2025-03-31
I'm working to switch from wget to curl (due to Fedora)
I've been using wget for a long time now, which means that I've developed a lot of habits, reflexes and even little scripts around it. Then wget2 happened, or more exactly Fedora switched from wget to wget2 (and Ubuntu is probably going to follow along). I'm very much not a fan of wget2 (also); I find it has both worse behavior and worse output than classical wget, in ways that routinely get in my way. Or got in my way before I started retraining myself to use curl instead of wget.
(It's actually possible that Ubuntu won't follow Fedora here. Ubuntu 24.04's 'wget' is classic wget, and Debian unstable currently has the wget package still as classic wget. The wget to wget2 transition involves the kind of changes that I can see Debian developers rejecting, so maybe Debian will keep 'wget' as classic wget. The upstream has a wget 1.25.0 release as recently as November 2024 (cf); on the other hand, the main project page says that 'currently GNU wget2 is being developed', so it certainly sounds like the upstream wants to move.)
One tool for my switch is wcurl (also, via), which is a cover script to provide a wget-like interface to curl. But I don't have wcurl everywhere (it's not packaged in Ubuntu 24.04, although I think it's coming in 26.04), so I've also been working to remember things like curl's -L and -O options (for downloading things, these are basically 'do what I want' options; I almost always want curl to follow HTTP redirects). There's a number of other options I want to remember, so since I've been looking at the curl manual page, here's some notes to myself.
(If I downloaded multiple URLs at once, I'll probably want to use '--remote-name-all' instead of repeating -O a lot. But I'm probably not going to remember that unless I write a script.)
My 'wcat' script is basically 'curl -L -sS <url>' (-s to not show the progress bar, -S to include at least the HTTP payload on an error, -L to follow redirects). My related 'wretr' script, which is intended to show headers too, is 'curl -L -sS -i <url>' (-i includes headers), or 'curl -sS -i <url>' if I want to explicitly see any HTTP redirect rather than automatically follow it.
(What I'd like is an option to show HTTP headers only if there was an HTTP error, but curl is currently all or nothing here.)
Some of the time I'll want to fetch files with the -J option, which is the curl equivalent of wget's --trust-server-names. This is necessary in cases where a project doesn't bother with good URLs for things. Possibly I also want to use '-R' to set the local downloaded file's timestamp based on the server provided timestamp, which is wget's traditional behavior (sometimes it's good, sometimes it's confusing).
PS: I care about wcurl being part of a standard Ubuntu package because then we can install it as part of one of our standard package sets. If it's a personal script, it's not pervasive, although that's still better than nothing.
PPS: I'm not going to blame Fedora for the switch from wget to wget2. Fedora has a consistent policy of marching forward in changes like this to stay in sync with what upstream is developing, even when they cause pain to people using Fedora. That's just what you sign up for when you choose Fedora (or drift into it, in my case; I've been using 'Fedora' since before it was Fedora).