I'm writing a shell script but having difficulties wit the following. I want to use a pipe for wget, however this doesn't seem to work. This is what I try:

$ echo "www.google.com" | wget
wget: missing URL
Usage: wget [OPTION]... [URL]...

Try `wget --help' for more options.

Actually I will use another script that return an url instead of the echo command but to keep it simple I thought this should also work. What am I doing wrong? The output of the echo command should be used as input for wget? Yet wget doesn't get any input.

Your help is appreciated.

Standard input to a program is not the same thing as an argument on the command line. You have two options:

Or you can use the xargs command:
In the first option, everything inside "$( )" is considered a command, and the whole sequence is replaced with the command's output.

You don't get concept of pipes exactly right. Pipe redirects standard output stream of command to a input stream of another command. Wget in other hand excepts URL as _parameter_, which is not a stream at all.

One way is to use xargs -command to translate:
echo "www.google.com" |xargs wget

or another example with multiple parameters:
ls | xargs echo

So xargs translates its standard input into its first parameters parameters and executes it.

edit:
too slow

Thanx guys, I'm glad this is the newbie section. I'm learning