3 Linux commands I use for downloading files and how they’re different

Have you ever used Secure Shell to access a remote machine, only to find yourself needing to download a file from a remote location? What do you do? Since you only have terminal window access to that remote machine, you can’t open a web browser and download the file as you normally would.

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Fortunately, these Linux commands make it fairly easy to download files from a local or remote location. I’m going to show you three: wget, curl, and scp.

1. wget

The wget command is my go-to for downloading remote files to a local machine when a GUI isn’t available. There are two reasons I tend to default to wget: It’s the first command I learned to use for this purpose and it’s very simple. 

Let’s say you need to download the file http://www.example.com/file.zip. You can do that with the command:

wget http://www.example.com/file.zip

The wget command has several handy options. For example, if a download is interrupted, you can pick it up where it left off with:

wget -c http://www.example.com/file.zip

Or maybe you want to download the file with a different name. For that, you’d just use the -O option (for output file), like this:

wget -O newnamez.ip http://www.example.com/file.zip

If you want to download the file to a specific directory, the command would be:

wget -P /home/$USER/Downloads http://www.example.com/file.zip

You can also create a text file with the full addresses to access multiple downloads. Say you create the file downloads.txt. In that file, you add one URL per line. You can then download all of those files with a single command:

wget -i downloads.txt

2. curl

Next, we have curl, which is a slightly different beast. If you use curl to download a file without any options, curl will essentially print out the contents of the file to the terminal window. Because of that, you have to instruct curl to save the file, which is done with the -O option like this:

curl -O http://www.example.com/file.zip

You can also save the remote file with a different name, like so:

curl -o newname.zip http://www.example.com/file.zip

Another handy curl feature: You can use what’s called globbing, which allows you to specify multiple URLs at once. 

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Let’s say you need to download file1.zip, file2.zip, file3.zip, file4.zip, and file5.zip, and you want to do so with a single command. Just use brackets, like so:

curl http://www.example.com/file[1-5].zip

All five files will download into the current working directory.

3. scp

The scp command is part of Secure Shell and allows you to copy files from a remote machine with a bit more security. Because scp works in conjunction with Secure Shell, you have to be able to log into the remote machine with a valid user. 

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Let’s say the file.zip file is on a remote machine on your network and you have a valid account on the hosting machine. For example’s sake, we’ll say the IP address of the remote machine is 192.168.1.11 and the local username is olivia. To download the file from that machine, the command would be:

scp olivia@192.168.1.11:/home/olivia/file.zip file.zip

The above command would prompt you for olivia’s user password and, upon successful authentication, the file.zip file would be downloaded to the current working directory on the local machine. 

Also: How to use the scp command in Linux

Keep in mind that if you don’t have an account on the remote machine, you cannot use scp to download a file.

While all three of these Linux commands can be used to download files, if you want to know my preference, it’s wget all the way (unless I need to add a layer of security, at which point I use scp).