MacSwitching.com > Wget – a must for all Mac-geeks!

Let’s face it, when it comes to quick-and-dirty missions, there’s no better place than Terminal.
Provided you know how to use it, what to use and which parameter to feed in, you can do almost anything…

Take wget for example, that incidentally is not part of the standard stuff that Mac OS X comes with.

You can bypass almost any browser problems, you just give it a feasible URL and, boom there you are.
It’s by far the best way to get files, updates, SVNs or stuff like that.
It’s also the best way to hack your way through embedded flash videos so popular these days.

Syntax at the lowest level goes like this:

wget [URL]

You can specify a horde of options in between, output dir, HTTP auth options and so on.
My favorite is -b which runs the process into background-land and gives me command line back.

Fact is, as most *nix commands you get source code and so need to compile it.
Here’s a tip: Quentin Stafford compiled a wget so you get binaries comfortably running with Leopard.

Check his page on wget here and download wget Mac OS X-ready binaries from here.