This file documents the GNU Wget utility for downloading network data.
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Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License”.
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.
This chapter is a partial overview of Wget’s features.
By default, Wget is very simple to invoke. The basic syntax is:
wget [option]... [URL]...
Wget will simply download all the URLs specified on the command line. URL is a Uniform Resource Locator, as defined below.
However, you may wish to change some of the default parameters of Wget. You can do it two ways: permanently, adding the appropriate command to .wgetrc (see Startup File), or specifying it on the command line.
URL is an acronym for Uniform Resource Locator. A uniform resource locator is a compact string representation for a resource available via the Internet. Wget recognizes the URL syntax as per RFC1738. This is the most widely used form (square brackets denote optional parts):
http://host[:port]/directory/file ftp://host[:port]/directory/file
You can also encode your username and password within a URL:
ftp://user:password@host/path http://user:password@host/path
Either user or password, or both, may be left out. If you leave out either the HTTP username or password, no authentication will be sent. If you leave out the FTP username, ‘anonymous’ will be used. If you leave out the FTP password, your email address will be supplied as a default password.1
Important Note: if you specify a password-containing URL
on the command line, the username and password will be plainly visible
to all users on the system, by way of ps. On multi-user systems,
this is a big security risk. To work around it, use wget -i -
and feed the URLs to Wget’s standard input, each on a separate
line, terminated by C-d.
You can encode unsafe characters in a URL as ‘%xy’, xy
being the hexadecimal representation of the character’s ASCII
value. Some common unsafe characters include ‘%’ (quoted as
‘%25’), ‘:’ (quoted as ‘%3A’), and ‘@’ (quoted as
‘%40’). Refer to RFC1738 for a comprehensive list of unsafe
characters.
Wget also supports the type feature for FTP URLs. By
default, FTP documents are retrieved in the binary mode (type
‘i’), which means that they are downloaded unchanged. Another
useful mode is the ‘a’ (ASCII) mode, which converts the line
delimiters between the different operating systems, and is thus useful
for text files. Here is an example:
ftp://host/directory/file;type=a
Two alternative variants of URL specification are also supported, because of historical (hysterical?) reasons and their widespreaded use.
FTP-only syntax (supported by NcFTP):
host:/dir/file
HTTP-only syntax (introduced by Netscape):
host[:port]/dir/file
These two alternative forms are deprecated, and may cease being supported in the future.
If you do not understand the difference between these notations, or do
not know which one to use, just use the plain ordinary format you use
with your favorite browser, like Lynx or Netscape.
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
(see Wgetrc Syntax).
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.
Display the version of Wget.
Print a help message describing all of Wget’s command-line options.
Go to background immediately after startup. If no output file is specified via the ‘-o’, output is redirected to wget-log.
Execute command as if it were a part of .wgetrc (see Startup File). 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’.
Log all messages to logfile. The messages are normally reported to standard error.
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.
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’. See Reporting Bugs, for more information on how to use ‘-d’ for sending bug reports.
Turn off Wget’s output.
Turn on verbose output, with all the available data. The default output is verbose.
Turn off verbose without being completely quiet (use ‘-q’ for that), which means that error messages and basic information still get printed.
Output bandwidth as type. The only accepted value is ‘bits’.
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.
Downloads files covered in local Metalink file. Metalink version 3 and 4 are supported.
Keeps downloaded Metalink’s files with a bad hash. It appends .badhash to the name of Metalink’s files which have a checksum mismatch, except without overwriting existing files.
Issues HTTP HEAD request instead of GET and extracts Metalink metadata from response headers. Then it switches to Metalink download. If no valid Metalink metadata is found, it falls back to ordinary HTTP download. Enables ‘Content-Type: application/metalink4+xml’ files download/processing.
Set the Metalink ‘application/metalink4+xml’ metaurl ordinal NUMBER. From 1 to the total number of “application/metalink4+xml” available. Specify 0 or ‘inf’ to choose the first good one. Metaurls, such as those from a ‘--metalink-over-http’, may have been sorted by priority key’s value; keep this in mind to choose the right NUMBER.
Set preferred location for Metalink resources. This has effect if multiple resources with same priority are available.
Enable use of file system’s extended attributes to save the original URL and the Referer HTTP header value if used.
