Back when Mac OS X was young, and Apple hadn’t yet settled on their toolchain, wget was included as a CLI tool for getting files from URLs.

When 10.1 came around, wget disappeared in favor of cURL . I have no idea if there were internal political reasons at Apple for this change, or whether they thought it was simply a better tool. Personally, I think they both have their strengths.

Anyway, when folks noticed that wget was absent, I put the binary up on ierna.com so folks could get it, since compiling from source wasn’t as easy on Mac OS X as it is now. Apple was maintaining their own ports, and the changes which made the configure/make/make install dance easy hadn’t yet trickled out. Neither were excellent tools like fink and Darwin Ports available yet to ease compiling and dependency management.

A few people linked directly to the file which is why I’m writing this entry in my blog; if folks attempt to visit that link, they’ll get redirected to this post.

Note to those people: if you really want wget, install Darwin Ports and after installation, type “ports install wget”.