Installing wget on Mac OS X

Installing wget on Mac OS X

How to install wget on your Mac#

Ok, so Mac is cool and stuff, but it doesn’t come with wget by default, which in my opinion sucks. wget is a very useful tool and is used for downloading installation files among other stuff; it ought to be there on your Mac.

Getting wget on Mac OS X is pretty easy, so worry not. Just follow my instructions. Before that make sure you have a C/C++ compiler on your system, if you have XCode, you are all set and ready.

The first step, of course, is downloading the wget source code. We’ll have to use our browser to download that since we don’t have wget yet. Get the wget source from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/wget/, scroll down for the latest version. The latest version as of writing this post is wget-1.13.tar.gz.

Once you have downloaded the source, unarchive it using Archive Utility (just double-click the downloaded file to get a new folder which looks like wget-1.13). Now open a terminal, cd to wget-1.13 directory, and do the following:

$ ./configure ... $ make install

There you! Now you have wget installed on your Mac. Confirm it this way.

$ wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/wget/wget-1.13.tar.gz

Did wget fail to install because of some dependencies? Maybe you wanna go a less hardcore but very easy way, and manage all the packages on your system using Homebrew instead. Installing wget using Homebrew is as easy as doing this:

$ brew install wget

Homebrew is highly recommended for managing the UNIX packages on your Mac. I could have straightaway told you the Homebrew way but you’d have missed some valuable lessons if I did. The instructions for installing Homebrew can be found here. Get it!