Saving wget file with different filename

Anyone who has worked with Linux must be familar with the wget utility. wget utility allows you to download files from a remote server using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP protocols. Downloading files using wget is as simple as

wget http://www.joycebabu.com/my-photo.jpg
Where http://www.joycebabu.com/my-photo.jpg is the file to be downloaded.

By default wget saves the file with the same name as the fetched file. For example, the above command will save the file as my-photo.jpg in the current working directory. If a file already exists with the given name, the downloaded file will be named as my-photo.jpg.1, my-photo.jpg.2 etc until a non existent filename is found.

It is possible to explicitly specify a different name for the downloaded file. This is possible using the -O switch (--output-document also works, but I believe short is sweet). The new command is

wget -O photo.jpg http://www.joycebabu.com/my-photo.jpg
Where photo.jpg is the new filename.

But be careful while using the -O switch. If there is an existing file with the same name, it will be overwritten with the new file.

By Joyce

I am a co-founder and director of Ennexa Technologies. To know more about me, visit my about page. You can find a list of websites maintained by our company at the links page.