Linux download file onto server

A command line is simply a text-based interface that takes in commands and forwards them to the OS which runs them. It is due to this flexible nature of it that it has gained an edge over the Graphical User Interface GUI and as a result, many users have switched to the Command Line for doing various tasks, one of which is the downloading of files.

One of the most popular command line tools for downloading files from the internet is Wget. It also provides users with a variety of features ranging from recursive downloading to playing and pausing the downloads as well as limiting its bandwidth.

Moreover, it is cross-platform which gives it quite the edge over many other command line downloaders as well as graphical downloaders. Wget usually comes pre-installed with most of the Linux Distributions. It is to be noted that the command given above is for only Debian based Linux systems such as Ubuntu. If a user has a Red Hat Linux system such as Fedora, then the user needs to enter the following command into the command line:.

As mentioned before, Wget has multiple features incorporated inside of it. The most basic operation that Wget offers to users is downloading files by simply using its URL. 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. This is another full featured text browser which may be easier to use in the same way that you would use a graphical browser. Most of the other browsers on this list allow you to jump between links, but make it difficult to browse the page itself. The w3m browser, however, uses TABs to navigate between links and arrow keys to move the cursor independently to scroll the page.

Another advantage of this browser that will interest some people is that it can use vi -like key commands. While sometimes it is helpful to be able to browse from the server itself, more often, you will find that browsing from a graphical web browser on your own machine is more efficient and will allow you to render the pages in a more faithful manner. Because of this, many people browse the web on their own machine and then paste download links into their terminal window to use with downloading utilities.

The wget tool is a great option for quickly getting pages or downloads from a website. If you do not have wget already available on your Ubuntu server, you can acquire it by typing:.

Afterwards, downloading a file from a remote source is as easy as pasting the URL after the command name like this:.

If you point this at a general website, it will download the index or main page to a file in the local directory. If you direct it towards a file, it will download the file instead. Then you would use this URL with the above command. If your download gets interrupted, you actually can actually use the -c flag, which will resume a partial download if an incomplete file is found in the current directory:.

The wget command can handle cookies, is a good candidate for scripting, and can recursively download entire websites in their original format. The curl tool is also a great choice for this type of operation.

While wget usually operates by producing files, curl by default uses standard output, making it incredibly useful for scripts and pipes. It also supports a great number of protocols, and can handle more HTTP authentication methods than wget.

While many systems will have curl installed by default, if your Ubuntu machine does not, you can type:. While curl uses pipes normally, you can easily have it save its output to a file as well. This is what you probably want if you are downloading files for your server. To download a file and output it to a local file with the same name, type:. We have to specify a file because that is how curl will know what to name the local file.

If we want to choose what to name the local file, we no longer need to point it at a specific file if we are looking for the directory index of a site. Instead we can optionally point it at a location and whatever index file is configured to return will be placed in the file we choose:. This works just as well for downloading a file to a name you want to choose and is not only useful for working with directory indexes.

If you are handed a redirect, you can tell curl to follow it by also using the -L flag. By now, you can see that there are quite a few different options for getting software, data, and material from the internet onto your server. While all of these have the ability to pull content from the web, none of them are suitable for every kind of downloading and consuming.

It is helpful to know what your options are and to be able to leverage the strengths of each solution for the situations that it was designed for. This will help you avoid doing unnecessary work and will give you flexibility in the way that you approach a problem. Where would you like to share this to? Twitter Reddit Hacker News Facebook. Share link Tutorial share link. Sign Up.

DigitalOcean home. Community Control Panel. Hacktoberfest Contribute to Open Source. By Justin Ellingwood Published on April 14, Introduction One capability that almost all servers must have is the power to send and receive information to other networked machines. Acquiring Data and Software from Repositories Perhaps the most common way of getting packages and software onto your server is through the use of repositories.

Installing Software from a Regular Distribution Repository The standard way of installing software for a Linux computer is to use a package manager. Linux distributions use different packaging formats and package managers to accomplish this.

This varies by release, but you should be able to use one of the two options below: sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install python-software-properties For Ubuntu General Web Resources While managing software with repositories is easy and provides a great method for keeping track of software and changes, it is not always possible to rely on these methods for a variety of reasons.

With this flag, the file will be downloaded and saved at the current working directory. Need to download multiple files? Follow the command structure shown below.

Curl allows you to limit the download speed. Here, the download speed is limited to 1mb. It is also possible to manage an FTP server using curl.

Downloading files from an FTP server is like the method shown before. However, assuming the FTP server requires user authentication, use the following command structure:. In certain situations, the URL that you are trying to access may be blocked due to a lack of a proper user agent. Curl allows you to define the user agent manually. As for the user agent, you can use the User Agents randomizer. If you want a custom user agent, then you can find one from WhatIsMyBrowser.

Despite it being a simple and lightweight tool, curl offers tons of features. Compared to other command-line download managers, like wget, curl offers a more sophisticated way of handling file downloads. For in-depth information, I always recommend checking out the man page of curl, which you can open with the following command:. Skip to content Home.