Download a file from a website in command line in Linux

Question

I need to download a file from a website which has a URL formatted like:

http://www.server.com/downloads/1234/

This redirects to a .zip file which has to be saved. There is also a need to authenticate based on username and password.

I tried to use wget, curl and lynx with no luck.

UPDATE:

• wget doesnt work with redirection. It simply downloads the webpage instead of the zip file.
• curl gives the error "Maximum redirection exceeded > 50 "
• lynx also gives the same error.

Answer 1

Wget does support redirect, does this work?

wget --user=USER --password=PASS --max-redirect URL

Note that if the site does not implement HTTP Authentication (require a form submission via GET or POST), then you'll need to setup some more work (given the little information you give about the site where the file is, a good answer is hard to give)

wget --post-file=datafile --keep-session-cookies --max-redirect URL

and your datafile could look like

username=USER
password=PASS

where username and password should be the name of the form fields being submitted.

NOTE : the site needs to redirect to the actual Zip file and not some other page where there is a link to the Zip file. If this is the case, you'll need to write a parsing script because neither Curl or Wget will help you there. They are tools to get content off of a given Url, they are not meant to "guess" you want you want them to fetch; they simply download what the server sends.