wget on Mac: 6 Places curl -O Behaves Differently
On a stock Mac, wget fails before it starts. With the PATH pinned to /usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin, macOS 26.4.1 (build 25E253) answers zsh:1: command not found: wget and exits 127. What ships instead is /usr/bin/curl, version 8.7.1. The standard advice is to type curl -O and move on. I tested that advice today and it fails quietly: pointed at a missing file, curl -O saved a 48-byte HTML error page under the name missing.zip and exited 0.
This Mac does have wget, but only because Homebrew installed it on May 15. Everything in this site's pipeline downloads with curl: the string curl appears in 112 files under ops/, and no script there calls wget. My click tracker even lists wget in its bot-traffic regex, next to curl. So I know where curl's defaults bite, and I wanted a direct answer: when you swap wget for curl -O, what changes?
One test server, the same URLs to both tools
I wrote a 55-line Python server on 127.0.0.1:18080 with one endpoint per behavior a download tool has to decide on: a 404, a 301 redirect, a server that returns 503 twice before a 200, a download whose name comes from a Content-Disposition header, a URL ending in a slash, and a file that already exists on disk. Each tool ran in an empty directory, and the server logged every request header. The tools were Homebrew wget 1.25.0 and the system curl 8.7.1, plus a third column for the curl flags that close most of the gaps.
curl -O got all six wrong and reported success on five of them.Where curl -O and wget part ways
Errors. wget treated the 404 as fatal, wrote nothing and exited 8. curl -O wrote the server's error page to disk and exited 0, because curl does not consider an HTTP status an error unless you pass -f. With -f it exits 22 and leaves no file. I covered that flag's own traps in curl --fail exit code 22; here the point is that a script swapping wget for curl -O loses its only failure signal.
Redirects. wget followed the 301 and saved the full 1,000,000 bytes. curl -O saved the redirect response itself, a 0-byte old.bin, and again exited 0. curl only follows Location headers with -L.
Retries. This is the one wget gets wrong. Its manual says it retries 20 times by default, which is true for network failures. HTTP 503 is not on that list: my server saw exactly one wget request, and wget exited 8. The GNU Wget manual documents the fix, --retry-on-http-error=503, and with it wget made three requests and succeeded in 3.2 seconds. curl retries nothing by default, but its man page defines 408, 429, 500, 502, 503 and 504 as transient for --retry. With --retry 3 it made three requests in 3.19 seconds, waiting one second and then two.
File names. For /download?id=42 with a Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="report.csv" header, wget saved a file literally named download?id=42, curl -O saved download, and only the opt-in flags (wget --content-disposition, curl -J) produced report.csv. For a URL ending in a slash, wget named the file index.html; curl has no name to extract and fails with exit 23, "Failure writing output to destination". No curl flag in my test fixed that; you have to pass -o name yourself.
Existing files. I put a 9-byte file containing precious where the download would land. curl -O overwrote it without a word, as its man page says it will. wget kept the original and wrote file.bin.1, then file.bin.2 on the next run. curl has had the same behavior behind --no-clobber since 7.83.0.
Resuming was the one tie. From a 400,000-byte partial file, wget -c and curl -C - -O both sent Range: bytes=400000-, and both finished files compared identical with cmp.
The curl line that covers five of six
# stock macOS, nothing to install
curl -fsSL --retry 3 -OJ --no-clobber "https://example.com/file.zip"
# as a shell function, for muscle memory
wget() { curl -fsSL --retry 3 -OJ --no-clobber "$@"; }Against the same server this line refused the 404 with exit 22, followed the redirect, survived the two 503s, saved report.csv, and wrote old.bin.1 beside an existing file. It still fails on a URL that ends in a slash. The function shadows real wget, so delete it if you install wget later, and it accepts URLs only, not wget flags. One more difference shows up in the request log: wget sends Accept-Encoding: identity on every request, while curl sends no Accept-Encoding unless you add --compressed. Servers that compress anyway are the subject of curl --compressed and unsolicited gzip.
Installing wget: three routes, measured
| Route | What happened here | Result |
|---|---|---|
brew install wget | Formula 1.25.0 revision 2 pulls libidn2, libpsl, openssl@4, gettext, libunistring. My May install still links openssl@3, a 79 MB keg, plus 40 MB of gettext | Works, HTTPS included |
Source, default ./configure | Exit 1: "The pkg-config script could not be found or is too old" after checking for gnutls... no | No binary |
Source, --without-ssl | Configures, builds in 4 s with make -j8, 576,728-byte binary | HTTP only: "HTTPS support not compiled in." |
The Homebrew formula page counts 43,374 installs in the last 30 days, so the first row is the route most people take. The source route is the answer to the "install wget on Mac without brew" search, and on a clean PATH it does not work: macOS ships no pkg-config and no TLS library headers, so wget's configure finds neither GnuTLS nor OpenSSL. A 2018 Ask Different question stops at the same step with "No package 'gnutls' found". Disabling TLS gets you a binary, and on today's web an HTTP-only downloader is close to useless; my build failed on the first https:// URL I gave it. The tarball also took about eight minutes to download from ftp.gnu.org this morning, for 5.2 MB.
When wget is still worth installing
Recursion. wget -r -np -l 2 fetched my test site's index, followed its links two levels down, skipped the parent directory, and asked for robots.txt first. curl has no equivalent; its author says so in his curl vs Wget comparison, calling recursive download "Wget's major strong side". If you mirror sites, convert links for offline reading, or feed a long list to -i with retry and naming behavior you already trust, install it. For single files in a script, the curl line above is already on every Mac. It is the same kind of gap as timeout: command not found on Mac, with a better stock substitute.
One check worth copying: my first clean-PATH test ran zsh -c 'wget -V' and found wget anyway, because ~/.zshenv prepends /opt/homebrew/bin even for non-interactive shells. Only zsh -f showed the stock answer. If you test "does a fresh Mac have this command", skip the startup files.
FAQ
Does macOS come with wget?
No. macOS 26.4.1 has no /usr/bin/wget or /bin/wget; a clean shell returns "command not found" with exit 127. It ships curl 8.7.1 at /usr/bin/curl.
What is the curl equivalent of wget on a Mac?
curl -fsSL --retry 3 -OJ --no-clobber URL. In my tests it matched wget on 404s, redirects, server-supplied names and existing files, and beat default wget on 503 retries. It fails on URLs ending in a slash, where you need -o filename.
Can I install wget on a Mac without Homebrew?
Not usefully from source on a stock system. The default configure step fails because macOS has no pkg-config or TLS headers, and a --without-ssl build cannot fetch HTTPS URLs. Use Homebrew, MacPorts, or the curl line.
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How this was checked: on 2026-10-06 I ran Homebrew wget 1.25.0 and system curl 8.7.1 on a Mac mini M4 (macOS 26.4.1) against a local Python test server, logging every request header; each case ran in an empty directory. The source build used wget-1.25.0.tar.gz from ftp.gnu.org with PATH limited to system directories. I did not test MacPorts, wget2, or Intel Macs. Retry and overwrite behavior comes from the tools' own man pages; the timings are single runs on loopback.