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How can I download something from the web directly without IE/Firefox opening Acrobat Reader/Quicktime/MS Word/whatever? I'm using Windows, so a Windows version of wget would do.

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Don't install any of those products. – Hello71 Jul 21 '11 at 16:33
@Hello71: Why should none "of those products" be installed? – Zachary Young Sep 1 '11 at 0:45
@Zachary: Nothing installed = No plugins. – Hello71 Sep 1 '11 at 13:16
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8 Answers

up vote 26 down vote accepted

Wget for Windows should work.

GNU Wget is a free network utility to retrieve files from the World Wide Web using HTTP and FTP, the two most widely used Internet protocols. It works non-interactively, thus enabling work in the background, after having logged off

.

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There's also Winwget cybershade.us/winwget if you prefer a gui – Col Aug 19 '09 at 11:47
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up vote 26 down vote

An alternative I discovered recently, using PowerShell:

$client = new-object System.Net.WebClient
$client.DownloadFile("http://www.xyz.net/file.txt","C:\tmp\file.txt")
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You can also do it in one-line: (new-object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile('http://www.xyz.net/file.txt','C:\tmp\file.tx‌​t') – schellack Oct 14 '11 at 20:32
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up vote 5 down vote

Windows has it's command line download utility - bitsadmin

BITSAdmin is a command-line tool that you can use to create download or upload jobs and monitor their progress.

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Interesting. That is one clumsy piece of software compared to wget. – Matt H Mar 28 at 21:36
Note that It doesn't ship with Windows XP, and maybe not with other versions either. – Ian Dunn May 22 at 23:06
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up vote 2 down vote

And one more for completeness, Cygwin has wget (and many more utilities).

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up vote 1 down vote

You can get WGet for Windows here. Alternatively you can right click on the download link of the item you want to download and choose Save As. This will download the file and not open it in the assigned application.

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up vote 1 down vote

And http://www.httrack.com/ has a nice gui (and it's free), for mirroring sites. Also has a Linux version.

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up vote 0 down vote

An alternative to using gnuwin32 is unxutils which includes wget.

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you can manage with unxutils but it's old, it uses an old version of wget. gnuwin32 is the thing to use. not quite as convenient to install and not as easy to find things, but it has much more than unxutils too. – barlop Oct 5 '11 at 19:31
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up vote 0 down vote

If you want a GUI, then try VisualWget, which is actually clean, and feature full. It is based on GNU Wget for its download engine.

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here is an updated link: sites.google.com/site/visualwget/… (the downloads are at the bottom of the page, use the little arrows on the right) – Reed Hedges May 13 at 12:43
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