Windows & DOS: Issues & Discussions

I downloaded and installed wget for windows, then used cmd.exe to run it directly from its install folder. I downloaded an 8.5 GB (yes, Giga) tar file, waited a couple of days, then tried to find it only to see that it's nowhere to be found! I don't want to re-download the whole thing, especially if it's only to lose it again. I've tried test downloads of a few websites, and I can't find any of them either.

1) Where can I find my mysteriously disappeared file?

2) If it's just plain gone forever, how do I change stuff so that my files download properly?

If you're looking for a simple answer...download something like windirstat. It visualizes your hard drive usage, and you can just look for a relatively big block on your drive (I'm assuming you don't have that many 9 gig files laying around).

Or if you're using cygwin or something similar, you can do some googling and try out the find command. Or even more simple, just use windows search, search for *.* and filter results to only files over 7 gigs.

Unless told to do otherwise, wget saves to the current directory, whatever that may be. It may not be what you expect it to be depending on how you ran wget. Start looking in odd places for the files, like c:\windows\system32\, the directory wget.exe resides in, etc. Also remember you can right-click on a folder and click 'properties' to see a summary of how big its contents are, hunt around for a folder with 8 gigs of stuff.

If you know date when the download finished you can search the whole drive from an MSDOS prompt for any files created on that date. The big one should be obvious.

The date format should be in the order displayed by the "dir" command.

e.g. For a UK format date dd/mm/yyyy :

Code:

dir c:\ /s | find /i "05/07/2010" | more