wget and URLs with ?s

[thehemi]

Why do so many open source places provide download URLs that
include a ? in the middle somewhere? wget doesn't play w/ them!
Is there an option for use with wget that I'm missing? Or should
I use something else other than wget for downloading files?

[Ben Cotton]

Scott,

Have you tried putting quotes around the URL? That should make it happy. It's not so much a wget issue as a shell issue. Quoting the URL should cause the shell to pass it as a single string to wget.


BC

[Cabhan]

Right. The shell has a feature called shell patterns, that allow you to select multiple files with one string. You probably know about the other special character, '*'. '*' means "0 or more characters", while '?' means "1 character". So for instance, the following all match:

hell* => hell, hello, hellothere
b?b => bab, bob, bub, bbb, bcb

If you want to pass the literal strings, surround it with single quotes ('b?b').

[thehemi]

I will give the quotes a whirl next time. Thanks for the heads-up.