How to change filename of a file downloaded with wget?

Question

I am downloading a file from www.examplesite.com/textfile.txt

When running the following command

wget www.examplesite.com/textfile.txt

the file is saved as textfile. How can I save it as newfile.txt?

Kurr

It's wget -O newfile.txt. – Steiger

but wget -o will simply give you the progress of downloading as a logfile. I tried wget -o. – Kurr

wget -o will output log information to a file. wget -O will output the downloaded content. man wget will tell you all of this and more. – Coz

What @AndyRoss said: mind the capitalisation; it's commonly MEANINGFUL in unix/linux land. – Torero

Ohhh, I missed out on the Caps. I was trying the lower case o until @AndyRoss pointed out. It worked. – Kurr

This does not answer the question at all. The OUTPUT of the command will be saved to -o file, but the file itself will be downloaded with the same name and not "saved as". – Erickson

Stack Overflow is a site for programming and development questions. This question appears to be off-topic because it is not about programming or development. See What topics can I ask about here in the Help Center. Perhaps Super User or Unix & Linux Stack Exchange would be a better place to ask. – Sandarac

Is there a way to get the filename that wget will use for the output file? I'd like to use wget's default name and then process the file afterwards, but to do the post processing I need the name that wget used for the file. – Eugenieeugenio

Answer 1

Use the -O file option.

E.g.

wget google.com
...
16:07:52 (538.47 MB/s) - `index.html' saved [10728]

vs.

wget -O foo.html google.com
...
16:08:00 (1.57 MB/s) - `foo.html' saved [10728]

Reproduce

Man pages reveal: "Use of -O is not intended to mean simply 'use the name file instead of the one in the URL;' rather, it is analogous to shell redirection: wget -O file http://foo is intended to work like wget -O - http://foo > file; file will be truncated immediately, and all downloaded content will be written there." – Persuader

How would one append to foo.html instead of overwriting it? – Hardily

@CraigJacobs you can output wget in console and append it to file. For example wget -O - -o /dev/null http://google.com >> foo.html. Reference – Okun

Thanks @javadba, on Mint 18 (based on Ubuntu 16.04) only your syntax works, as it seems true for Centos6 as seen in other answer (the answer is edited pending acceptance) – Mismate

This approach would render --timestamping ineffective – Rhizoid

This command won't create the file if the directory doesn't exist before – Isoelectronic

Not to be confused with -o! – Westminster

Is it possible to merely choose the file stem, and let wget apply the extension of the file you're downloading? Ex wget -P /my/dir --stem foo https://example.com/img.jpg → /my/dir/foo.jpg – Eugenieeugenio

Answer 2

Also notice the order of parameters on the command line. At least on some systems (e.g. CentOS 6):

wget -O FILE URL

works. But:

wget URL -O FILE

does not work.

Clearance

seems OK on debian bullseye for ARM64 – Ader

Answer 3

You would use the command Mechanical snail listed. Notice the uppercase O. Full command line to use could be:

wget www.examplesite.com/textfile.txt --output-document=newfile.txt

or

wget www.examplesite.com/textfile.txt -O newfile.txt

Hope that helps.

Woodyard

--output-document=newfile.txt is what worked for me. All attempts to use -O failed with the error Resolving webmin_1.630_all.deb (webmin_1.630_all.deb)... failed: Name or service not known. – Quittance

Answer 4

Either curl or wget can be used in this case. All 3 of these commands do the same thing, downloading the file at http://path/to/file.txt and saving it locally into "my_file.txt".

Note that in all commands below, I also recommend using the -L or --location option with curl in order to follow HTML 302 redirects to the new location of the file, if it has moved. wget requires no additional options to do this, as it does this automatically.

# save the file locally as my_file.txt

wget http://path/to/file.txt -O my_file.txt  # my favorite--it has a progress bar
curl -L http://path/to/file.txt -o my_file.txt
curl -L http://path/to/file.txt > my_file.txt

Alternatively, to save the file as the same name locally as it is remotely, use either wget by itself, or curl with -O or --remote-name:

# save the file locally as file.txt

wget http://path/to/file.txt
curl -LO http://path/to/file.txt
curl -L --remote-name http://path/to/file.txt

Notice that the -O in all of the commands above is the capital letter "O".

The nice thing about the wget command is it shows a nice progress bar.

You can prove the files downloaded by each of the sets of 3 techniques above are exactly identical by comparing their sha512 hashes. Running sha512sum my_file.txt after running each of the commands above, and comparing the results, reveals all 3 files to have the exact same sha hashes (sha sums), meaning the files are exactly identical, byte-for-byte.

References

1. I learned about the -L option with curl here: Is there a way to follow redirects with command line cURL?

_{See also: How to capture cURL output to a file?}

Bridgeboard

Answer 5

wget -O yourfilename.zip remote-storage.url/theirfilename.zip

will do the trick for you.

Note:

a) its a capital O.

b) wget -O filename url will only work. Putting -O last will not.

Tombola

Answer 6

Using CentOS Linux I found that the easiest syntax would be:

wget "link" -O file.ext

where "link" is the web address you want to save and "file.ext" is the filename and extension of your choice.

Weismann

I dont understand answering an already-answered-question with the same answer 2 years later.. – Upright