Is there a command line method by which I can check whether a downloaded file is complete or broken?

The most common way to verify the integrity of downloaded files is to use MD5 checksums. This assumes that the site you are downloading from actually published MD5 checksums of their files. You can verify a MD5 checksum by creating your own checksum of the downloaded file and comparing it to the published checksum. If they are identical the file you have downloaded is complete and not tampered with.

If you don't expect the file you are downloading to change you can precompute a checksum and hard code it into the script, but if the file is ever updated the verification will fail.

To create a MD5 checksum of a file run md5sum myFile. In the case of wget you might find this command useful, especially if the file you are downloading is large:

wget -O - http://example.com/myFile | tee myFile | md5sum > MD5SUM.

This will create a checksum of "myFile" while downloading and save it to the file MD5SUM, possibly saving you some time.

In the case of a dropped connection I think the best way would be to check the exit codes of wget. If the download is successful without any errors wget will return 0. Anything else indicates something went wrong. Take a look at the "Exit status" section of man wget.

The return code of the command used to download the file will tell you if the command executed successfully or not. Typically, a return code of 0 denotes success and any non-zero number denotes an error. You can access the return code through the $? variable.

A basic example using wget would go:

#!/bin/bash

wget foo.tgz &> /dev/null

if [[ "$?" != 0 ]]; then
    echo "Error downloading file"
else
    echo "Success"
fi

&> /dev/null redirects all of wget's output to /dev/null so it's ideal for scripting BUT it's makes debugging wget errors more difficult.