What to do if wget's progress:mega doen't cut it anymore?

Question

I have script for downloading large files in a queue. Now I would really appreciate it, if I had a decent log. Specifying the -o or -a option is apparently specially made for that, however as of the time I am writing this "very large files", as the manpage states, are no longer 50m of size but rather gigabytes. --progress=dot:mega produces 1000 lines of output (plainly it will be 3000*80 dots ('.')) just for a 3GB file. So I am wondering: is there any way to customize the progress style settings, so that i can actually make use of the log feature?

Answer 1

I went down a big long path of playing with modifying the wget output on the fly because I couldn't figure this out either. Then I found this debian bugreport which led me to the -e dotbytes=X option in wget. I tested this and it works with my wget-1.12:

wget blah --progress=dot -e dotbytes=10M

prints a dot for every 10M of output. You can use 1000M or whatever you like.