Shell Programming and Scripting

I'm trying to write a python wrapper around wget to show the progress bar on a gui application. Wget gives you a progress bar on command line, but how would I pipe that to some "tty" that's really just a variable I read, or am I going about it all wrong? When I try to just redirect the output to a file, I don't get the progress bar, or anything in that file if I tail -f it.

I'm experimenting...with limited success with using nohup, so:

Code:

nohup wget http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/ubuntu-releases/intrepid/ubuntu-8.10-alternate-amd64.iso > somefile

which is sorta working if I tail -f somefile, but I suspect I'm missing some much simpler method, is there an environmental variable I could be looking at for this? Presumably I could now build a loop which cuts the portion of the last line of somefile which shows the % number, but it still seems like I'm missing some simpler method.