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wget is a very useful tool to download stuff on the internet quickly, but can I use it to download from hosting sites, like FreakShare, IFile.it Depositfiles, Uploaded, Rapidshare? If so, how can I do that?

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Don't most of those sites tend use javascript and other barriers to eliminate linking directly to the files? –  Tim Jul 13 '12 at 17:08
@Tim I think you are correct, because it's impossible to get a direct link from those sites. –  Zignd Jul 14 '12 at 14:54
@swift Could you please translate it to english and post on pastebin or somewhere else –  Zignd Jul 14 '12 at 18:20

2 Answers 2

up vote 7 down vote accepted

This kind of site tries to make it difficult not to use a graphical web browser, because if you use wget you'll be missing all these ads that pay for the bandwidth.

Some sites don't make advanced checks and can be tricked easily: tell wget to pretend that it's really Mozilla and that it's coming from the download site.

wget --user-agent='Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/14.0.1' \

Most sites that check let you get away with --user-agent=Mozilla and --referer set to the URL of the file you're downloading.

With some sites, you might need to export the web browser cookies and pass --load-cookies to wget; at this point using wget starts to be more work than a manual download. The ultimate method, which can work all the time but requires some coding for each site, is to use a browser automation framework such as Selenium or Watir.

See also Does anybody here have experience in automating some tasks in web applications using curl?

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Awesome! Your answer helped me write this for Zippyshare Links: stackoverflow.com/a/21100640/1533054 –  Sheharyar Jan 13 '14 at 20:23

For Zippyshare:

This method builds up on Gilles' answer. Like he said, the trick is to make the server think that the request is being made from a browser and to make that happen, you need a couple of things:

  • The Download Link (The actual link to the file)
  • Link Referrer (The webpage with the download button)
  • Zippyshare Session ID (Found in Cookies)

Here's a screenshot explaining where you can get each item:

Download From Zippyshare

Now open up your terminal, and use the following command (replacing necessary items):

wget <download_link> \
--referer='<referrer>' \
--cookies=off --header "Cookie: JSESSIONID=<session_id>" \


wget http://www16.zippyshare.com/d/29887835/8895183/hello.txt \
--referer='http://www16.zippyshare.com/v/29887835/file.html' \
--cookies=off --header "Cookie: JSESSIONID=26458C0893BF69F88EB5743D74FE0F8C" \

Note: In the command, it is in fact referer not referrer

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