NAME¶
Wget - The non-interactive network downloader.
SYNOPSIS¶
wget [
option]... [
URL]...
DESCRIPTION¶
GNU Wget is a free utility for non-interactive download of files from the Web.
It supports HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP protocols, as well as retrieval through HTTP
proxies.
Wget is non-interactive, meaning that it can work in the background, while the
user is not logged on. This allows you to start a retrieval and disconnect
from the system, letting Wget finish the work. By contrast, most of the Web
browsers require constant user's presence, which can be a great hindrance when
transferring a lot of data.
Wget can follow links in HTML, XHTML, and CSS pages, to create local versions of
remote web sites, fully recreating the directory structure of the original
site. This is sometimes referred to as "recursive downloading."
While doing that, Wget respects the Robot Exclusion Standard (
/robots.txt). Wget can be instructed to convert the links in downloaded
files to point at the local files, for offline viewing.
Wget has been designed for robustness over slow or unstable network connections;
if a download fails due to a network problem, it will keep retrying until the
whole file has been retrieved. If the server supports regetting, it will
instruct the server to continue the download from where it left off.
OPTIONS¶
Option Syntax¶
Since Wget uses GNU getopt to process command-line arguments, every option has a
long form along with the short one. Long options are more convenient to
remember, but take time to type. You may freely mix different option styles,
or specify options after the command-line arguments. Thus you may write:
wget -r --tries=10 http://fly.srk.fer.hr/ -o log
The space between the option accepting an argument and the argument may be
omitted. Instead of
-o log you can write
-olog.
You may put several options that do not require arguments together, like:
wget -drc <URL>
This is completely equivalent to:
wget -d -r -c <URL>
Since the options can be specified after the arguments, you may terminate them
with
--. So the following will try to download URL
-x, reporting
failure to
log:
wget -o log -- -x
The options that accept comma-separated lists all respect the convention that
specifying an empty list clears its value. This can be useful to clear the
.wgetrc settings. For instance, if your
.wgetrc sets
"exclude_directories" to
/cgi-bin, the following example will
first reset it, and then set it to exclude
/~nobody and
/~somebody. You can also clear the lists in
.wgetrc.
wget -X " -X /~nobody,/~somebody
Most options that do not accept arguments are
boolean options, so named
because their state can be captured with a yes-or-no ("boolean")
variable. For example,
--follow-ftp tells Wget to follow FTP links from
HTML files and, on the other hand,
--no-glob tells it not to perform
file globbing on FTP URLs. A boolean option is either
affirmative or
negative (beginning with
--no). All such options share several
properties.
Unless stated otherwise, it is assumed that the default behavior is the opposite
of what the option accomplishes. For example, the documented existence of
--follow-ftp assumes that the default is to
not follow FTP links
from HTML pages.
Affirmative options can be negated by prepending the
--no- to the option
name; negative options can be negated by omitting the
--no- prefix.
This might seem superfluous---if the default for an affirmative option is to
not do something, then why provide a way to explicitly turn it off? But the
startup file may in fact change the default. For instance, using
"follow_ftp = on" in
.wgetrc makes Wget
follow FTP
links by default, and using
--no-follow-ftp is the only way to restore
the factory default from the command line.
Basic Startup Options¶
- -V
- --version
- Display the version of Wget.
- -h
- --help
- Print a help message describing all of Wget's command-line
options.
- -b
- --background
- Go to background immediately after startup. If no output
file is specified via the -o, output is redirected to
wget-log.
- -e command
- --execute command
- Execute command as if it were a part of
.wgetrc. A command thus invoked will be executed after the
commands in .wgetrc, thus taking precedence over them. If you need
to specify more than one wgetrc command, use multiple instances of
-e.
- -o logfile
- --output-file=logfile
- Log all messages to logfile. The messages are
normally reported to standard error.
- -a logfile
- --append-output=logfile
- Append to logfile. This is the same as -o,
only it appends to logfile instead of overwriting the old log file.
If logfile does not exist, a new file is created.
- -d
- --debug
- Turn on debug output, meaning various information important
to the developers of Wget if it does not work properly. Your system
administrator may have chosen to compile Wget without debug support, in
which case -d will not work. Please note that compiling with debug
support is always safe---Wget compiled with the debug support will
not print any debug info unless requested with -d.
- -q
- --quiet
- Turn off Wget's output.
- -v
- --verbose
- Turn on verbose output, with all the available data. The
default output is verbose.
- -nv
- --no-verbose
- Turn off verbose without being completely quiet (use
-q for that), which means that error messages and basic information
still get printed.
- -i file
- --input-file=file
- Read URLs from a local or external file. If -
is specified as file, URLs are read from the standard input. (Use
./- to read from a file literally named -.)
If this function is used, no URLs need be present on the command line. If
there are URLs both on the command line and in an input file, those on the
command lines will be the first ones to be retrieved. If
--force-html is not specified, then file should consist of a
series of URLs, one per line.
However, if you specify --force-html, the document will be regarded
as html. In that case you may have problems with relative links,
which you can solve either by adding "<base href="
url">" to the documents or by specifying
--base= url on the command line.
If the file is an external one, the document will be automatically
treated as html if the Content-Type matches text/html.
Furthermore, the file's location will be implicitly used as base
href if none was specified.
- -F
- --force-html
- When input is read from a file, force it to be treated as
an HTML file. This enables you to retrieve relative links from existing
HTML files on your local disk, by adding "<base href="
url">" to HTML, or using the --base
command-line option.
- -B URL
- --base=URL
- Resolves relative links using URL as the point of
reference, when reading links from an HTML file specified via the
-i/ --input-file option (together with --force-html,
or when the input file was fetched remotely from a server describing it as
HTML). This is equivalent to the presence of a "BASE" tag in the
HTML input file, with URL as the value for the "href"
attribute.
For instance, if you specify http://foo/bar/a.html for URL,
and Wget reads ../baz/b.html from the input file, it would be
resolved to http://foo/baz/b.html.
- --config=FILE
- Specify the location of a startup file you wish to
use.
Download Options¶
- --bind-address=ADDRESS
- When making client TCP/IP connections, bind to
ADDRESS on the local machine. ADDRESS may be specified as a
hostname or IP address. This option can be useful if your machine is bound
to multiple IPs.
- -t number
- --tries=number
- Set number of retries to number. Specify 0 or
inf for infinite retrying. The default is to retry 20 times, with
the exception of fatal errors like "connection refused" or
"not found" (404), which are not retried.
- -O file
- --output-document=file
- The documents will not be written to the appropriate files,
but all will be concatenated together and written to file. If
- is used as file, documents will be printed to standard
output, disabling link conversion. (Use ./- to print to a file
literally named -.)
Use of -O is not intended to mean simply "use the name
file instead of the one in the URL;" rather, it is analogous
to shell redirection: wget -O file http://foo is intended to work
like wget -O - http://foo > file; file will be truncated
immediately, and all downloaded content will be written there.
