Hi

I've come across a situation where I got to use wget to load remote files.
I totally dont understand this.
Whats wget all abt ? fopen() and cURL can read remote files too. Why am I told to use wget ?

Thanks

wget is very handy for getting files via the command line - quick and simple. Perhaps you can give more details about your situation and maybe we can answer your question better as to why you were told to use wget? I would say unless there are specific circumstances if you were writing scripts fopen() etc. would be better.

NAME
Wget - The non-interactive network downloader.

SYNOPSIS
wget [option]... [URL]...

DESCRIPTION
GNU Wget is a free utility for non-interactive download of
files from the Web. It supports HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP pro­
tocols, as well as retrieval through HTTP proxies.

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If you have console access you may want to try "man wget" assuming you're connectiong to a Nix box

The person whom Im writing the PHP script for wants this running as cron. But he says that theres no way to use cron directly. wget is required. 1and1 is the host and they have their own control panel. I know to set cron in Plesk, CPanel etc. I dont understand how cron has anything to with wget.

I dont understand how cron has anything to with wget.

Perfect question to ask the person you're working with.

Short answer, it doesn't

cron is a daemon for scheduled periodic tasks. Like once per day roll over the logs, etc.

You can setup cron to do anything with wget, like wget a site every minute, parse it, and then if something looks wrong then email yourself or something.

It doesn't. The person will use cron, to call wget, which will then send a request to your script. Its really that simple.