Cleaner output when downloading files in a Vagrant provisioning script

Question

I use Vagrant for quickly bringing up test environments, development servers, etc. A lot of my Vagrant setups use provisioning scripts to automate the download and configuration of various tools as necessary. However the "tricks" that command-line download utilities such as curl and wget use to generate their progress bars/status displays (backspacing to overwrite the current line of text to increment a progress bar, etc.) do not render well at all when run in a Vagrant provision script, and result in huge spews of junk such as the following that cause legitimate output to quickly scroll off.

==> default: #
==> default: #########
############                                                              16.7%
############                                                              16.7%
==> default: #
==> default: #
==> default: #
==> default: #
==> default: #
==> default: #
==> default: #
==> default: #
==> default: #
==> default: #
==> default: #
==> default: #
==> default:
==> default:
==> default:
############                                                              16.8%

Is there a way to "clean up" the output of either curl or wget to be neater, and not use the "backspace over current line to redraw it" tricks? I prefer wget but would switch to curl if necessary. Alternatively, is there another download tool with a simpler/neater output format that I could use instead? (preferably one available in Ubuntu's repository, as that is the distro I use with most of my Vagrant setups)

My current solution is to disable output entirely (using wget's --no-verbose or curl's -s) but this is not ideal as it results in long pauses where nothing is output during the vagrant build (some of the files that I download are rather large); it would be nice to at least have a simple "percent done" progress display, or even a simple line of "marching dots."

Answer 1

I use wget with the --progress=bar:force option. While not ideal, this makes the outlook better. Without this option, wget defaults to the dot type progress bar, because it does not detect a terminal.