For this reason, -N (for timestamp-checking) is not supported in
combination with -O: since file is always newly created, it
will always have a very new timestamp. A warning will be issued if this
combination is used.
Similarly, using -r or -p with -O may not work as you
expect: Wget won't just download the first file to file and then
download the rest to their normal names: all downloaded content
will be placed in file. This was disabled in version 1.11, but has
been reinstated (with a warning) in 1.11.2, as there are some cases where
this behavior can actually have some use.
Note that a combination with -k is only permitted when downloading a
single document, as in that case it will just convert all relative URIs to
external ones; -k makes no sense for multiple URIs when they're all
being downloaded to a single file; -k can be used only when the
output is a regular file.
- -nc
- --no-clobber
- If a file is downloaded more than once in the same
directory, Wget's behavior depends on a few options, including -nc.
In certain cases, the local file will be clobbered, or overwritten,
upon repeated download. In other cases it will be preserved.
When running Wget without -N, -nc, -r, or -p,
downloading the same file in the same directory will result in the
original copy of file being preserved and the second copy being
named file.1. If that file is downloaded yet again, the
third copy will be named file.2, and so on. (This is also
the behavior with -nd, even if -r or -p are in
effect.) When -nc is specified, this behavior is suppressed, and
Wget will refuse to download newer copies of file. Therefore,
""no-clobber"" is actually a misnomer in this
mode---it's not clobbering that's prevented (as the numeric suffixes were
already preventing clobbering), but rather the multiple version saving
that's prevented.
When running Wget with -r or -p, but without -N,
-nd, or -nc, re-downloading a file will result in the new
copy simply overwriting the old. Adding -nc will prevent this
behavior, instead causing the original version to be preserved and any
newer copies on the server to be ignored.
When running Wget with -N, with or without -r or -p,
the decision as to whether or not to download a newer copy of a file
depends on the local and remote timestamp and size of the file. -nc
may not be specified at the same time as -N.
Note that when -nc is specified, files with the suffixes .html
or .htm will be loaded from the local disk and parsed as if they
had been retrieved from the Web.
- -c
- --continue
- Continue getting a partially-downloaded file. This is
useful when you want to finish up a download started by a previous
instance of Wget, or by another program. For instance:
wget -c ftp://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/ls-lR.Z
If there is a file named ls-lR.Z in the current directory, Wget will
assume that it is the first portion of the remote file, and will ask the
server to continue the retrieval from an offset equal to the length of the
local file.
Note that you don't need to specify this option if you just want the current
invocation of Wget to retry downloading a file should the connection be
lost midway through. This is the default behavior. -c only affects
resumption of downloads started prior to this invocation of Wget,
and whose local files are still sitting around.
Without -c, the previous example would just download the remote file
to ls-lR.Z.1, leaving the truncated ls-lR.Z file alone.
Beginning with Wget 1.7, if you use -c on a non-empty file, and it
turns out that the server does not support continued downloading, Wget
will refuse to start the download from scratch, which would effectively
ruin existing contents. If you really want the download to start from
scratch, remove the file.
Also beginning with Wget 1.7, if you use -c on a file which is of
equal size as the one on the server, Wget will refuse to download the file
and print an explanatory message. The same happens when the file is
smaller on the server than locally (presumably because it was changed on
the server since your last download attempt)---because
"continuing" is not meaningful, no download occurs.
On the other side of the coin, while using -c, any file that's bigger
on the server than locally will be considered an incomplete download and
only "(length(remote) - length(local))" bytes will be downloaded
and tacked onto the end of the local file. This behavior can be desirable
in certain cases---for instance, you can use wget -c to download
just the new portion that's been appended to a data collection or log
file.
However, if the file is bigger on the server because it's been
changed, as opposed to just appended to, you'll end up with
a garbled file. Wget has no way of verifying that the local file is really
a valid prefix of the remote file. You need to be especially careful of
this when using -c in conjunction with -r, since every file
will be considered as an "incomplete download" candidate.
Another instance where you'll get a garbled file if you try to use -c
is if you have a lame HTTP proxy that inserts a "transfer
interrupted" string into the local file. In the future a
"rollback" option may be added to deal with this case.
Note that -c only works with FTP servers and with HTTP servers that
support the "Range" header.
- --progress=type
- Select the type of the progress indicator you wish to use.
Legal indicators are "dot" and "bar".
The "bar" indicator is used by default. It draws an ASCII progress
bar graphics (a.k.a "thermometer" display) indicating the status
of retrieval. If the output is not a TTY, the "dot" bar will be
used by default.
Use --progress=dot to switch to the "dot" display. It
traces the retrieval by printing dots on the screen, each dot representing
a fixed amount of downloaded data.
When using the dotted retrieval, you may also set the style by
specifying the type as dot:style. Different styles assign
different meaning to one dot. With the "default" style each dot
represents 1K, there are ten dots in a cluster and 50 dots in a line. The
"binary" style has a more "computer"-like
orientation---8K dots, 16-dots clusters and 48 dots per line (which makes
for 384K lines). The "mega" style is suitable for downloading
very large files---each dot represents 64K retrieved, there are eight dots
in a cluster, and 48 dots on each line (so each line contains 3M).
Note that you can set the default style using the "progress"
command in .wgetrc. That setting may be overridden from the command
line. The exception is that, when the output is not a TTY, the
"dot" progress will be favored over "bar". To force
the bar output, use --progress=bar:force.
- -N
- --timestamping
- Turn on time-stamping.
- --no-use-server-timestamps
- Don't set the local file's timestamp by the one on the
server.
By default, when a file is downloaded, it's timestamps are set to match
those from the remote file. This allows the use of --timestamping
on subsequent invocations of wget. However, it is sometimes useful to base
the local file's timestamp on when it was actually downloaded; for that
purpose, the --no-use-server-timestamps option has been
provided.
- -S
- --server-response
- Print the headers sent by HTTP servers and responses sent
by FTP servers.
- --spider
- When invoked with this option, Wget will behave as a Web
spider, which means that it will not download the pages, just check
that they are there. For example, you can use Wget to check your
bookmarks:
wget --spider --force-html -i bookmarks.html
This feature needs much more work for Wget to get close to the functionality
of real web spiders.
- -T seconds
- --timeout=seconds
- Set the network timeout to seconds seconds. This is
equivalent to specifying --dns-timeout, --connect-timeout,
and --read-timeout, all at the same time.
When interacting with the network, Wget can check for timeout and abort the
operation if it takes too long. This prevents anomalies like hanging reads
and infinite connects. The only timeout enabled by default is a 900-second
read timeout. Setting a timeout to 0 disables it altogether. Unless you
know what you are doing, it is best not to change the default timeout
settings.
All timeout-related options accept decimal values, as well as subsecond
values. For example, 0.1 seconds is a legal (though unwise) choice
of timeout. Subsecond timeouts are useful for checking server response
times or for testing network latency.
