wget
The non-interactive network downloader.
Synopsis
wget
[option]... [ URL ]...
add an example, a script, a trick and tips
examples
source
How to wget a file with correct name when redirected?
-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
-.
)
So,
wget -O somefile.extension http://www.vim.org/scripts/download_script.php?src_id=9750
Or you may be able to get wget
to work this out
using the --content-disposition option if supported by your
version.
wget --content-disposition http://www.vim.org/scripts/download_script.php?src_id=9750
Caveats as per the man page,
--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.
You can achieve the same automated behaviour with
curl
, using,
curl -J -O http://www.vim.org/scripts/download_script.php?src_id=9750
-O
uses the remote name, and -J
forces
the -O
to get that name from the content-disposition
header rather than the URL.
source
How can I do a HTTP PUT with Wget?
Wget can't do PUT. Use cURL instead, with
-T
.
source
how to download dropbox files using wget command?
The link in your question is not the link to the file, is a link
to the Dropbox page of this file.
If you want to use wget
to download it, you should
copy the link to direct download from the menu that drops when
pushing the download button to the right.
In my case, that worked fine. However, sometimes problems in
downloading links from outside the browser relate to parameters
other than the link itself. A common element that does not exist
when you simply copy the link are the site cookies.
Try this cool FF add-on to get the correct
wget
links
And also, especially if we are talking about a known workstation
and not a casual one, you can of course install the Dropbox
client. This will be the easiest way, just let your box be part
of your file structure and eliminate the need of complicated
downloads.
See this askubuntu.com
post, and the Dropbox download page.
source
how can I use wget to download large files?
You can continue failed downloads using wget.
(Provided where you're downloading from supports it)
Quote:
Say we're downloading a big file:
$ wget bigfile
And bang - our connection goes dead (you can simulate this by
quitting with Ctrl-C if you like). Once we're back up and running
and making sure you're in the same directory you were during the
original download:
$ wget -c bigfile
Provided where you're downloading from supports it, you should
get going from exactly where you left off.
source
Using Wget to Recursively Crawl a Site and Download Images
Try adding the --page-requisites
option
source
How do I download a single file in 2 parts to different locations using wget?
With curl you should be able to do
curl -o customname -r0-499 <url>
where 0 - 500 would be the byte range
curl man page look
at the -r option
Posted by ewindisch in comment
It is better not to use -O here as the OP would like to specify
the destinations. curl -o file.part1 -r0-490000 $url & curl -o
file.part2 -r490001- $url – ewindisch
source
Make wget download page resources on a different domain
wget --recursive --level=inf --page-requisites
--convert-links --html-extension --span-hosts=domainA,domainB
domainA
source
Escaping query strings with wget --mirror
wget does not have an option to modify the saved name. What
you'll probably need to do is create a script to go through and
replace ? with _ or something similar. Wget alone cannot do this.
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
--version
Display the version of
Wget.
--help
Print a help message describing
all of Wget’s command-line options.
--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.
Logging and
Input File Options
-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.
--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.
--quiet
Turn off Wget’s
output.
--verbose
Turn on verbose output, with
all the available data. The default output is verbose.
--no-verbose
Turn off verbose without being
completely quiet (use -q for that), which means
that error messages and basic information still get
printed.
--report-speed=type
Output bandwidth as
type. The only accepted value is bits.
-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.
--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.
--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.
--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.
--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.
--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.
--inet4-only
--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
--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).
--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.
--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.
--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.
--content-on-error
If this is set to on, wget will
not skip the content when the server responds with a http
status code that indicates error.
--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.
--warc-file=file
Use file as the
destination WARC file.
--warc-header=string
Use string into as the
warcinfo record.
--warc-max-size=size
Set the maximum size of the
WARC files to size.
--warc-cdx
Write CDX index
files.
--warc-dedup=file
Do not store records listed in
this CDX file.
--no-warc-compression
Do not compress
WARC files with GZIP .
--no-warc-digests
Do not calculate
SHA1 digests.
--no-warc-keep-log
Do not store the log file in a
WARC record.
--warc-tempdir=dir
Specify the location for
temporary files created by the WARC
writer.
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
Usually, when retrieving
FTP directories recursively and a symbolic
link is encountered, 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 downloaded
unless this recursive retrieval would have encountered it
separately and downloaded it anyway.
When
--retr-symlinks is specified,
however, symbolic links are traversed and the pointed-to
files are retrieved. At this time, this option does not
cause Wget to traverse symlinks to directories and recurse
through them, but in the future it should be enhanced to do
this.
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
--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.
--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.
--backup-converted
When converting a file, back up
the original version with a .orig suffix. Affects the
behavior of -N.
--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.
--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.
--span-hosts
Enable spanning across hosts
when doing recursive retrieving.
--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.
--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.
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".
environment
Wget supports proxies for both HTTP and
FTP retrievals. The standard way to specify proxy
location, which Wget recognizes, is using the following
environment variables:
http_proxy
https_proxy
If set, the http_proxy and https_proxy variables
should contain the URLs of the proxies for HTTP
and HTTPS connections respectively.
ftp_proxy
This variable should contain the URL of the proxy
for FTP connections. It is quite common that
http_proxy and ftp_proxy are set to the same
URL .
no_proxy
This variable should contain a comma-separated list of domain
extensions proxy should not be used for. For instance, if
the value of no_proxy is .mit.edu, proxy will not
be used to retrieve documents from MIT .
exit status
Wget may return one of several error codes if it encounters
problems.
0
No problems occurred.
1
Generic error code.
2
Parse error---for instance, when parsing command-line options,
the .wgetrc or .netrc...
3
File I/O error.
4
Network failure.
5
SSL verification failure.
6
Username/password authentication failure.
7
Protocol errors.
8
Server issued an error response.
With the exceptions of 0 and 1, the lower-numbered exit codes
take precedence over higher-numbered ones, when multiple types of
errors are encountered.
In versions of Wget prior to 1.12, Wget’s exit status tended to
be unhelpful and inconsistent. Recursive downloads would
virtually always return 0 (success), regardless of any issues
encountered, and non-recursive fetches only returned the status
corresponding to the most recently-attempted download.
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[:at:]xemacs[:dot:]org>.