Be aware that the URL might contain private information like access tokens or credentials.
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.
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’.
Specify the location of a startup file you wish to use instead of the default one(s). Use –no-config to disable reading of config files. If both –config and –no-config are given, –no-config is ignored.
Logs all URL rejections to logfile as comma separated values. The values include the reason of rejection, the URL and the parent URL it was found in.
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.
[libcares only] This address overrides the route for DNS requests. If you ever need to circumvent the standard settings from /etc/resolv.conf, this option together with ‘--dns-servers’ is your friend. ADDRESS must be specified either as IPv4 or IPv6 address. Wget needs to be built with libcares for this option to be available.
[libcares only] The given address(es) override the standard nameserver addresses, e.g. as configured in /etc/resolv.conf. ADDRESSES may be specified either as IPv4 or IPv6 addresses, comma-separated. Wget needs to be built with libcares for this option to be available.
Set number of tries 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.
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.
A combination with ‘-nc’ is only accepted if the given output file does not exist.
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.
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 (see Time-Stamping). ‘-nc’ may not be specified at the same time as ‘-N’.
A combination with ‘-O’/‘--output-document’ is only accepted if the given output file does not exist.
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.
Before (over)writing a file, back up an existing file by adding a ‘.1’ suffix (‘_1’ on VMS) to the file name. Such backup files are rotated to ‘.2’, ‘.3’, and so on, up to backups (and lost beyond that).
Do not try to obtain credentials from .netrc file. By default .netrc file is searched for credentials in case none have been passed on command line and authentication is required.
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.
If you use ‘-c’ on a non-empty file, and the server does not support continued downloading, Wget will restart the download from scratch and overwrite the existing file entirely.
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.
Start downloading at zero-based position OFFSET. Offset may be expressed in bytes, kilobytes with the ‘k’ suffix, or megabytes with the ‘m’ suffix, etc.
‘--start-pos’ has higher precedence over ‘--continue’. When ‘--start-pos’ and ‘--continue’ are both specified, wget will emit a warning then proceed as if ‘--continue’ was absent.
Server support for continued download is required, otherwise ‘--start-pos’ cannot help. See ‘-c’ for details.
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.
The progress type can also take one or more parameters. The parameters vary based on the type selected. Parameters to type are passed by appending them to the type sperated by a colon (:) like this: ‘--progress=type:parameter1:parameter2’.
When using the dotted retrieval, you may 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 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).
If mega is not enough then you can use the giga
style—each dot represents 1M retrieved, there are eight dots in a
cluster, and 32 dots on each line (so each line contains 32M).
With ‘--progress=bar’, there are currently two possible parameters, force and noscroll.
When the output is not a TTY, the progress bar always falls back to “dot”, even if ‘--progress=bar’ was passed to Wget during invocation. This behaviour can be overridden and the “bar” output forced by using the “force” parameter as ‘--progress=bar:force’.
By default, the ‘bar’ style progress bar scroll the name of the file from left to right for the file being downloaded if the filename exceeds the maximum length allotted for its display. In certain cases, such as with ‘--progress=bar:force’, one may not want the scrolling filename in the progress bar. By passing the “noscroll” parameter, Wget can be forced to display as much of the filename as possible without scrolling through it.
Note that you can set the default style using the progress
command in .wgetrc. That setting may be overridden from the
command line. For example, to force the bar output without scrolling,
use ‘--progress=bar:force:noscroll’.
Force wget to display the progress bar in any verbosity.
By default, wget only displays the progress bar in verbose mode. One may however, want wget to display the progress bar on screen in conjunction with any other verbosity modes like ‘--no-verbose’ or ‘--quiet’. This is often a desired a property when invoking wget to download several small/large files. In such a case, wget could simply be invoked with this parameter to get a much cleaner output on the screen.
This option will also force the progress bar to be printed to stderr when used alongside the ‘--output-file’ option.
Turn on time-stamping. See Time-Stamping, for details.
Do not send If-Modified-Since header in ‘-N’ mode. Send preliminary HEAD request instead. This has only effect in ‘-N’ mode.
Don’t set the local file’s timestamp by the one on the server.
By default, when a file is downloaded, its 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.
Print the headers sent by HTTP servers and responses sent by FTP servers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Don’t use proxies, even if the appropriate *_proxy environment
variable is defined.