- --dns-timeout=seconds
- Set the DNS lookup timeout to seconds seconds. DNS
lookups that don't complete within the specified time will fail. By
default, there is no timeout on DNS lookups, other than that implemented
by system libraries.
- --connect-timeout=seconds
- Set the connect timeout to seconds seconds. TCP
connections that take longer to establish will be aborted. By default,
there is no connect timeout, other than that implemented by system
libraries.
- --read-timeout=seconds
- Set the read (and write) timeout to seconds seconds.
The "time" of this timeout refers to idle time: if, at
any point in the download, no data is received for more than the specified
number of seconds, reading fails and the download is restarted. This
option does not directly affect the duration of the entire download.
Of course, the remote server may choose to terminate the connection sooner
than this option requires. The default read timeout is 900 seconds.
- --limit-rate=amount
- Limit the download speed to amount bytes per second.
Amount may be expressed in bytes, kilobytes with the k suffix, or
megabytes with the m suffix. For example, --limit-rate=20k
will limit the retrieval rate to 20KB/s. This is useful when, for whatever
reason, you don't want Wget to consume the entire available bandwidth.
This option allows the use of decimal numbers, usually in conjunction with
power suffixes; for example, --limit-rate=2.5k is a legal value.
Note that Wget implements the limiting by sleeping the appropriate amount of
time after a network read that took less time than specified by the rate.
Eventually this strategy causes the TCP transfer to slow down to
approximately the specified rate. However, it may take some time for this
balance to be achieved, so don't be surprised if limiting the rate doesn't
work well with very small files.
- -w seconds
- --wait=seconds
- Wait the specified number of seconds between the
retrievals. Use of this option is recommended, as it lightens the server
load by making the requests less frequent. Instead of in seconds, the time
can be specified in minutes using the "m" suffix, in hours using
"h" suffix, or in days using "d" suffix.
Specifying a large value for this option is useful if the network or the
destination host is down, so that Wget can wait long enough to reasonably
expect the network error to be fixed before the retry. The waiting
interval specified by this function is influenced by
"--random-wait", which see.
- --waitretry=seconds
- If you don't want Wget to wait between every
retrieval, but only between retries of failed downloads, you can use this
option. Wget will use linear backoff, waiting 1 second after the
first failure on a given file, then waiting 2 seconds after the second
failure on that file, up to the maximum number of seconds you
specify.
By default, Wget will assume a value of 10 seconds.
- --random-wait
- Some web sites may perform log analysis to identify
retrieval programs such as Wget by looking for statistically significant
similarities in the time between requests. This option causes the time
between requests to vary between 0.5 and 1.5 * wait seconds, where
wait was specified using the --wait option, in order to mask
Wget's presence from such analysis.
A 2001 article in a publication devoted to development on a popular consumer
platform provided code to perform this analysis on the fly. Its author
suggested blocking at the class C address level to ensure automated
retrieval programs were blocked despite changing DHCP-supplied addresses.
The --random-wait option was inspired by this ill-advised
recommendation to block many unrelated users from a web site due to the
actions of one.
- --no-proxy
- Don't use proxies, even if the appropriate *_proxy
environment variable is defined.
- -Q quota
- --quota=quota
- Specify download quota for automatic retrievals. The value
can be specified in bytes (default), kilobytes (with k suffix), or
megabytes (with m suffix).
Note that quota will never affect downloading a single file. So if you
specify wget -Q10k ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/ls-lR.gz, all of the
ls-lR.gz will be downloaded. The same goes even when several URLs
are specified on the command-line. However, quota is respected when
retrieving either recursively, or from an input file. Thus you may safely
type wget -Q2m -i sites---download will be aborted when the quota
is exceeded.
Setting quota to 0 or to inf unlimits the download quota.
- --no-dns-cache
- Turn off caching of DNS lookups. Normally, Wget remembers
the IP addresses it looked up from DNS so it doesn't have to repeatedly
contact the DNS server for the same (typically small) set of hosts it
retrieves from. This cache exists in memory only; a new Wget run will
contact DNS again.
However, it has been reported that in some situations it is not desirable to
cache host names, even for the duration of a short-running application
like Wget. With this option Wget issues a new DNS lookup (more precisely,
a new call to "gethostbyname" or "getaddrinfo") each
time it makes a new connection. Please note that this option will
not affect caching that might be performed by the resolving library
or by an external caching layer, such as NSCD.
If you don't understand exactly what this option does, you probably won't
need it.
- --restrict-file-names=modes
- Change which characters found in remote URLs must be
escaped during generation of local filenames. Characters that are
restricted by this option are escaped, i.e. replaced with
%HH, where HH is the hexadecimal number that
corresponds to the restricted character. This option may also be used to
force all alphabetical cases to be either lower- or uppercase.
By default, Wget escapes the characters that are not valid or safe as part
of file names on your operating system, as well as control characters that
are typically unprintable. This option is useful for changing these
defaults, perhaps because you are downloading to a non-native partition,
or because you want to disable escaping of the control characters, or you
want to further restrict characters to only those in the ASCII range of
values.
The modes are a comma-separated set of text values. The acceptable
values are unix, windows, nocontrol, ascii,
lowercase, and uppercase. The values unix and
windows are mutually exclusive (one will override the other), as
are lowercase and uppercase. Those last are special cases,
as they do not change the set of characters that would be escaped, but
rather force local file paths to be converted either to lower- or
uppercase.
When "unix" is specified, Wget escapes the character / and
the control characters in the ranges 0--31 and 128--159. This is the
default on Unix-like operating systems.
When "windows" is given, Wget escapes the characters \,
|, /, :, ?, ", *,
<, >, and the control characters in the ranges 0--31
and 128--159. In addition to this, Wget in Windows mode uses +
instead of : to separate host and port in local file names, and
uses @ instead of ? to separate the query portion of the
file name from the rest. Therefore, a URL that would be saved as
www.xemacs.org:4300/search.pl?input=blah in Unix mode would be
saved as www.xemacs.org+4300/search.pl@input=blah in Windows mode.
This mode is the default on Windows.
If you specify nocontrol, then the escaping of the control characters
is also switched off. This option may make sense when you are downloading
URLs whose names contain UTF-8 characters, on a system which can save and
display filenames in UTF-8 (some possible byte values used in UTF-8 byte
sequences fall in the range of values designated by Wget as
"controls").
The ascii mode is used to specify that any bytes whose values are
outside the range of ASCII characters (that is, greater than 127) shall be
escaped. This can be useful when saving filenames whose encoding does not
match the one used locally.
- -4
- --inet4-only
- -6
- --inet6-only
- Force connecting to IPv4 or IPv6 addresses. With
--inet4-only or -4, Wget will only connect to IPv4 hosts,
ignoring AAAA records in DNS, and refusing to connect to IPv6 addresses
specified in URLs. Conversely, with --inet6-only or -6, Wget
will only connect to IPv6 hosts and ignore A records and IPv4 addresses.
