FFR: Capturing web sites

Every once in a while I want to capture a web site or a portion of one. Today Lifehacker presented a simple solution: wget from GNU. Read below the fold for Mac installation instructions.

It turns out wget is not part of MacOSX by default. It can be easily installed, however. One option, use some pretty Mac versions of wget:

• CocoaWget (self contained)
• SimpleWget (note, this needs the Unix installation below to be done separately)
• and probably others

If you want the plain old Unix tool to script and use from the command line, here you go. Make sure to do this from an admin account. These instructions are based on Matt’s instructions, but his point to a specific version of wget. I just assume you want the latest version.

Go to a Terminal window and do the following:

% curl -O http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/wget/wget-latest.tar.gz
% tar xzf wget-latest.tar.gz
% cd wget-latest
% ./configure
% make
% sudo make install

You will need to know your admin password and use it in that last step. Don’t be surprised by all the text that flies by in the configure and make steps, that’s just your Mac working hard to compile the software. After this is done you can also do the following to get rid of the directory you create above.

% cd ..
% rm -r wget-latest

Now you are ready to use wget. See the simple solution article for some tips and the GNU wget manual for the gory details. Typing wget -V (upper case “V” there) will get you the version information and confirm that wget is working. Typing wget -help will provide a synopsis of what the command can do.