What is the Windows equivalent of Wget?

Question

How can I download something from the web directly without Internet Explorer or Firefox opening Acrobat Reader/Quicktime/MS Word/whatever?

I'm using Windows, so a Windows version of Wget would do.

Answer 1

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

.

Answer 2

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")

Answer 3

Windows has its own 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.

Answer 4

Save the following text as wget.js and simply call

cscript /nologo wget.js http://example.com

This is the code:

var WinHttpReq = new ActiveXObject("WinHttp.WinHttpRequest.5.1");
WinHttpReq.Open("GET", WScript.Arguments(0), /*async=*/false);
WinHttpReq.Send();
WScript.Echo(WinHttpReq.ResponseText);

/* To save a binary file use this code instead of previous line
BinStream = new ActiveXObject("ADODB.Stream");
BinStream.Type = 1;
BinStream.Open();
BinStream.Write(WinHttpReq.ResponseBody);
BinStream.SaveToFile("out.bin");
*/

Answer 5

There is also a native cURL for Windows available here. There are many flavors available- with SSL support, without SSL support. You don't need the extra baggage of cygwin and the likes, just one small exe file.

Answer 6

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.

Answer 7

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

Answer 8

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.

EDIT: updated link.

Answer 9

I know I am really late. I was searching for the same, and since I had no privilege to install any of the above packages, I went for a small workaround (to download 30+files)

• I created a batch file
• listed all the files
• put firefox.exe at the beginning of each line
• went to the firefox directory in Program Files
• ran it.

Answer 10

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

Answer 11

If PowerShell is an option, that's the preferred route, since you (potentially) won't have to install anything extra:

(new-object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile('http://www.xyz.net/file.txt','C:\tmp\file.tx‌​t')

Failing that, wget for windows, as others have pointed out is definitely the second best option. As posted above it looks like you can download wget all by itself, or you can grab it as a part of Cygwin or MSys

If for some reason, you find yourself stuck in a time warp, using a machine that doesn't have PowerShell and you have zero access to a working web browser (i.e. IE is the only browser on the system, and its settings are corrupt), and your file is on an FTP site (as opposed to HTTP):

start->run "FTP", press "OK".

If memory serves it's been there since Windows 98, and I can confirm that it is still there in Windows 8 RTM (you might have to go into appwiz.cpl and add/remove features to get it). This utility can both download and upload files to/from FTP sites on the web. It can also be used in scripts to automate either operation.

This tool being built-in has been a real life saver for me in the past, esp. in the days of ftp.cdrom.com -- downloaded Firefox that way once, on a completely broken machine that had only dial-up internet (back when sneaker-net's maximum packet size was still 1.44 MB, and Firefox was still called "Netscape" /me does trollface).

Couple of tips, it's its own command processor, and it has its own syntax, try typing "help". All ftp sites require a username and password; but if they allow "anonymous" users, the username is "anonymous" and the password is your email address (you can make one up if you don't want to be tracked, but usually there is some kind of logic to make sure it's a valid email address).

Answer 12

For my unreliable mobile broadband connection, I found http://burnbit.com/ useful.

It turns a URL into a torrent.

Answer 13

I made a quick myGet.bat file which calls the powershell method described above.

@Echo OFF
SetLocal EnableDelayedExpansion
Set Var=%1
Set Var=!Var:http://=!
Set Var=!Var:/=,!
Set Var=!Var:%%20=?!
Set Var=!Var: =?!
Call :LOOP !var!
Echo.Downloading: %1 to %~p0!FN!
powershell.exe -Command (new-object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile('%1','%~p0!FN!')
GoTo :EOF
:LOOP
If "%1"=="" GoTo :EOF
Set FN=%1
Set FN=!FN:?= !
Shift
GoTo :LOOP

I borrowed some code from here: http://www.computing.net/answers/programming/parsing-url-for-filename-with-space/14749.html

Answer 14

An alternative to using gnuwin32 is unxutils which includes wget.