Neither options should be needed normally. By default, an IPv6-aware Wget
will use the address family specified by the host's DNS record. If the DNS
responds with both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, Wget will try them in sequence
until it finds one it can connect to. (Also see
"--prefer-family" option described below.)
These options can be used to deliberately force the use of IPv4 or IPv6
address families on dual family systems, usually to aid debugging or to
deal with broken network configuration. Only one of --inet6-only
and --inet4-only may be specified at the same time. Neither option
is available in Wget compiled without IPv6 support.
- --prefer-family=none/IPv4/IPv6
- When given a choice of several addresses, connect to the
addresses with specified address family first. The address order returned
by DNS is used without change by default.
This avoids spurious errors and connect attempts when accessing hosts that
resolve to both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses from IPv4 networks. For example,
www.kame.net resolves to 2001:200:0:8002:203:47ff:fea5:3085
and to 203.178.141.194. When the preferred family is
"IPv4", the IPv4 address is used first; when the preferred
family is "IPv6", the IPv6 address is used first; if the
specified value is "none", the address order returned by DNS is
used without change.
Unlike -4 and -6, this option doesn't inhibit access to any
address family, it only changes the order in which the addresses
are accessed. Also note that the reordering performed by this option is
stable---it doesn't affect order of addresses of the same family.
That is, the relative order of all IPv4 addresses and of all IPv6
addresses remains intact in all cases.
- --retry-connrefused
- Consider "connection refused" a transient error
and try again. Normally Wget gives up on a URL when it is unable to
connect to the site because failure to connect is taken as a sign that the
server is not running at all and that retries would not help. This option
is for mirroring unreliable sites whose servers tend to disappear for
short periods of time.
- --user=user
- --password=password
- Specify the username user and password
password for both FTP and HTTP file retrieval. These parameters can
be overridden using the --ftp-user and --ftp-password
options for FTP connections and the --http-user and
--http-password options for HTTP connections.
- --ask-password
- Prompt for a password for each connection established.
Cannot be specified when --password is being used, because they are
mutually exclusive.
- --no-iri
- Turn off internationalized URI (IRI) support. Use
--iri to turn it on. IRI support is activated by default.
You can set the default state of IRI support using the "iri"
command in .wgetrc. That setting may be overridden from the command
line.
- --local-encoding=encoding
- Force Wget to use encoding as the default system
encoding. That affects how Wget converts URLs specified as arguments from
locale to UTF-8 for IRI support.
Wget use the function "nl_langinfo()" and then the
"CHARSET" environment variable to get the locale. If it fails,
ASCII is used.
You can set the default local encoding using the "local_encoding"
command in .wgetrc. That setting may be overridden from the command
line.
- --remote-encoding=encoding
- Force Wget to use encoding as the default remote
server encoding. That affects how Wget converts URIs found in files from
remote encoding to UTF-8 during a recursive fetch. This options is only
useful for IRI support, for the interpretation of non-ASCII characters.
For HTTP, remote encoding can be found in HTTP "Content-Type"
header and in HTML "Content-Type http-equiv" meta tag.
You can set the default encoding using the "remoteencoding"
command in .wgetrc. That setting may be overridden from the command
line.
- --unlink
- Force Wget to unlink file instead of clobbering existing
file. This option is useful for downloading to the directory with
hardlinks.
Directory Options¶
- -nd
- --no-directories
- Do not create a hierarchy of directories when retrieving
recursively. With this option turned on, all files will get saved to the
current directory, without clobbering (if a name shows up more than once,
the filenames will get extensions .n).
- -x
- --force-directories
- The opposite of -nd---create a hierarchy of
directories, even if one would not have been created otherwise. E.g.
wget -x http://fly.srk.fer.hr/robots.txt will save the
downloaded file to fly.srk.fer.hr/robots.txt.
- -nH
- --no-host-directories
- Disable generation of host-prefixed directories. By
default, invoking Wget with -r http://fly.srk.fer.hr/ will create a
structure of directories beginning with fly.srk.fer.hr/. This
option disables such behavior.
- --protocol-directories
- Use the protocol name as a directory component of local
file names. For example, with this option, wget -r
http://host will save to http/host/...
rather than just to host/....
- --cut-dirs=number
- Ignore number directory components. This is useful
for getting a fine-grained control over the directory where recursive
retrieval will be saved.
Take, for example, the directory at ftp://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/.
If you retrieve it with -r, it will be saved locally under
ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/. While the -nH option can remove
the ftp.xemacs.org/ part, you are still stuck with
pub/xemacs. This is where --cut-dirs comes in handy; it
makes Wget not "see" number remote directory components.
Here are several examples of how --cut-dirs option works.
No options -> ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/
-nH -> pub/xemacs/
-nH --cut-dirs=1 -> xemacs/
-nH --cut-dirs=2 -> .
--cut-dirs=1 -> ftp.xemacs.org/xemacs/
...
If you just want to get rid of the directory structure, this option is
similar to a combination of -nd and -P. However, unlike
-nd, --cut-dirs does not lose with subdirectories---for
instance, with -nH --cut-dirs=1, a beta/ subdirectory will
be placed to xemacs/beta, as one would expect.
- -P prefix
- --directory-prefix=prefix
- Set directory prefix to prefix. The directory
prefix is the directory where all other files and subdirectories will
be saved to, i.e. the top of the retrieval tree. The default is .
(the current directory).
HTTP Options¶
- --default-page=name
- Use name as the default file name when it isn't
known (i.e., for URLs that end in a slash), instead of
index.html.
- -E
- --adjust-extension
- If a file of type application/xhtml+xml or
text/html is downloaded and the URL does not end with the regexp
\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?, this option will cause the suffix .html
to be appended to the local filename. This is useful, for instance, when
you're mirroring a remote site that uses .asp pages, but you want
the mirrored pages to be viewable on your stock Apache server. Another
good use for this is when you're downloading CGI-generated materials. A
URL like http://site.com/article.cgi?25 will be saved as
article.cgi?25.html.
Note that filenames changed in this way will be re-downloaded every time you
re-mirror a site, because Wget can't tell that the local
X.html file corresponds to remote URL X (since
it doesn't yet know that the URL produces output of type text/html
or application/xhtml+xml.
As of version 1.12, Wget will also ensure that any downloaded files of type
text/css end in the suffix .css, and the option was renamed
from --html-extension, to better reflect its new behavior. The old
option name is still acceptable, but should now be considered deprecated.
At some point in the future, this option may well be expanded to include
suffixes for other types of content, including content types that are not
parsed by Wget.
- --http-user=user
- --http-password=password
- Specify the username user and password
password on an HTTP server. According to the type of the challenge,
Wget will encode them using either the "basic" (insecure), the
"digest", or the Windows "NTLM" authentication scheme.
Another way to specify username and password is in the URL itself. Either
method reveals your password to anyone who bothers to run "ps".