See Proxies, for more information about the use of proxies with Wget.
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 https://example.com/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. The quota is checked only at the end of each downloaded file, so it will never result in a partially downloaded file. Thus you may safely type ‘wget -Q2m -i sites’—download will be aborted after the file that exhausts the quota is completely downloaded.
Setting quota to 0 or to ‘inf’ unlimits the download quota.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Prompt for a password for each connection established. Cannot be specified when ‘--password’ is being used, because they are mutually exclusive.
Prompt for a user and password using the specified command. If no command is specified then the command in the environment variable WGET_ASKPASS is used. If WGET_ASKPASS is not set then the command in the environment variable SSH_ASKPASS is used.
You can set the default command for use-askpass in the .wgetrc. That setting may be overridden from the command line.
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.
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.
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.
Force Wget to unlink file instead of clobbering existing file. This option is useful for downloading to the directory with hardlinks.
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’).
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.
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.
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/...’.
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.
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).
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.
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.
As of version 1.19.2, Wget will also ensure that any downloaded files with
a Content-Encoding of ‘br’, ‘compress’, ‘deflate’
or ‘gzip’ end in the suffix ‘.br’, ‘.Z’, ‘.zlib’
and ‘.gz’ respectively.
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.
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
(see URL Format). Either method reveals your password to anyone who
bothers to run ps. To prevent the passwords from being seen,
use the ‘--use-askpass’ or 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.
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.
Disable server-side cache. In this case, Wget will send the remote server appropriate directives (‘Cache-Control: no-cache’ and ‘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.
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 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:
The cookies are in ~/.netscape/cookies.txt.
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.
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.
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 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’.
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.
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.
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.
Choose the type of compression to be used. Legal values are ‘auto’, ‘gzip’ and ‘none’.
If ‘auto’ or ‘gzip’ are specified, Wget asks the server to
compress the file using the gzip compression format. If the server
compresses the file and responds with the Content-Encoding
header field set appropriately, the file will be decompressed
automatically.
If ‘none’ is specified, wget will not ask the server to compress the file and will not decompress any server responses. This is the default.
Compression support is currently experimental. In case it is turned on,
please report any bugs to bug-wget@gnu.org.
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.
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.
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 the headers sent by the HTTP server to the file, preceding the actual contents, with an empty line as the separator.
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.
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 note that wget does not require the content to be of the form
key1=value1&key2=value2, and neither does it test for it. Wget will
simply transmit whatever data is provided to it. Most servers however expect
the POST data to be in the above format when processing HTML Forms.
When sending a POST request using the ‘--post-file’ option, Wget treats the file as a binary file and will send every character in the POST request without stripping trailing newline or formfeed characters. Any other control characters in the text will also be sent as-is in the POST request.
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: As of version 1.15 if Wget is redirected after the POST request is completed, its behaviour will depend on the response code returned by the server. In case of a 301 Moved Permanently, 302 Moved Temporarily or 307 Temporary Redirect, Wget will, in accordance with RFC2616, continue to send a POST request. In case a server wants the client to change the Request method upon redirection, it should send a 303 See Other response code.
This example shows how to log in 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://example.com/auth.php # Now grab the page or pages we care about. wget --load-cookies cookies.txt \ -p http://example.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.
For the purpose of RESTful scripting, Wget allows sending of other HTTP Methods without the need to explicitly set them using ‘--header=Header-Line’. Wget will use whatever string is passed to it after ‘--method’ as the HTTP Method to the server.
Must be set when additional data needs to be sent to the server along with the Method specified using ‘--method’. ‘--body-data’ sends string as data, whereas ‘--body-file’ sends the contents of file. Other than that, they work in exactly the same way.
Currently, ‘--body-file’ is not for transmitting files as a whole.
Wget does not currently support multipart/form-data for transmitting data;
only application/x-www-form-urlencoded. In the future, this may be changed
so that wget sends the ‘--body-file’ as a complete file instead of sending its
contents to the server. Please be aware that Wget needs to know the contents of
BODY Data in advance, and hence the argument to ‘--body-file’ should be a
regular file. See ‘--post-file’ for a more detailed explanation.
Only one of ‘--body-data’ and ‘--body-file’ should be specified.
