Using WGet on Windows

Just in case you’re like me that can’t trust free download manager anymore or just want a little program that can resume your download at later time and doesn’t use many resources .. i’d suggest you to use WGet for Windows (if you’re a Linux user i believe WGet already installed on your machine)

To start off there are few links to where you can grab WGet for Windows (feel free to choose)

1. Christopher Lewis Wget Page
2. GNUWin32 Wget Package
3. Bpuype Wget File

Although if it’s for me, i just grab the Christopher’s Visual Studio Project file combined with Wget from it’s SVN repository because i prefer to compile it by myself (to make few adjustment to the user agent so it’ll use Mozilla Firefox User agent by default and also other Mozilla Firefox Header), but let’s keep this aside shall we ? :P

Okay now, i assume you’ve downloaded your WGet files, and already extracted it somewhere in your harddrive. The next step would be, adding your WGet path into Windows Environment Variables Path, so you can access it easily from anywhere

Step to do it :

1. Open Windows System Properties page (Press Windows Key + Pause / Break) or Right click on my computer and choose properties
2. Choose the Advanced Tab and then click on Environment Variables
3. Add new Path Variable to your username or edit the Path variable for your system
4. Add this line like below image (adjust your wget path accordingly)

And you’re done … now you can type Wget anywhere from the command prompt :)

But wait … if you’re using Mozilla Firefox, you can also use Wget to download something from the web, and in order to do this you just need to install FlashGot Extension for Firefox, and then add this line to the Flashgot command line arguments :

Quoted from Flashgot page :

-c [--directory-prefix=FOLDER] [--referer=REFERER] [--post-data=POST] [--load-cookies=CFILE] [--header=Cookie:COOKIE] [--input-file=UFILE]

And you’re finished :)

Well basically the above should be working fine with Firefox 2, but because Firefox 3 recently released to the public, i’m having problem with the Command Prompt window not showing although the wget process is running in the background (it’s listed on the task manager but the window can’t be seen)

And so if you’re running Firefox 3, you can try using these configurations instead of the above:

Executable Path:
C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe

Command Line arguments template:
/C start wget -c [--directory-prefix=FOLDER] [--referer=REFERER] [--post-data=POST] [--load-cookies=CFILE] [--header=Cookie:COOKIE] [--input-file=UFILE]

And voila … you can see the downloading process again just like on Firefox 2 ;)