To prevent the passwords from being seen, store them in .wgetrc or
.netrc, and make sure to protect those files from other users with
"chmod". If the passwords are really important, do not leave
them lying in those files either---edit the files and delete them after
Wget has started the download.
- --no-http-keep-alive
- Turn off the "keep-alive" feature for HTTP
downloads. Normally, Wget asks the server to keep the connection open so
that, when you download more than one document from the same server, they
get transferred over the same TCP connection. This saves time and at the
same time reduces the load on the server.
This option is useful when, for some reason, persistent (keep-alive)
connections don't work for you, for example due to a server bug or due to
the inability of server-side scripts to cope with the connections.
- --no-cache
- Disable server-side cache. In this case, Wget will send the
remote server an appropriate directive ( Pragma: no-cache) to get
the file from the remote service, rather than returning the cached
version. This is especially useful for retrieving and flushing out-of-date
documents on proxy servers.
Caching is allowed by default.
- --no-cookies
- Disable the use of cookies. Cookies are a mechanism for
maintaining server-side state. The server sends the client a cookie using
the "Set-Cookie" header, and the client responds with the same
cookie upon further requests. Since cookies allow the server owners to
keep track of visitors and for sites to exchange this information, some
consider them a breach of privacy. The default is to use cookies; however,
storing cookies is not on by default.
- --load-cookies file
- Load cookies from file before the first HTTP
retrieval. file is a textual file in the format originally used by
Netscape's cookies.txt file.
You will typically use this option when mirroring sites that require that
you be logged in to access some or all of their content. The login process
typically works by the web server issuing an HTTP cookie upon receiving
and verifying your credentials. The cookie is then resent by the browser
when accessing that part of the site, and so proves your identity.
Mirroring such a site requires Wget to send the same cookies your browser
sends when communicating with the site. This is achieved by
--load-cookies---simply point Wget to the location of the
cookies.txt file, and it will send the same cookies your browser
would send in the same situation. Different browsers keep textual cookie
files in different locations:
- Netscape 4.x.
- The cookies are in ~/.netscape/cookies.txt.
- Mozilla and Netscape 6.x.
- Mozilla's cookie file is also named cookies.txt,
located somewhere under ~/.mozilla, in the directory of your
profile. The full path usually ends up looking somewhat like
~/.mozilla/default/
some-weird-string/cookies.txt.
- Internet Explorer.
- You can produce a cookie file Wget can use by using the
File menu, Import and Export, Export Cookies. This has been tested with
Internet Explorer 5; it is not guaranteed to work with earlier
versions.
- Other browsers.
- If you are using a different browser to create your
cookies, --load-cookies will only work if you can locate or produce
a cookie file in the Netscape format that Wget expects.
If you cannot use
--load-cookies, there might still be an alternative. If
your browser supports a "cookie manager", you can use it to view the
cookies used when accessing the site you're mirroring. Write down the name and
value of the cookie, and manually instruct Wget to send those cookies,
bypassing the "official" cookie support:
wget --no-cookies --header "Cookie: <name>=<value>"
- --save-cookies file
- Save cookies to file before exiting. This will not
save cookies that have expired or that have no expiry time (so-called
"session cookies"), but also see
--keep-session-cookies.
- --keep-session-cookies
- When specified, causes --save-cookies to also save
session cookies. Session cookies are normally not saved because they are
meant to be kept in memory and forgotten when you exit the browser. Saving
them is useful on sites that require you to log in or to visit the home
page before you can access some pages. With this option, multiple Wget
runs are considered a single browser session as far as the site is
concerned.
Since the cookie file format does not normally carry session cookies, Wget
marks them with an expiry timestamp of 0. Wget's --load-cookies
recognizes those as session cookies, but it might confuse other browsers.
Also note that cookies so loaded will be treated as other session cookies,
which means that if you want --save-cookies to preserve them again,
you must use --keep-session-cookies again.
- --ignore-length
- Unfortunately, some HTTP servers (CGI programs, to be more
precise) send out bogus "Content-Length" headers, which makes
Wget go wild, as it thinks not all the document was retrieved. You can
spot this syndrome if Wget retries getting the same document again and
again, each time claiming that the (otherwise normal) connection has
closed on the very same byte.
With this option, Wget will ignore the "Content-Length"
header---as if it never existed.
- --header=header-line
- Send header-line along with the rest of the headers
in each HTTP request. The supplied header is sent as-is, which means it
must contain name and value separated by colon, and must not contain
newlines.
You may define more than one additional header by specifying --header
more than once.
wget --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2' \
--header='Accept-Language: hr' \
http://fly.srk.fer.hr/
Specification of an empty string as the header value will clear all previous
user-defined headers.
As of Wget 1.10, this option can be used to override headers otherwise
generated automatically. This example instructs Wget to connect to
localhost, but to specify foo.bar in the "Host" header:
wget --header="Host: foo.bar" http://localhost/
In versions of Wget prior to 1.10 such use of --header caused sending
of duplicate headers.
- --max-redirect=number
- Specifies the maximum number of redirections to follow for
a resource. The default is 20, which is usually far more than necessary.
However, on those occasions where you want to allow more (or fewer), this
is the option to use.
- --proxy-user=user
- --proxy-password=password
- Specify the username user and password
password for authentication on a proxy server. Wget will encode
them using the "basic" authentication scheme.
Security considerations similar to those with --http-password pertain
here as well.
- --referer=url
- Include `Referer: url' header in HTTP request.
Useful for retrieving documents with server-side processing that assume
they are always being retrieved by interactive web browsers and only come
out properly when Referer is set to one of the pages that point to
them.
- --save-headers
- Save the headers sent by the HTTP server to the file,
preceding the actual contents, with an empty line as the separator.
- -U agent-string
- --user-agent=agent-string
- Identify as agent-string to the HTTP server.
The HTTP protocol allows the clients to identify themselves using a
"User-Agent" header field. This enables distinguishing the WWW
software, usually for statistical purposes or for tracing of protocol
violations. Wget normally identifies as Wget/version,
version being the current version number of Wget.
However, some sites have been known to impose the policy of tailoring the
output according to the "User-Agent"-supplied information. While
this is not such a bad idea in theory, it has been abused by servers
denying information to clients other than (historically) Netscape or, more
frequently, Microsoft Internet Explorer. This option allows you to change
the "User-Agent" line issued by Wget. Use of this option is
discouraged, unless you really know what you are doing.
Specifying empty user agent with --user-agent="" instructs
Wget not to send the "User-Agent" header in HTTP requests.
- --post-data=string
- --post-file=file
- Use POST as the method for all HTTP requests and send the
specified data in the request body. --post-data sends string
as data, whereas --post-file sends the contents of file.