If Wget is redirected after the request is completed, Wget will
suspend the current method and send a GET request till the redirection
is completed. This is true for all redirection response codes except
307 Temporary Redirect which is used to explicitly specify that the
request method should not change. Another exception is when
the method is set to POST, in which case the redirection rules
specified under ‘--post-data’ are followed.
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.
When combined with ‘--metalink-over-http’ and ‘--trust-server-names’,
a ‘Content-Type: application/metalink4+xml’ file is named using the
Content-Disposition filename field, if available.
If this is set to on, wget will not skip the content when the server responds with a http status code that indicates error.
If this is set, on a redirect, the local file name will be based on the redirection URL. By default the local file name is based on the original URL. When doing recursive retrieving this can be helpful because in many web sites redirected URLs correspond to an underlying file structure, while link URLs do not.
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.
Consider host errors, such as “Temporary failure in name resolution”, as non-fatal, transient errors.
Consider given HTTP response codes as non-fatal, transient errors. Supply a comma-separated list of 3-digit HTTP response codes as argument. Useful to work around special circumstances where retries are required, but the server responds with an error code normally not retried by Wget. Such errors might be 503 (Service Unavailable) and 429 (Too Many Requests). Retries enabled by this option are performed subject to the normal retry timing and retry count limitations of Wget.
Using this option is intended to support special use cases only and is generally not recommended, as it can force retries even in cases where the server is actually trying to decrease its load. Please use wisely and only if you know what you are doing.
To support encrypted HTTP (HTTPS) downloads, Wget must be compiled with an external SSL library. The current default is GnuTLS. In addition, Wget also supports HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security). If Wget is compiled without SSL support, none of these options are available.
Choose the secure protocol to be used. Legal values are ‘auto’, ‘SSLv2’, ‘SSLv3’, ‘TLSv1’, ‘TLSv1_1’, ‘TLSv1_2’, ‘TLSv1_3’ and ‘PFS’. If ‘auto’ is used, the SSL library is given the liberty of choosing the appropriate protocol automatically, which is achieved by sending a TLSv1 greeting. This is the default.
Specifying ‘SSLv2’, ‘SSLv3’, ‘TLSv1’, ‘TLSv1_1’, ‘TLSv1_2’ or ‘TLSv1_3’ forces the use of the corresponding protocol. This is useful when talking to old and buggy SSL server implementations that make it hard for the underlying SSL library to choose the correct protocol version. Fortunately, such servers are quite rare.
Specifying ‘PFS’ enforces the use of the so-called Perfect Forward Security cipher suites. In short, PFS adds security by creating a one-time key for each SSL connection. It has a bit more CPU impact on client and server. We use known to be secure ciphers (e.g. no MD4) and the TLS protocol. This mode also explicitly excludes non-PFS key exchange methods, such as RSA.
When in recursive mode, only HTTPS links are followed.
Set the cipher list string. Typically this string sets the cipher suites and other SSL/TLS options that the user wish should be used, in a set order of preference (GnuTLS calls it ’priority string’). This string will be fed verbatim to the SSL/TLS engine (OpenSSL or GnuTLS) and hence its format and syntax is dependent on that. Wget will not process or manipulate it in any way. Refer to the OpenSSL or GnuTLS documentation for more information.
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. For self-signed/internal certificates, you should download the certificate and verify against that instead of forcing this insecure mode. If you are really sure of not desiring any certificate verification, you can specify –check-certificate=quiet to tell wget to not print any warning about invalid certificates, albeit in most cases this is the wrong thing to do.
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.
Specify the type of the client certificate. Legal values are ‘PEM’ (assumed by default) and ‘DER’, also known as ‘ASN1’.
Read the private key from file. This allows you to provide the private key in a file separate from the certificate.
Specify the type of the private key. Accepted values are ‘PEM’ (the default) and ‘DER’.
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.
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.
Specifies a CRL file in file. This is needed for certificates that have been revocated by the CAs.
Tells wget to use the specified public key file (or hashes) to verify the peer. This can be a path to a file which contains a single public key in PEM or DER format, or any number of base64 encoded sha256 hashes preceded by “sha256//” and separated by “;”
When negotiating a TLS or SSL connection, the server sends a certificate indicating its identity. A public key is extracted from this certificate and if it does not exactly match the public key(s) provided to this option, wget will abort the connection before sending or receiving any data.
