Wget: Is there a way to pass username and password from a file?

Use a .wgetrc file (GNU manual) in which you can set username and passwords for either or both ftp and http.

To use the same credentials for both specify

user=casper
password=CasperPassword

or individually

ftp_user=casperftp
ftp_password=casperftppass
http_user=casperhttp
http_password=casperhttppass

I'm surprised nobody mentioned the .netrc file. First create the file if it doesn't exists and set safe permissions:

touch ~/.netrc
chmod 600 ~/.netrc

Then you can add the hostname, username and password all on one line:

echo 'machine example.com login casper password CasperPassword' >> ~/.netrc

Then when you do wget https://example.com and the server responds with 401 Authorization Required, wget will retry with the username and password from the ~/.netrc file.

When using this from cron make sure you have the right HOME directory. Often cron sets HOME=/ (in that case you would have to create the file as /.netrc, but it's better to set a proper HOME at the beginning of your script, like export HOME=/root).

You can specify multiple hosts in ~/.netrc, one per line. More info in man netrc.

In many regards curl can be a better choice. Wget became a bit stale over time.

curl's -n switch can be used for this task: http://curl.haxx.se/docs/manpage.html#-n