Other than that, they work in exactly the same way. In particular, they
both expect content of the form
"key1=value1&key2=value2", with percent-encoding for special
characters; the only difference is that one expects its content as a
command-line parameter and the other accepts its content from a file. In
particular, --post-file is not for transmitting files as
form attachments: those must appear as "key=value" data (with
appropriate percent-coding) just like everything else. Wget does not
currently support "multipart/form-data" for transmitting POST
data; only "application/x-www-form-urlencoded". Only one of
--post-data and --post-file should be specified.
Please be aware that Wget needs to know the size of the POST data in
advance. Therefore the argument to "--post-file" must be a
regular file; specifying a FIFO or something like /dev/stdin won't
work. It's not quite clear how to work around this limitation inherent in
HTTP/1.0. Although HTTP/1.1 introduces chunked transfer that
doesn't require knowing the request length in advance, a client can't use
chunked unless it knows it's talking to an HTTP/1.1 server. And it can't
know that until it receives a response, which in turn requires the request
to have been completed -- a chicken-and-egg problem.
Note: if Wget is redirected after the POST request is completed, it will not
send the POST data to the redirected URL. This is because URLs that
process POST often respond with a redirection to a regular page, which
does not desire or accept POST. It is not completely clear that this
behavior is optimal; if it doesn't work out, it might be changed in the
future.
This example shows how to log to a server using POST and then proceed to
download the desired pages, presumably only accessible to authorized
users:
# Log in to the server. This can be done only once.
wget --save-cookies cookies.txt \
--post-data 'user=foo&password=bar' \
http://server.com/auth.php
# Now grab the page or pages we care about.
wget --load-cookies cookies.txt \
-p http://server.com/interesting/article.php
If the server is using session cookies to track user authentication, the
above will not work because --save-cookies will not save them (and
neither will browsers) and the cookies.txt file will be empty. In
that case use --keep-session-cookies along with
--save-cookies to force saving of session cookies.
- --content-disposition
- If this is set to on, experimental (not fully-functional)
support for "Content-Disposition" headers is enabled. This can
currently result in extra round-trips to the server for a "HEAD"
request, and is known to suffer from a few bugs, which is why it is not
currently enabled by default.
This option is useful for some file-downloading CGI programs that use
"Content-Disposition" headers to describe what the name of a
downloaded file should be.
- --trust-server-names
- If this is set to on, on a redirect the last component of
the redirection URL will be used as the local file name. By default it is
used the last component in the original URL.
- --auth-no-challenge
- If this option is given, Wget will send Basic HTTP
authentication information (plaintext username and password) for all
requests, just like Wget 1.10.2 and prior did by default.
Use of this option is not recommended, and is intended only to support some
few obscure servers, which never send HTTP authentication challenges, but
accept unsolicited auth info, say, in addition to form-based
authentication.
HTTPS (SSL/TLS) Options¶
To support encrypted HTTP (HTTPS) downloads, Wget must be compiled with an
external SSL library, currently OpenSSL. If Wget is compiled without SSL
support, none of these options are available.
- --secure-protocol=protocol
- Choose the secure protocol to be used. Legal values are
auto, SSLv2, SSLv3, and TLSv1. If auto
is used, the SSL library is given the liberty of choosing the appropriate
protocol automatically, which is achieved by sending an SSLv2 greeting and
announcing support for SSLv3 and TLSv1. This is the default.
Specifying SSLv2, SSLv3, or TLSv1 forces the use of the
corresponding protocol. This is useful when talking to old and buggy SSL
server implementations that make it hard for OpenSSL to choose the correct
protocol version. Fortunately, such servers are quite rare.
- --no-check-certificate
- Don't check the server certificate against the available
certificate authorities. Also don't require the URL host name to match the
common name presented by the certificate.
As of Wget 1.10, the default is to verify the server's certificate against
the recognized certificate authorities, breaking the SSL handshake and
aborting the download if the verification fails. Although this provides
more secure downloads, it does break interoperability with some sites that
worked with previous Wget versions, particularly those using self-signed,
expired, or otherwise invalid certificates. This option forces an
"insecure" mode of operation that turns the certificate
verification errors into warnings and allows you to proceed.
If you encounter "certificate verification" errors or ones saying
that "common name doesn't match requested host name", you can
use this option to bypass the verification and proceed with the download.
Only use this option if you are otherwise convinced of the
site's authenticity, or if you really don't care about the validity
of its certificate. It is almost always a bad idea not to check
the certificates when transmitting confidential or important data.
- --certificate=file
- Use the client certificate stored in file. This is
needed for servers that are configured to require certificates from the
clients that connect to them. Normally a certificate is not required and
this switch is optional.
- --certificate-type=type
- Specify the type of the client certificate. Legal values
are PEM (assumed by default) and DER, also known as
ASN1.
- --private-key=file
- Read the private key from file. This allows you to
provide the private key in a file separate from the certificate.
- --private-key-type=type
- Specify the type of the private key. Accepted values are
PEM (the default) and DER.
- --ca-certificate=file
- Use file as the file with the bundle of certificate
authorities ("CA") to verify the peers. The certificates must be
in PEM format.
Without this option Wget looks for CA certificates at the system-specified
locations, chosen at OpenSSL installation time.
- --ca-directory=directory
- Specifies directory containing CA certificates in PEM
format. Each file contains one CA certificate, and the file name is based
on a hash value derived from the certificate. This is achieved by
processing a certificate directory with the "c_rehash" utility
supplied with OpenSSL. Using --ca-directory is more efficient than
--ca-certificate when many certificates are installed because it
allows Wget to fetch certificates on demand.
Without this option Wget looks for CA certificates at the system-specified
locations, chosen at OpenSSL installation time.
- --random-file=file
- Use file as the source of random data for seeding
the pseudo-random number generator on systems without /dev/random.
On such systems the SSL library needs an external source of randomness to
initialize. Randomness may be provided by EGD (see --egd-file
below) or read from an external source specified by the user. If this
option is not specified, Wget looks for random data in $RANDFILE or, if
that is unset, in $HOME/.rnd. If none of those are
available, it is likely that SSL encryption will not be usable.
If you're getting the "Could not seed OpenSSL PRNG; disabling
SSL." error, you should provide random data using some of the methods
described above.
- --egd-file=file
- Use file as the EGD socket. EGD stands for
Entropy Gathering Daemon, a user-space program that collects
data from various unpredictable system sources and makes it available to
other programs that might need it. Encryption software, such as the SSL
library, needs sources of non-repeating randomness to seed the random
number generator used to produce cryptographically strong keys.
OpenSSL allows the user to specify his own source of entropy using the
"RAND_FILE" environment variable. If this variable is unset, or
if the specified file does not produce enough randomness, OpenSSL will
read random data from EGD socket specified using this option.
If this option is not specified (and the equivalent startup command is not
used), EGD is never contacted. EGD is not needed on modern Unix systems
that support /dev/random.
FTP Options¶
- --ftp-user=user
- --ftp-password=password
- Specify the username user and password
password on an FTP server. Without this, or the corresponding
startup option, the password defaults to -wget@, normally used for
anonymous FTP.
