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#Spider Websites with Wget – 20 Practical Examples
Wget is extremely powerful, but like with most other command line programs, the plethora of options it supports can be intimidating to new users. Thus what we have here are a collection of wget commands that you can use to accomplish common tasks from downloading single files to mirroring entire websites. It will help if you can read through the wget manual but for the busy souls, these commands are ready to execute.
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Wget is extremely powerful, but like with most other command line programs, the plethora of options it supports can be intimidating to new users. Thus what we have here are a collection of wget commands that you can use to accomplish common tasks from downloading single files to mirroring entire websites. It will help if you can read through the wget manual but for the busy souls, these commands are ready to execute.
1. Download a single file from the Internet
wget http://example.com/file.iso
2. Download a file but save it locally under a different name
wget ‐‐output-document=filename.html example.com
3. Download a file and save it in a specific folder
Wget can be used for downloading content from sites that are behind a login screen or ones that check for the HTTP referer and the User Agent strings of the bot to prevent screen scraping.
14. Download files from websites that check the User Agent and the HTTP Referer
16. Fetch pages that are behind a login page. You need to replace user and password with the actual form fields while the URL should point to the Form Submit (action) page.
The wget tool is essentially a spider that scrapes / leeches web pages but some web hosts may block these spiders with the robots.txt files. Also, wget will not follow links on web pages that use the rel=nofollow attribute.
You can however force wget to ignore the robots.txt and the nofollow directives by adding the switch ‐‐execute robots=off to all your wget commands. If a web host is blocking wget requests by looking at the User Agent string, you can always fake that with the ‐‐user-agent=Mozilla switch.
The wget command will put additional strain on the site’s server because it will continuously traverse the links and download files. A good scraper would therefore limit the retrieval rate and also include a wait period between consecutive fetch requests to reduce the server load.
In the above example, we have limited the download bandwidth rate to 20 KB/s and the wget utility will wait anywhere between 30s and 90 seconds before retrieving the next resource.
Finally, a little quiz. What do you think this wget command will do?