Can’t find output from Wget on Windows 10

Question

I run wget URL, it gives a pop-up progress bar in the PowerShell Window, then ends with some status (-v option), but no resulting file.

I have seen multiple previous discussions on this, some saying it should be in the current directory, some in a user home directory, some in a VirtualStore under AppData - but nothing in any of these locations.

This is Windows 10, running from a PowerShell command window.

My session (with fake URL):

PS P:\ftp> wget -v  http://mysystem/image.jpg
VERBOSE: GET http://mysystem/image.jpg with 0-byte payload
VERBOSE: received 70544-byte response of content type image/jpeg


StatusCode        : 200
StatusDescription : OK
Content           : {255, 216, 255, 224...}
RawContent        : HTTP/1.1 200 OK
                    Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100
                    Connection: Keep-Alive
                    Accept-Ranges: bytes
                    Content-Length: 70544
                    Content-Type: image/jpeg
                    Date: Sun, 03 Mar 2019 02:09:03 GMT
                    ETag: "11390-531efc...
Headers           : {[Keep-Alive, timeout=5, max=100], [Connection, Keep-Alive], [Accept-Ranges, bytes],
                    [Content-Length, 70544]...}
RawContentLength  : 70544

Answer 1

I assume wget is used as an alias of the powershell cmdlet Invoke-WebRequest. Then this should work:

wget -v  http://mysystem/image.jpg -outfile c:\temp\image.jpg

It is nice that some PS cmdlets have aliases that are equal to *nix commands providing the same functionality. But sometime it leads to confusion like here. You aren't running wget here, it is Invoke-WebRequest which is quite similar but not the same.

EDIT

In response to your comment: The code in your post does download the file, but keeps it in memory in the .content property of the WebResponseObject that is returned . It is even possible to save the file from the returned object. Like this:

$ret = wget -v  http://mysystem/image.jpg
$file = [System.IO.FileStream]::new('C:\temp\image.jpg', [System.IO.FileMode]::Create)
$file.write($ret.Content, 0, $ret.Content.Length)
$file.close()

Depending of what is downloaded the type of $ret.Content can vary. The above code works for binary files. All in all the first method using -Output is easier and resolves the binary/text format issue for you.