Wget: retrieve files from the WWW Wget works exceedingly well on slow or unstable connections, keeping getting the document until it is fully retrieved. Re-getting files from where it left off works on servers (both HTTP and FTP) that support it. Matching of wildcards and recursive mirroring of directories are available when retrieving via FTP. Both HTTP and FTP retrievals can be time-stamped, thus Wget can see if the remote file has changed since last retrieval and automatically retrieve the new version if it has.



Wget supports proxy servers, which can lighten the network load, speed up retrieval and provide access behind firewalls. If you are behind a firewall that requires the use of a socks style gateway, you can get the socks library and compile wget with support for socks.