Wget retry-until-completed alias

wget is a great tool and may be used also in case of a low bandwidth. It works also when the connection with a server is unstable for some reason and the download of a file simply fails way to many times.

With this parameters wget tries and retries to download a specific file from an URL until it is completely finished. Also it does not restart the download from the beginning but continues from where it has stopped, if possible.

wget \
  --tries=0 \
  --retry-connrefused \
  --continue \
  --progress=bar \
  --show-progress \
  --timeout=30 \
  --dns-timeout=30 \
  --random-wait \
  --background \
  --append-output=/var/log/wget_background \
  URL

It is most useful as an alias in your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc or whatever shell you’re using:

alias wget-infinite="wget --tries=0 --retry-connrefused --continue --timeout=30 --random-wait --background --append-output=/tmp/wget_background"

Note for OS X: if you installed wget through Homebrew, you may need the --with-iri installation option.

To check the current status of your download (if there is only one simultaneous download), run:

tail -2 /var/log/wget_background | head -1

which can be saved as an alias as well:

alias wget-infinite-status="tail -2 /tmp/wget_background | head -1"