GNU Wget in decline? | Hacker News Reader

GNU Wget in decline?

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9 pointswslh10 comments

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=0-13&q=wget%2...

You can do everything you can do with wget - and more - with curl (though it seems to be tending downward on that graph... not very sure what may be the reason for that).

Nice text on HTTP scripting: http://curl.haxx.se/docs/httpscripting.html

And a total aside: http://ifconfig.me/ is extremely awesome. I probably end up using 'curl ifconfig.me' about once a day at least.

Wget can do something which curl can't: recursive downloading, and in particular full site mirroring. It's not useful every day, but when I need it I'm glad it's there.

Ah, you're right.

Here's a nice page detailing the differences between the two tools -- apparently written by the creator of curl itself:

http://daniel.haxx.se/docs/curl-vs-wget.html (and a more comprehensive chart with additional tools: http://curl.haxx.se/docs/comparison-table.html )

I'm using wget for a project, basically because it's the only crawler on the planet that given a single URL, can download that page + all images, style sheets and scripts embedded in it without hassle (just with a flag: -p or --page-requisites).

It sucks however, because you can't redirect its output to another program and have to write the output to the file system (more I/O).

The lack of libwget does frustate me sometimes; I have to use wget strictly via command-line. curl also has some nice features lacking in wget: selecting HTTP/1.0 or HTTP/1.1, support for multiple SSL libraries, etc. But wget surely has many features that curl doesn't have.

In short, I use both.

Wow, the curve indicating a decline of GNU Wget looks by eye to have the same shape as the curve indicating a decline of Apache. The HTML curve looks pretty similar. Javascript, too.

I think there's only one conclusion:

The web itself is in decline.

Incredible, I know, but this is science.

But curl curve is inclining.

One of the first things I do on a linux system is install curl. Wget only outfeatures curl in very obscure ways, and I find it more annoying to use on a day-to-day basis.

Heh, one of the first things I used to do on OSX as to install wget (having come from Linux myself), but over time I ended up just learning what I needed from curl.

It's basically done. It's all the way on the right of the hype cycle. Is tcpdump in decline? Is dig in decline?

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