Differences Between Curl and Wget
-
Installing
wget
andcurl
in Linux -
Using
curl
to Access a Website in Linux -
Use the
wget
to Access a Website in Linux -
Difference Between
curl
andwget
in Linux -
the
wget
in Contrast to thecurl
Command in Linux
We normally think about pushing the download button while downloading files from the internet. You can, however, download files from your terminal.
The wget
and curl
are two of the most common tools for doing so. This tutorial will look at these two and see how they differ.
The curl
command allows you to send data from any server to your computer. The wget
command, on the other hand, downloads the data as a file.
This is the most significant distinction between the two commands.
Installing wget
and curl
in Linux
If you don’t have wget
and curl
installed, you can download using the command below.
Use the following command to install curl
on your system:
#Debian and Ubuntu Systems
sudo apt install curl
#Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S curl
Use the following command to install wget
on your system:
#Debian and Ubuntu Systems
sudo apt install wget
#Arch Linux-based distros:
sudo pacman -S wget
Using curl
to Access a Website in Linux
Let’s run curl
on google.com
to see what the output looks like.
$ curl google.com
Output:
<HTML><HEAD><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8">
<TITLE>301 Moved</TITLE></HEAD><BODY>
<H1>301 Moved</H1>
The document has moved
<A HREF="http://www.google.com/">here</A>.
</BODY></HTML>
As you can see, the curl
displays data from the webpage on the terminal.
Use the wget
to Access a Website in Linux
Let’s run wget
on some websites to see the output.
$ wget python.org
Output:
--2022-01-19 21:50:34-- https://www.python.org/
Resolving python.org (python.org)... 138.197.63.241
Connecting to python.org (python.org)|138.197.63.241|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently
Location: https://python.org/ [following]
--2022-01-19 21:50:37-- https://python.org/
Connecting to python.org (python.org)|138.197.63.241|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently
Location: https://www.python.org/ [following]
--2022-01-19 21:50:39-- https://www.python.org/
Resolving www.python.org (www.python.org)... 2a04:4e42:2d::223, 151.101.188.223
Connecting to www.python.org (www.python.org)|2a04:4e42:2d::223|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 49799 (49K) [text/html]
Saving to: 'index.html'
index.html 100%[=================================================================>] 48.63K 9.75KB/s in 5.0s
2022-01-19 21:50:46 (9.75 KB/s) - 'index.html' saved [49799/49799]
The wget
saves the results to a file by default. In the output, there is also a progress bar.
Difference Between curl
and wget
in Linux
-
The
curl
is based onlibcurl
, a cross-platform library with a well-defined API that anyone may use. This distinction is critical because it produces an entirely different mentality about dealing with things inside.A library is also slightly more difficult to create than a
simple
command-line tool. -
The
curl
is similar to the standardUnix-cat
command in that it transmits more data tostdout
and reads more data fromstdin
in aneverything is a pipe
fashion. -
The
curl
is primarily designed to perform single-shot data transfers. It only transfers the URLs that the user chooses, and it doesn’t have any recursive downloading logic orHTML
parser.
the wget
in Contrast to the curl
Command in Linux
- The
wget's
main advantage overcurl
is its ability to download recursively, or even just everything referred to from a remote resource, whether it’s anHTML
page or anFTP
directory listing. - The
wget
can be traced back to its precursor on January 9, 1996, whereascurl
can only be traced to November 11, 1996. - The
wget
is released under the GNU General Public License version 3. - The
wget
is part of the GNU Project, and all copyrights have been handed over to the Free Software Foundation. Thecurl
project is completely self-contained and self-contained, with no organizational oversight and practically all copyrights owned by Daniel. - The
wget
does not require any additional arguments to download a distantURL
to a local file, butcurl
does.