What is the difference between curl and wget?
I am keen to know the difference between curl and wget. Both are used to get files and documents but what the key difference between them.
Why are there two different programs?
The main differences are:
wget‘s major strong side compared tocurlis its ability to download recursively.wgetis command line only. There’s no lib or anything, butcurl‘s features are powered by libcurl.curlsupportsFTP,FTPS,GOPHER,HTTP,HTTPS,SCP,SFTP,TFTP,TELNET,DICT,LDAP,LDAPS,FILE,POP3,IMAP,SMTP,RTMPandRTSP.wgetsupportsHTTP,HTTPSandFTP.curlbuilds and runs on more platforms thanwget.wgetis released under a free software copyleft license (the GNU GPL).curlis released under a free software permissive license (a MIT derivate).curloffers upload and sending capabilities.wgetonly offers plain HTTP POST support.
You can see more details at the following link:
Actually, the major difference is that curl includes a library (libcurl), and that library is widely used by other applications. wget is standalone.
They were made for different purposes
wgetis a tool to download files from serverscurlis a tool that let’s you exchange requests/responses with a server
wget
Wget solely lets you download files from an HTTP/HTTPS or FTP server. You give it a link and it automatically downloads the file where the link points to. It builds the request automatically.
curl
Curl in contrast to wget lets you build the request as you wish. Combine that with the plethora of protocols supported – FTP, FTPS, Gopher, HTTP, HTTPS, SCP, SFTP, TFTP, Telnet, DICT, LDAP, LDAPS, IMAP, POP3, SMTP, RTSP and URI – and you get an amazing debugging tool (for testing protocols, testing server configurations, etc.).
As many already mentioned you can download a file with curl. True, but that is just an “extra”. In practice, use CURL when you want to download a file via a protocol that wget doesn’t support.
I did some performance tests with wget and curl, and the result is:
100 times tested average run time while downloading 1MB file:
wget: 0.844s
cURL: 0.680s
100 times tested average run time while downloading 5MB file:
wget: 1.075s
cURL: 0.863s
100 times tested average run time while downloading 10MB file:
wget: 1.182s
cURL: 1.074s
Command size on the system:
wget: 371K
cURL: 182K
The main differences(1. curl mainly reminds of communicating in various protocols, wget mainly reminds of downloading, 2. curl provides – and is based on – the libcurl library, and other softwares are able to use the same library as well, wget is standalone) have been mentioned in other answers, but here’s also another difference worth emphasizing, explained in an example.
Another interesting feature of curl not possible with wget is communicating with UNIX sockets (i.e., communication even without a network).
For instance we can use curl to talk to Docker Engine using its socket in /var/run/docker.sock to get a list of all pulled docker images in JSON format (useful for "programming", in contrast to the docker images CLI command which is good for "readability"):
curl --unix-socket /var/run/docker.sock http://localhost/images/json | jq