Native alternative to wget in Windows PowerShell?

Solution 1:

Here's a simple PS 3.0 and later one-liner that works and doesn't involve much PS barf:

wget http://blog.stackexchange.com/ -OutFile out.html

Note that:

wget is an alias for Invoke-WebRequest
Invoke-WebRequest returns a HtmlWebResponseObject, which contains a lot of useful HTML parsing properties such as Links, Images, Forms, InputFields, etc., but in this case we're just using the raw Content
The file contents are stored in memory before writing to disk, making this approach unsuitable for downloading large files

On Windows Server Core installations, you'll need to write this as

wget http://blog.stackexchange.com/ -UseBasicParsing -OutFile out.html

Prior to Sep 20 2014, I suggested
```
(wget http://blog.stackexchange.com/).Content >out.html
```
as an answer. However, this doesn't work in all cases, as the > operator (which is an alias for Out-File) converts the input to Unicode.

If you are using Windows 7, you will need to install version 4 or newer of the Windows Management Framework.

You may find that doing a $ProgressPreference = "silentlyContinue" before Invoke-WebRequest will significantly improve download speed with large files; this variable controls whether the progress UI is rendered.

Solution 2:

If you just need to retrieve a file, you can use the DownloadFile method of the WebClient object:

$client = New-Object System.Net.WebClient
$client.DownloadFile($url, $path)

Where $url is a string representing the file's URL, and $path is representing the local path the file will be saved to.

Note that $path must include the file name; it can't just be a directory.

Solution 3:

There is Invoke-WebRequest in the upcoming PowerShell version 3:

Invoke-WebRequest http://www.google.com/ -OutFile c:\google.html

Solution 4:

It's a bit messy but there is this blog post which gives you instructions for downloading files.

Alternatively (and this is one I'd recommend) you can use BITS:

Import-Module BitsTransfer
Start-BitsTransfer -source "http://urlToDownload"

It will show progress and will download the file to the current directory.

Solution 5:

PowerShell V4 One-liner:

(iwr http://blog.stackexchange.com/).Content >index.html`

(iwr http://demo.mediacore.tv/files/31266.mp4).Content >video.mp4

This is basically Warren's (awesome) V3 one-liner (thanks for this!) - with just a tiny change in order to make it work in a V4 PowerShell.

Warren's one-liner - which simply uses wget rather than iwr - should still work for V3 (At least, I guess; didn't tested it, though). Anyway. But when trying to execute it in a V4 PowerShell (as I tried), you'll see PowerShell failing to resolve wget as a valid cmdlet/program.

For those interested, that is - as I picked up from Bob's comment in reply to the accepted answer (thanks, man!) - because as of PowerShell V4, wget and curl are aliased to Invoke-WebRequest, set to iwr by default. Thus, wget can not be resolved (as well as curl can not work here).