[OpenSSL and LibreSSL only] Use file as the source of random data for seeding the pseudo-random number generator on systems without /dev/urandom.
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 you’re getting the “Could not seed OpenSSL PRNG; disabling SSL.” error, you should provide random data using some of the methods described above.
[OpenSSL only] 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/urandom.
Wget supports HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security, RFC 6797) by default.
Use ‘--no-hsts’ to make Wget act as a non-HSTS-compliant UA. As a
consequence, Wget would ignore all the Strict-Transport-Security
headers, and would not enforce any existing HSTS policy.
By default, Wget stores its HSTS database in ~/.wget-hsts. You can use ‘--hsts-file’ to override this. Wget will use the supplied file as the HSTS database. Such file must conform to the correct HSTS database format used by Wget. If Wget cannot parse the provided file, the behaviour is unspecified.
The Wget’s HSTS database is a plain text file. Each line contains an HSTS entry
(ie. a site that has issued a Strict-Transport-Security header and that
therefore has specified a concrete HSTS policy to be applied). Lines starting with
a dash (#) are ignored by Wget. Please note that in spite of this convenient
human-readability hand-hacking the HSTS database is generally not a good idea.
An HSTS entry line consists of several fields separated by one or more whitespace:
<hostname> SP [<port>] SP <include subdomains> SP <created> SP <max-age>
The hostname and port fields indicate the hostname and port to which
the given HSTS policy applies. The port field may be zero, and it will, in
most of the cases. That means that the port number will not be taken into account
when deciding whether such HSTS policy should be applied on a given request (only
the hostname will be evaluated). When port is different to zero, both the
target hostname and the port will be evaluated and the HSTS policy will only be applied
if both of them match. This feature has been included for testing/development purposes only.
The Wget testsuite (in testenv/) creates HSTS databases with explicit ports
with the purpose of ensuring Wget’s correct behaviour. Applying HSTS policies to ports
other than the default ones is discouraged by RFC 6797 (see Appendix B "Differences
between HSTS Policy and Same-Origin Policy"). Thus, this functionality should not be used
in production environments and port will typically be zero. The last three fields
do what they are expected to. The field include_subdomains can either be 1
or 0 and it signals whether the subdomains of the target domain should be
part of the given HSTS policy as well. The created and max-age fields
hold the timestamp values of when such entry was created (first seen by Wget) and the
HSTS-defined value ’max-age’, which states how long should that HSTS policy remain active,
measured in seconds elapsed since the timestamp stored in created. Once that time
has passed, that HSTS policy will no longer be valid and will eventually be removed
from the database.
If you supply your own HSTS database via ‘--hsts-file’, be aware that Wget may modify the provided file if any change occurs between the HSTS policies requested by the remote servers and those in the file. When Wget exits, it effectively updates the HSTS database by rewriting the database file with the new entries.
If the supplied file does not exist, Wget will create one. This file will contain the new HSTS
entries. If no HSTS entries were generated (no Strict-Transport-Security headers
were sent by any of the servers) then no file will be created, not even an empty one. This
behaviour applies to the default database file (~/.wget-hsts) as well: it will not be
created until some server enforces an HSTS policy.
Care is taken not to override possible changes made by other Wget processes at the same time over the HSTS database. Before dumping the updated HSTS entries on the file, Wget will re-read it and merge the changes.
Using a custom HSTS database and/or modifying an existing one is discouraged. For more information about the potential security threats arose from such practice, see section 14 "Security Considerations" of RFC 6797, specially section 14.9 "Creative Manipulation of HSTS Policy Store".
Use file as the destination WARC file.
Use string into as the warcinfo record.
Set the maximum size of the WARC files to size.
Write CDX index files.
Do not store records listed in this CDX file.
Do not compress WARC files with GZIP.
Do not calculate SHA1 digests.
Do not store the log file in a WARC record.
Specify the location for temporary files created by the WARC writer.
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
(see URL Format). 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.
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.
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).
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.
Preserve remote file permissions instead of permissions set by umask.
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 file system. 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.
