How to download a Google Drive url via curl or wget

Simplest and best way (with a real Google Drive file example)

1. Install gdown using pip

   • Command - pip install gdown

2. Let's say I wish to download cnn_stories.tgz from Google Drive

   • Download Link: https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=0BwmD_VLjROrfTHk4NFg2SndKcjQ

3. Please note the id URL parameter 0BwmD_VLjROrfTHk4NFg2SndKcjQ in the link

4. That's it! Download the file using gdown

   • gdown --id 0BwmD_VLjROrfTHk4NFg2SndKcjQ --output cnn_stories.tgz

TLDR: gdown --id {gdrive_file_id} --output {file_name}

---

Command Line Args:

--id : Google drive file ID

--output: Output File name

How about this method? When the file is such large size, Google returns a code for downloading the file. You can download the file using the code. When such large file is downloaded using curl, you can see the code as follows.

<a id="uc-download-link" class="goog-inline-block jfk-button jfk-button-action" href="/uc?export=download&amp;confirm=ABCD&amp;id=### file ID ###">download</a>

The query with confirm=ABCD is important for downloading the file. This code is also included in the cookie. At the cookie, you can see it as follows.

#HttpOnly_.drive.google.com TRUE    /uc TRUE    #####   download_warning_#####  ABCD

In this case, "ABCD" is the code. In order to retrieve the code from the cookie and download the file, you can use the following script.

Sample script :

#!/bin/bash
fileid="### file id ###"
filename="MyFile.csv"
curl -c ./cookie -s -L "https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=${fileid}" > /dev/null
curl -Lb ./cookie "https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&confirm=`awk '/download/ {print $NF}' ./cookie`&id=${fileid}" -o ${filename}

If this was not useful for you, I'm sorry.

Updated at February 17, 2022

Recently, it seems that the specification of this flow has been changed. So I updated this answer. In order to download a publicly shared file of large size from Google Drive, you can use the following script.

#!/bin/bash
fileid="### file id ###"
filename="MyFile.csv"
html=`curl -c ./cookie -s -L "https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=${fileid}"`
curl -Lb ./cookie "https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&`echo ${html}|grep -Po '(confirm=[a-zA-Z0-9\-_]+)'`&id=${fileid}" -o ${filename}

• In this case, the ID for downloading is retrieved from the HTML data as follows.

    <form id="downloadForm" action="https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&amp;id={fileId}&amp;confirm={value for downloading}" method="post">
  

• When you want to download a publicly shared file of small size from Google Drive, you can use the following command.

    curl -L "https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=### fileId ###" -o sampleoutput.csv