Another way to specify username and password is in the URL itself. Either
method reveals your password to anyone who bothers to run "ps".
To prevent the passwords from being seen, store them in .wgetrc or
.netrc, and make sure to protect those files from other users with
"chmod". If the passwords are really important, do not leave
them lying in those files either---edit the files and delete them after
Wget has started the download.
- --no-remove-listing
- Don't remove the temporary .listing files generated
by FTP retrievals. Normally, these files contain the raw directory
listings received from FTP servers. Not removing them can be useful for
debugging purposes, or when you want to be able to easily check on the
contents of remote server directories (e.g. to verify that a mirror you're
running is complete).
Note that even though Wget writes to a known filename for this file, this is
not a security hole in the scenario of a user making .listing a
symbolic link to /etc/passwd or something and asking
"root" to run Wget in his or her directory. Depending on the
options used, either Wget will refuse to write to .listing, making
the globbing/recursion/time-stamping operation fail, or the symbolic link
will be deleted and replaced with the actual .listing file, or the
listing will be written to a .listing.number file.
Even though this situation isn't a problem, though, "root" should
never run Wget in a non-trusted user's directory. A user could do
something as simple as linking index.html to /etc/passwd and
asking "root" to run Wget with -N or -r so the
file will be overwritten.
- --no-glob
- Turn off FTP globbing. Globbing refers to the use of
shell-like special characters ( wildcards), like *,
?, [ and ] to retrieve more than one file from the
same directory at once, like:
wget ftp://gnjilux.srk.fer.hr/*.msg
By default, globbing will be turned on if the URL contains a globbing
character. This option may be used to turn globbing on or off permanently.
You may have to quote the URL to protect it from being expanded by your
shell. Globbing makes Wget look for a directory listing, which is
system-specific. This is why it currently works only with Unix FTP servers
(and the ones emulating Unix "ls" output).
- --no-passive-ftp
- Disable the use of the passive FTP transfer mode.
Passive FTP mandates that the client connect to the server to establish
the data connection rather than the other way around.
If the machine is connected to the Internet directly, both passive and
active FTP should work equally well. Behind most firewall and NAT
configurations passive FTP has a better chance of working. However, in
some rare firewall configurations, active FTP actually works when passive
FTP doesn't. If you suspect this to be the case, use this option, or set
"passive_ftp=off" in your init file.
- --retr-symlinks
- By default, when retrieving FTP directories recursively and
a symbolic link is encountered, the symbolic link is traversed and the
pointed-to files are retrieved. Currently, Wget does not traverse symbolic
links to directories to download them recursively, though this feature may
be added in the future.
When --retr-symlinks=no is specified, the linked-to file is not
downloaded. Instead, a matching symbolic link is created on the local
filesystem. The pointed-to file will not be retrieved unless this
recursive retrieval would have encountered it separately and downloaded it
anyway. This option poses a security risk where a malicious FTP Server may
cause Wget to write to files outside of the intended directories through a
specially crafted .LISTING file.
Note that when retrieving a file (not a directory) because it was specified
on the command-line, rather than because it was recursed to, this option
has no effect. Symbolic links are always traversed in this case.
Recursive Retrieval Options¶
- -r
- --recursive
- Turn on recursive retrieving. The default maximum depth is
5.
- -l depth
- --level=depth
- Specify recursion maximum depth level depth.
- --delete-after
- This option tells Wget to delete every single file it
downloads, after having done so. It is useful for pre-fetching
popular pages through a proxy, e.g.:
wget -r -nd --delete-after http://whatever.com/~popular/page/
The -r option is to retrieve recursively, and -nd to not
create directories.
Note that --delete-after deletes files on the local machine. It does
not issue the DELE command to remote FTP sites, for instance. Also
note that when --delete-after is specified, --convert-links
is ignored, so .orig files are simply not created in the first
place.
- -k
- --convert-links
- After the download is complete, convert the links in the
document to make them suitable for local viewing. This affects not only
the visible hyperlinks, but any part of the document that links to
external content, such as embedded images, links to style sheets,
hyperlinks to non-HTML content, etc.
Each link will be changed in one of the two ways:
- •
- The links to files that have been downloaded by Wget will
be changed to refer to the file they point to as a relative link.
Example: if the downloaded file /foo/doc.html links to
/bar/img.gif, also downloaded, then the link in doc.html
will be modified to point to ../bar/img.gif. This kind of
transformation works reliably for arbitrary combinations of
directories.
- •
- The links to files that have not been downloaded by Wget
will be changed to include host name and absolute path of the location
they point to.
Example: if the downloaded file /foo/doc.html links to
/bar/img.gif (or to ../bar/img.gif), then the link in
doc.html will be modified to point to
http://hostname/bar/img.gif.
Because of this, local browsing works reliably: if a linked file was downloaded,
the link will refer to its local name; if it was not downloaded, the link will
refer to its full Internet address rather than presenting a broken link. The
fact that the former links are converted to relative links ensures that you
can move the downloaded hierarchy to another directory.
Note that only at the end of the download can Wget know which links have been
downloaded. Because of that, the work done by
-k will be performed at
the end of all the downloads.
- -K
- --backup-converted
- When converting a file, back up the original version with a
.orig suffix. Affects the behavior of -N.
- -m
- --mirror
- Turn on options suitable for mirroring. This option turns
on recursion and time-stamping, sets infinite recursion depth and keeps
FTP directory listings. It is currently equivalent to -r -N -l inf
--no-remove-listing.
- -p
- --page-requisites
- This option causes Wget to download all the files that are
necessary to properly display a given HTML page. This includes such things
as inlined images, sounds, and referenced stylesheets.
Ordinarily, when downloading a single HTML page, any requisite documents
that may be needed to display it properly are not downloaded. Using
-r together with -l can help, but since Wget does not
ordinarily distinguish between external and inlined documents, one is
generally left with "leaf documents" that are missing their
requisites.
For instance, say document 1.html contains an "<IMG>"
tag referencing 1.gif and an "<A>" tag pointing to
external document 2.html. Say that 2.html is similar but
that its image is 2.gif and it links to 3.html. Say this
continues up to some arbitrarily high number.
If one executes the command:
wget -r -l 2 http://<site>/1.html
then 1.html, 1.gif, 2.html, 2.gif, and
3.html will be downloaded. As you can see, 3.html is without
its requisite 3.gif because Wget is simply counting the number of
hops (up to 2) away from 1.html in order to determine where to stop
the recursion. However, with this command:
wget -r -l 2 -p http://<site>/1.html
all the above files and 3.html's requisite 3.gif will
be downloaded. Similarly,
wget -r -l 1 -p http://<site>/1.html
will cause 1.html, 1.gif, 2.html, and 2.gif to
be downloaded. One might think that:
wget -r -l 0 -p http://<site>/1.html
would download just 1.html and 1.gif, but unfortunately this
is not the case, because -l 0 is equivalent to -l inf---that
is, infinite recursion. To download a single HTML page (or a handful of
them, all specified on the command-line or in a -i URL input file)
and its (or their) requisites, simply leave off -r and -l:
wget -p http://<site>/1.html
Note that Wget will behave as if -r had been specified, but only that
single page and its requisites will be downloaded. Links from that page to
external documents will not be followed. Actually, to download a single
page and all its requisites (even if they exist on separate websites), and
make sure the lot displays properly locally, this author likes to use a
few options in addition to -p:
wget -E -H -k -K -p http://<site>/<document>
To finish off this topic, it's worth knowing that Wget's idea of an external
document link is any URL specified in an "<A>" tag, an
"<AREA>" tag, or a "<LINK>" tag other than
"<LINK REL="stylesheet">".
