Question: I want to use wget to download the following 18 HTML files:

```
http://www.ted.com/talks/quick-list?sort=date&order=desc&page=18
http://www.ted.com/talks/quick-list?sort=date&order=desc&page=17
...
http://www.ted.com/talks/quick-list?sort=date&order=desc&page=1

```

No matter what comes after `page=`, it always downloads the first page of the listing. Do I have to escape some characters in the URLs? How?

Answer: 
`&` is a special character in most shell environments. You can use double quotes to quote the URL to pass the whole thing in as the parameter to `wget`:

```
wget "http://www.ted.com/talks/quick-list?sort=date&order=desc&page=18"

```
1. Store your list of URLs in a file (each URL in a separate line!!):

`echo "http://www.ted.com/talks/quick-list?sort=date&order=desc&page=18
http://www.ted.com/talks/quick-list?sort=date&order=desc&page=17
...
" > wget_filelist.txt`
2. Call wget to retrieve the stuff: 

`wget -i wget_filelist.txt`