Using wget does not give same output as browser

I am using wget for Windows (gnuwin32 wget-1.11.4-1) in Windows 8 and using it for a helpdesk tool called Kayako, telling it to poll from an email queue. The command line looks like this:

wget.exe -O null --timeout 25 http://xxx.kayako.com/cron/index.php?/Parser/ParserMinute/POP3IMAP

I know it takes around 20 seconds to receive a response from the server in my particular case when using a browser with the URL in the command line above. However, when using that command, it returns almost immediately. This is an excerpt of the output:

Connecting to xxx.kayako.com[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: unspecified [text/html]

I would like to know what would be the difference between the two cases and how could I get wget to behave in the same way as the browser (I know it doesn't because Kayako is not polling from the email queue).

DPM

Posted 2013-03-25T11:17:14.667

Reputation: 123

Answers

Some websites offer browser optimized pages. That means the site checks on a request what kind of browser you are using and serves you with an optimized page or as a fallback a standard page.

Also java-script could be a problem see link

Simon

Posted 2013-03-25T11:17:14.667

Reputation: 3 831

1wget has a --user-agent option - try specifying a well known one. Use this site http://whatsmyuseragent.com/ to see your current user agent string. Also, you may need to use the --referrer option - some sites don't like blank referrers. The referrer you want to send is the URL of the page containing the link you are trying to download. Also you might need to specify -e robots=off. – LawrenceC – 2013-03-28T03:01:42.523