- --strict-comments
- Turn on strict parsing of HTML comments. The default is to
terminate comments at the first occurrence of -->.
According to specifications, HTML comments are expressed as SGML
declarations. Declaration is special markup that begins with
<! and ends with >, such as <!DOCTYPE
...>, that may contain comments between a pair of --
delimiters. HTML comments are "empty declarations", SGML
declarations without any non-comment text. Therefore,
<!--foo--> is a valid comment, and so is <!--one--
--two-->, but <!--1--2--> is not.
On the other hand, most HTML writers don't perceive comments as anything
other than text delimited with <!-- and -->, which is
not quite the same. For example, something like
<!------------> works as a valid comment as long as the
number of dashes is a multiple of four (!). If not, the comment
technically lasts until the next --, which may be at the other end
of the document. Because of this, many popular browsers completely ignore
the specification and implement what users have come to expect: comments
delimited with <!-- and -->.
Until version 1.9, Wget interpreted comments strictly, which resulted in
missing links in many web pages that displayed fine in browsers, but had
the misfortune of containing non-compliant comments. Beginning with
version 1.9, Wget has joined the ranks of clients that implements
"naive" comments, terminating each comment at the first
occurrence of -->.
If, for whatever reason, you want strict comment parsing, use this option to
turn it on.
Recursive Accept/Reject Options¶
- -A acclist --accept
acclist
- -R rejlist --reject
rejlist
- Specify comma-separated lists of file name suffixes or
patterns to accept or reject. Note that if any of the wildcard characters,
*, ?, [ or ], appear in an element of
acclist or rejlist, it will be treated as a pattern, rather
than a suffix.
- -D domain-list
- --domains=domain-list
- Set domains to be followed. domain-list is a
comma-separated list of domains. Note that it does not turn on
-H.
- --exclude-domains domain-list
- Specify the domains that are not to be
followed.
- --follow-ftp
- Follow FTP links from HTML documents. Without this option,
Wget will ignore all the FTP links.
- --follow-tags=list
- Wget has an internal table of HTML tag / attribute pairs
that it considers when looking for linked documents during a recursive
retrieval. If a user wants only a subset of those tags to be considered,
however, he or she should be specify such tags in a comma-separated
list with this option.
- --ignore-tags=list
- This is the opposite of the --follow-tags option. To
skip certain HTML tags when recursively looking for documents to download,
specify them in a comma-separated list.
In the past, this option was the best bet for downloading a single page and
its requisites, using a command-line like:
wget --ignore-tags=a,area -H -k -K -r http://<site>/<document>
However, the author of this option came across a page with tags like
"<LINK REL="home" HREF="/">" and came
to the realization that specifying tags to ignore was not enough. One
can't just tell Wget to ignore "<LINK>", because then
stylesheets will not be downloaded. Now the best bet for downloading a
single page and its requisites is the dedicated --page-requisites
option.
- --ignore-case
- Ignore case when matching files and directories. This
influences the behavior of -R, -A, -I, and -X options, as well as globbing
implemented when downloading from FTP sites. For example, with this
option, -A *.txt will match file1.txt, but also
file2.TXT, file3.TxT, and so on.
- -H
- --span-hosts
- Enable spanning across hosts when doing recursive
retrieving.
- -L
- --relative
- Follow relative links only. Useful for retrieving a
specific home page without any distractions, not even those from the same
hosts.
- -I list
- --include-directories=list
- Specify a comma-separated list of directories you wish to
follow when downloading. Elements of list may contain
wildcards.
- -X list
- --exclude-directories=list
- Specify a comma-separated list of directories you wish to
exclude from download. Elements of list may contain wildcards.
- -np
- --no-parent
- Do not ever ascend to the parent directory when retrieving
recursively. This is a useful option, since it guarantees that only the
files below a certain hierarchy will be downloaded.
FILES¶
- /etc/wgetrc
- Default location of the global startup file.
- .wgetrc
- User startup file.
BUGS¶
You are welcome to submit bug reports via the GNU Wget bug tracker (see <
http://wget.addictivecode.org/BugTracker>).
Before actually submitting a bug report, please try to follow a few simple
guidelines.
- 1.
- Please try to ascertain that the behavior you see really is
a bug. If Wget crashes, it's a bug. If Wget does not behave as documented,
it's a bug. If things work strange, but you are not sure about the way
they are supposed to work, it might well be a bug, but you might want to
double-check the documentation and the mailing lists.
- 2.
- Try to repeat the bug in as simple circumstances as
possible. E.g. if Wget crashes while downloading wget -rl0 -kKE -t5
--no-proxy http://yoyodyne.com -o /tmp/log, you should try to
see if the crash is repeatable, and if will occur with a simpler set of
options. You might even try to start the download at the page where the
crash occurred to see if that page somehow triggered the crash.
Also, while I will probably be interested to know the contents of your
.wgetrc file, just dumping it into the debug message is probably a
bad idea. Instead, you should first try to see if the bug repeats with
.wgetrc moved out of the way. Only if it turns out that
.wgetrc settings affect the bug, mail me the relevant parts of the
file.
- 3.
- Please start Wget with -d option and send us the
resulting output (or relevant parts thereof). If Wget was compiled without
debug support, recompile it---it is much easier to trace bugs with
debug support on.
Note: please make sure to remove any potentially sensitive information from
the debug log before sending it to the bug address. The "-d"
won't go out of its way to collect sensitive information, but the log
will contain a fairly complete transcript of Wget's communication
with the server, which may include passwords and pieces of downloaded
data. Since the bug address is publically archived, you may assume that
all bug reports are visible to the public.
- 4.
- If Wget has crashed, try to run it in a debugger, e.g.
"gdb `which wget` core" and type "where" to get the
backtrace. This may not work if the system administrator has disabled core
files, but it is safe to try.
SEE ALSO¶
This is
not the complete manual for GNU Wget. For more complete
information, including more detailed explanations of some of the options, and
a number of commands available for use with
.wgetrc files and the
-e option, see the GNU Info entry for
wget.
AUTHOR¶
Originally written by Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@xemacs.org>.
COPYRIGHT¶
Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006,
2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the
terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version
published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no
Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included
in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".