For a huge download, put the download in background using wget option -b as shown below.

wget -b http://www.openss7.org/repos/tarballs/strx25-0.9.2.1.tar.bz2

Displays:

Continuing in background, pid 1984.

Output will be written to `wget-log'.

It will initiate the download and gives back the shell prompt to you. You can always check the status of the download using tail -f as shown below.

tail -f wget-log

Displays:

Saving to: `strx25-0.9.2.1.tar.bz2.4'

     0K .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........  1% 65.5K 57s
    50K .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........  2% 85.9K 49s
   100K .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........  3% 83.3K 47s
   150K .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........  5% 86.6K 45s
   200K .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........  6% 33.9K 56s
   250K .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........  7%  182M 46s
   300K .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........  9% 57.9K 47s

Also, make sure to review our previous multitail article on how to use tail command effectively to view multiple files.