How to Choose wGet or cURL

By eHow Internet Editor

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Ever find a website with tons of great downloads but don't want to spend all day right clicking and choosing "Save as..."? With wGet and cURL, you can make the process much simpler. Whether you choose wGet or cURL, downloading entire sites will be much smoother from here on out.

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Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

Things You’ll Need:

Operating system

Step1

Understand what wGet does. The wGet is a GNU utility and it is used for non-interactive downloading. Meaning, it can download programs in the background without you monitoring it. It uses a command line interface and can be used to download from HTTP, HTTPS and FTP protocols. It can be used to mirror a website and can do "recursive downloading," which essentially means grabbing a directory and its contents.

Step2

Understand what cURL does. The cURL is not a whole lot different from wGet. In fact, they use the same exact protocol. However, cURL has many more features. It can grab files from almost any type of protocol, has upload abilities, authentication and can handle cookies. However, it is a bit harder to use than wGet.

Step3

Consider your needs. If you are a webmaster or a web developer, you might find the programming library of cURL and the cookie handling and HTTP PUT and POST features useful. But if you are just looking to download files or mirror a website, wGet is a better choice as it is easier to use.

Step4

Look for a frontend. Another advantage for wGet is that there are more graphic user interface frontends available. Since the death of DOS, command lines are increasingly daunting to casual computer users. Check out the resources for some frontends to make wGet easier to use.

Tips & Warnings

Many operating systems come with cURL already installed--most versions of Linux and Mac OS for example.
cURL and wGet do essentially the same thing and have similar functions, so you'll be okay with either choice.
Many Webmasters don't appreciate people eating up bandwidth by downloading their entire site and may include a robots.txt file to block you from using wGet or cURL.