Native alternative to wget in Windows PowerShell?

I know I can download and install the aformentioned library (wget for Windows), but my question is this:

In Windows PowerShell, is there a native alternative to wget?

I need wget simply to retrieve a file from a given URL with HTTP GET. For instance:

wget http://www.google.com/

Answer

Here's a simple PS 3.0 and later one-liner that works and doesn't involve much PS barf:

wget http://blog.stackexchange.com/ -OutFile out.html

Note that:

• wget is an alias for Invoke-WebRequest


• Invoke-WebRequest returns a HtmlWebResponseObject, which contains a lot of useful HTML parsing properties such as Links, Images, Forms, InputFields, etc., but in this case we're just using the raw Content


• The file contents are stored in memory before writing to disk, making this approach unsuitable for downloading large files


• 
  

  On Windows Server Core installations, you'll need to write this as

  
  

  wget http://blog.stackexchange.com/ -UseBasicParsing -OutFile out.html
  



• 
  

  Prior to Sep 20 2014, I suggested

  
  

  (wget http://blog.stackexchange.com/).Content >out.html
  

  
  

  as an answer.  However, this doesn't work in all cases, as the > operator (which is an alias for Out-File) converts the input to Unicode.

  
  

If you are using Windows 7, you will need to install version 4 or newer of the Windows Management Framework.

You may find that doing a $ProgressPreference = "silentlyContinue" before Invoke-WebRequest will significantly improve download speed with large files; this variable controls whether the progress UI is rendered.