install wget in mac os x

wget is great command line *nix program for grabbing things from the web, but it doesn’t ship with macs. It’s also not a part of the developer tools package. Here’s the steps I used to build and install wget on my mac.

Grab the wget source code from http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/wget/wget-1.9.1.tar.gz (or get the latest here) . Open a terminal window and follow along:

tar xzf wget-1.9.1.tar.gz
cd wget-1.9.1
./configure
make
sudo make install

The wget binary should now be in your /usr/local/bin folder. Let’s also put /usr/local/bin in the shell path so we can type wget from the command line rather than the tedious /usr/local/bin/wget when we want to run the program. This is accomplished by editing ~/.bash_profile to add the following line:

PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin; export PATH

To get the shell to re-read this file again, type source ~/.bash_profile. Now whenever you start the terminal, /usr/local/bin will be in the path.

The other part of installing wget that needs a tweak is wget’s manual page isn’t found when running man wget from the terminal. To resolve this we need to edit the man configuration file.
 
sudo nano /usr/share/misc/man.conf

Scroll down a bit and below all the other lines beginning with MANPATH, add:
MANPATH /usr/local/man