How to handle special characters in a wget download link?

Question

I have a link like this:

 wget --user=user_nm --http-password=pass123 https://site.domain.com/Folder/Folder/page.php?link=/Folder/Folder/Csv.Stock.php\&namefile=STOCK.Stock.csv

But while the password authorization is fine, wget still cannot process the link. Why?

Solution

The safest way when handling a link from e.g. a browser is to use single quotes (') to quote the whole link string. That way the shell will not try to break it up, without you having to manually escape each special character:

wget --user=user_nm --http-password=pass123 'https://site.domain.com/Folder/Folder/page.php?link=/Folder/Folder/Csv.Stock.php&namefile=STOCK.Stock.csv'

Or, for a real example:

wget --user-agent=firefox 'https://www.google.com/search?q=bash+shell+singl+quote&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mageia:en-US:official&client=firefox-a#q=bash+single+quote&rls=org.mageia:en-US:official'

Keep in mind that server-side restrictions might make using wget like this quite hard. Google, for example, forbids certain user agent strings, hence the --user-agent option above. Other servers use cookies to maintain session information and simply feeding a link to wget will not work. YMMV.