Why does curl allow use of the file URL scheme, but not wget

curl wget file-uri
davetapley picture davetapley · May 4, 2012 · Viewed 8.2k times · Source

This question refers to curl 7.21.4 and GNU Wget 1.13.4, I don't know if the answer is version specific.

Using the file URI scheme I can get local file using curl as such

$ curl file://localhost/Users/dave/.vimrc
contents of .vimrc

However if I try the same using wget I receive an error:

$ wget file://localhost/Users/dave/.vimrc
file://localhost/Users/dave/.vimrc: Unsupported scheme `file'

Does anyone know why this is the case?

Answer

Daniel Stenberg picture Daniel Stenberg · May 4, 2012

Because Wget has not been written to support file:// URLs. (It's front web page clearly states "GNU Wget is a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP")

Allow me to point to a little curl vs wget comparison.

Related questions

wget/curl large file from google drive

I'm trying to download a file from google drive in a script, and I'm having a little trouble doing so. The files I'm trying to download are here. I've looked online extensively and I finally managed to get one of …

Read More
Get final URL after curl is redirected

I need to get the final URL after a page redirect preferably with curl or wget. For example http://google.com may redirect to http://www.google.com. The contents are easy to get(ex. curl --max-redirs 10 http://google.com …

Read More
How to send a HTTP OPTIONS request from the command line?

I tried to use cURL but it seems that by default (Debian) is not compiled with HTTPS support and I dont want to build it myself. wget seems to have SSL support but I found no information on how to …

Read More