Fix wget Download Freezing

May 4, 2024

One annoying problem of downloading files using wget is that when some network problem happens, it does not (by default) retry, and the download gets stuck,

60%[========================>                ]  71.62M --.-KB/s  eta 7m 43s

and I have to ^C and retry myself manually.

To fix this, --read-timeout=seconds comes to the rescue. According to the wget's man page:

--read-timeout=seconds
    Set the read (and write) timeout to seconds seconds.  The
    "time" of this timeout refers to idle time: if, at any
    point in the download, no data is received for more than the
    specified number of seconds, reading fails and the
    download is restarted.  This option does not directly affect
    the duration of the entire download.

We can adjust the timeout to a shorter interval, like every 20 seconds. So after 20 seconds of not receiving data, download is failed, and wget will automatically restart the download.

wget --read-timeout=20 <url>

However, we want wget to not ignore the previous download progress and start from where it left off. For that, we use the -c/--continue option.

wget --read-timeout=20 --continue <url>

And finally, we want wget to try infinitely after each download failure. For this, we specify the --tries=number option, whose default number is set to 20 tries. We specify 0 (or inf) for infinite trying.¹ So our final command is the following:

wget --read-timeout=20 --continue --tries=0 <url>

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