Note: Support refers to the http://support.geosc.uh.edu website.

Using Wget to download files

If you have 100s of files you need to download from one of the department FTP servers, (the IMAQS, AGL or Geosciences) and don’t want to keep on clicking one file at a time, there is a an easy way to achieve this – use WGET.

Wget is a file transfer utility that works similar to FTP but for downloading files from a web-site, the above FTP servers are all actually on the HTTP protocol, like so http://top-gun.agl.uh.edu (the AGL FTP server), http://geossun2.geosc.uh.edu (the IMAQS FTP server) and http://support.geosc.uh.edu (the Geosciences FTP server). So suppose you want to download say 50 files from http://top-gun.agl.uh.edu/ then you can use wget like so

wget -r http://top-gun.agl.uh.edu/ftp/outgoing/marmousi_II

Which would just download all the files in the above directory into a folder from where you started the wget program (note the “-r” option, this means recursively download all files in the directory and other directories that are beneath it), the folder would usually be titled “top-gun.agl.uh.edu” (or whatever server you are downloading from), now wget has several other useful options to work with, try “wget –-help” to get more information about the various options.

Additionally you can use wget to even download files from sites which require you to provide passwords, with the following command.

wget –r –http-user=userid –http-password=password http://top-gun.agl.uh.edu/secure/seg_book

As you can see, by supplying the correct userid and password, I can recursively (note the –r option), download the entire directory. A word of caution: You can quickly end up filling up your hard drive downloading stuff, so make sure you know what you are downloading.

You can download ready to use WGET version for, official site is at http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/wget.html

1. MS windows XP (just unzip it in the C:\ and you can start using it from a command prompt, check out the screen shot below).

2. SUN solaris 8 (extract it to /opt/Wget)

3. Linux (wget should be part of your Operating System usually under /usr/bin)

4. Source code (download, compile and install it for your OS)