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How to Use Wget

Updated by Angel Written by Angel

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GNU Wget is a non-interactive tool for downloading files from the internet. Wget is a mature package with a robust set of features. Typically wget is used to retrieve the latest packages from HTTP or FTP repositories.

The noninteractive nature of Wget makes it perfect for use in automatic scripts. This guide will walk you through downloading the Linode Speed Test files by using wget.

Note
Depending on your operating system or distribution, you may need to download wget. Wget exists in every package manager and on every operating system. At the end of this guide you will find resources for getting wget on your machine.

Use Wget to Download Speedtest Files

Picking the right location for your Linode is important, you have to decide what facility is closest to you and your clients. Linode offers a series of Linode Speed test files. By using wget, you can test your connection speed with each of these clients.

  1. To download one file using wget, use only wget <url>:

    wget http://speedtest.newark.linode.com/100MB-newark.bin

    As the download begins, a small progress bar will appear with information about the download:

    HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: ‘100MB-newark.bin’

100%[======================================>] 104,857,600  202MB/s   in 0.5s

2017-06-23 13:13:19 (202 MB/s) - ‘100MB-newark.bin’ saved [104857600/104857600]

  2. Write the output of Wget to a file using the -O option.

    wget -O Newark http://speedtest.newark.linode.com/100MB-newark.bin

    After the download completes, you will receive this message:

    2017-06-23 13:24:21 (48.4 MB/s) - ‘newark’ saved [104857600/104857600]

    You can also log the output of a file with -o as in:

    wget -o newarkTest http://speedtest.newark.linode.com/100MB-newark.bin

    Wget will then make a file and log the download information inside of it:

    newarkTest 
    1
2
3
4

    02350K .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........100%  457M 0s
102400K                                                       100% 0.00 =0.6s

2017-06-23 13:31:54 (179 MB/s) - ‘100MB-newark.bin.2’ saved [104857600/104857600]

  3. If you are trying to download a large file, wget offers the -b option for downloading in the background:

    wget -b http://speedtest.newark.linode.com/100MB-newark.bin
Continuing in background, pid 8764.
Output will be written to ‘wget-log’.

    If the file is too large, or you need to resume the download at a later time, you can use the -c option to continue the download:

    wget -c http://speedtest.newark.linode.com/100MB-newark.bin

  4. To get a more accurate benchmark, repeat the download multiple times. The --delete-after flag will clean up the file after each download.

    for i in {1..5}; do
  time wget --delete-after http://speedtest.newark.linode.com/100MB-newark.bin;
done

More Information

You may wish to consult the following resources for additional information on this topic. While these are provided in the hope that they will be useful, please note that we cannot vouch for the accuracy or timeliness of externally hosted materials.

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This guide is published under a CC BY-ND 4.0 license.