!!! Geek Alert !!!
Sometime ago Apple removed the tool wget from the OS X toolset and replaced it with the arguably more powerful curl tool. This new tool is great, and it has many new advanced features that the older wget tool lacks. However curl has one thing against it: it’s somewhat more complicated to use (and its man page is much longer). As a result, I find I use wget far more frequently.
So the question is, where to get wget?
The answer? Right here!
You can download a package of the binaries and an install script/readme file from here. (Thanks to Quentin Stafford-Fraser for doing the initial version of the binary pack).
Alternately, you can follow these steps (shamelessly cannibalized from wincent.com) to acquire and build wget for yourself. Note: This does require that you have the Apple Developer Tools (XCode) installed.
# Make a working directory somewhere, anywhere in fact. mkdir wget cd wget# The original instructions called for you to get the source from the cvs repository # but it looks like that copy of the code no longer exists. I believe they switched to # a subversion repository, but since OS X doesn't come with SVN by default, we'll # just have to do things the old fashioned way # Download a copy of the source code for wget. I found mine at # http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/wget/ # (pulling down a file like this is a perfect use for wget) curl http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/wget/wget-1.10.2.tar.gz -o wget-1.10.2.tar.gz # Uncompress the archive tar -zxvf wget-1.10.2.tar.gz # Move into the new wget source folder and perform the build actions cd wget-1.10.2 ./configure --with-ssl make # Run the installation command. This will require the root password to complete sudo make install # Exit the sudo exit # The default installation folder is /usr/local/bin. In Mac OS X 10.4.x, this folder # is not a part of the $PATH variable by default. You can add it with the command below export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH |
Again, a big thank you to those whose articles I plagiarized referenced. These binaries above were compiled on the MacBook (Intel Core Duo, OS X 10.4.9). I would think that they will work on any Intel-based Mac for sure, not sure about PowerPC versions. Let me know if this works out for you!
EDIT (2007-06-02): Judging by some of the comments, it appears that this build does not work on PowerPC-based Macs. I’m looking into the steps required for creating a universal binary now… Stay Tuned!
8 responses so far ↓
1 Dan Schick // Apr 8, 2007 at 8:18 am
Sweet article. I don’t know if WGET was replaced with curl, rather than just removed. I’ve been curling in OS X since at least 10.1. Good times!
2 Chad Riden // Apr 19, 2007 at 10:50 pm
Running os x server 10.4.9 on ppc, I do not have a couple of the folders referenced in install.sh:
/usr/local/man/man1
/usr/local/etc
3 Tom // May 31, 2007 at 4:02 am
Tried to install on a mere PowerPC running OS X 10.4.9. The directories
weren’t there, but that was easy to fix.
The problem here, though, is the message -bash: “./wget: cannot execute
binary file”. ‘file’ considers wget to be a “Mach-O executable i386″.
So I assume that’s a clear nono. Thanks anyway, will remember.
4 Keith // Jun 2, 2007 at 3:04 pm
I think the difficulties may be in that the original build was done on an Intel-based Macbook. I suspect that the binary is probably compiled only for that processor.
I’m going to have to do some investigating on how to create a universal binary.
5 Kageryu // Sep 2, 2007 at 1:17 am
Thank you for the intel recompile!
6 Yuka // Dec 14, 2007 at 5:47 am
Yes, thanks a lot!
7 Darren // Jul 24, 2008 at 8:45 pm
IIRC, you can pull it from darwinports too.
8 Stefan // Jul 28, 2008 at 4:08 pm
Try DeepVacuum, graphic application for vget. It contains vget so you do not need to install it separately.
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