GNU Wget will download the files to the folder currently active in your command line.

Usually, the GNU Wget software is offered as a source code archive, which means that you must configure, build, and install the command line tool on your own. For your convenience, the Softpedia team has compiled the source and wrapped the binary in an installer package: this way, the installation process is reduced to simply following the on-screen instructions.

The next step is to launch the Terminal app and call the command line wget program, while providing the download URL: simply type “wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/wget/wget-1.16.tar.gz”, for example.

The “wget -h” command will list all the available customization options together with their usage details.

The GNU Wget command line tool provides support for some of the most popular internet protocols, such as HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP. GNU Wget can deal with persistent HTTP connections, and HTTP proxies or cookies.

Once the download command has been issued, GNU Wget will work on its own and does not require user supervision. What’s more, if you are mirroring directories, it can analyze date stamps in order to determine if a file must be downloaded again.

GNU Wget offers you the possibility to transfer data over the internet by using Terminal commands: simply trigger the command line tool together with the source URL, and GNU Wget  takes care of the rest. Last but not least, GNU Wget can resume aborted downloads, which reduces the processing time when dealing with large archives.