What is better, curl or wget? [closed]

Solution 1:

If you are programming, you should use curl. It has a nice api and is available for most languages. Shelling out to the os to run wget is a kludge and shouldn't be done if you have an API interface!

Solution 2:

There is some overlap in functionality. While GNU wget is a package for retrieving files using HTTP/FTP, curl transfers data with single URL. As noted in the link shared by MarkusQ, wget can download recursively - see this comparison article for more details by the curl author.

Solution 3:

cURL is intended for data transfer in both directions while wget is for non-interactive downloading file(s) from a particular source. There are some overlaps in functionality, but they are not meant to do exactly the same things.

It really depends on what you are trying to do; for simpler tasks like downloading files wget and cURL are comparable, but this really only scratches the surface of either tool.

Solution 4:

They both offer endless options, most of which I've never used. However, I tend to like wget more as it by default saves the output from the URL you give — perfect for downloading. Curl goes the other way, and displays the output directly to the terminal (by default).