Data Transfer using curl and wget in Linux

curl

curl also written as cURL is a tool to download or upload data from or to a server, using one of the supported protocols (DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMB, SMBS, SMTP, SMTPS, TELNET and TFTP). The command is designed to work without user interaction.

curl supports following features:

• proxy support, user authentication
• FTP upload
• HTTP post
• SSL connections
• cookies
• file transfer resume
• Metalink

Basically, you can use curl to download content from the internet.

For example, if you want to download the file from the web address set to http://linux.about.com/cs/linux101/g/curl.html then the linked page will be downloaded.

By default, the output will be to the command line but you can also specify a filename to save the file to.

wget

GNU Wget is a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, the most widely-used Internet protocols. It is a non-interactive command line tool, so it may easily be called from scripts, cron jobs, terminals without X-Windows support, etc.
GNU Wget has many features to make retrieving large files or mirroring entire web or FTP sites easy, including:

• resume aborted downloads, using REST and RANGE
• use filename wild cards and recursively mirror directories
• converts absolute links in downloaded documents to relative, so that downloaded documents may link to each other locally
• runs on most UNIX-like operating systems as well as Microsoft Windows
• HTTP proxies
• HTTP cookies
• persistent HTTP connections

Similarity between curl and wget

1. command line tools
2. support FTP, HTTP, HTTPS
3. send HTTP post requests
4. HTTP cookies
5. work without user interaction
6. open source and free