This option tells Wget to use FTPS implicitly. Implicit FTPS consists of initializing
SSL/TLS from the very beginning of the control connection. This option does not send
an AUTH TLS command: it assumes the server speaks FTPS and directly starts an
SSL/TLS connection. If the attempt is successful, the session continues just like
regular FTPS (PBSZ and PROT are sent, etc.).
Implicit FTPS is no longer a requirement for FTPS implementations, and thus
many servers may not support it. If ‘--ftps-implicit’ is passed and no explicit
port number specified, the default port for implicit FTPS, 990, will be used, instead
of the default port for the "normal" (explicit) FTPS which is the same as that of FTP,
21.
Do not resume the SSL/TLS session in the data channel. When starting a data connection, Wget tries to resume the SSL/TLS session previously started in the control connection. SSL/TLS session resumption avoids performing an entirely new handshake by reusing the SSL/TLS parameters of a previous session. Typically, the FTPS servers want it that way, so Wget does this by default. Under rare circumstances however, one might want to start an entirely new SSL/TLS session in every data connection. This is what ‘--no-ftps-resume-ssl’ is for.
All the data connections will be in plain text. Only the control connection will be
under SSL/TLS. Wget will send a PROT C command to achieve this, which must be
approved by the server.
Fall back to FTP if FTPS is not supported by the target server. For security reasons,
this option is not asserted by default. The default behaviour is to exit with an error.
If a server does not successfully reply to the initial AUTH TLS command, or in the
case of implicit FTPS, if the initial SSL/TLS connection attempt is rejected, it is
considered that such server does not support FTPS.
Turn on recursive retrieving. See Recursive Download, for more details. The default maximum depth is 5.
Set the maximum number of subdirectories that Wget will recurse into to depth. In order to prevent one from accidentally downloading very large websites when using recursion this is limited to a depth of 5 by default, i.e., it will traverse at most 5 directories deep starting from the provided URL. Set ‘-l 0’ or ‘-l inf’ for infinite recursion depth.
wget -r -l 0 http://site/1.html
Ideally, one would expect this to download just 1.html. 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), specify them all on the command line and leave away ‘-r’ and ‘-l’. To download the essential items to view a single HTML page, see ‘page requisites’.
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.
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:
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.
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.
This option converts only the filename part of the URLs, leaving the rest of the URLs untouched. This filename part is sometimes referred to as the "basename", although we avoid that term here in order not to cause confusion.
It works particularly well in conjunction with ‘--adjust-extension’, although this coupling is not enforced. It proves useful to populate Internet caches with files downloaded from different hosts.
Example: if some link points to //foo.com/bar.cgi?xyz with
‘--adjust-extension’ asserted and its local destination is intended to be
./foo.com/bar.cgi?xyz.css, then the link would be converted to
//foo.com/bar.cgi?xyz.css. Note that only the filename part has been
modified. The rest of the URL has been left untouched, including the net path
(//) which would otherwise be processed by Wget and converted to the
effective scheme (ie. http://).
When converting a file, back up the original version with a ‘.orig’ suffix. Affects the behavior of ‘-N’ (see HTTP Time-Stamping Internals).
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’.
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">.
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.
Specify comma-separated lists of file name suffixes or patterns to accept or reject (see Types of Files). 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. In this case, you have to enclose the pattern into quotes to prevent your shell from expanding it, like in ‘-A "*.mp3"’ or ‘-A '*.mp3'’.
Specify a regular expression to accept or reject the complete URL.
Specify the regular expression type. Possible types are ‘posix’ or ‘pcre’. Note that to be able to use ‘pcre’ type, wget has to be compiled with libpcre support.
Set domains to be followed. domain-list is a comma-separated list of domains. Note that it does not turn on ‘-H’.
Specify the domains that are not to be followed (see Spanning Hosts).
Follow FTP links from HTML documents. Without this option, Wget will ignore all the FTP links.
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.
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 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. The quotes in the example are to prevent the shell from expanding the pattern.
Enable spanning across hosts when doing recursive retrieving (see Spanning Hosts).
Follow relative links only. Useful for retrieving a specific home page without any distractions, not even those from the same hosts (see Relative Links).
Specify a comma-separated list of directories you wish to follow when downloading (see Directory-Based Limits). Elements of list may contain wildcards.
Specify a comma-separated list of directories you wish to exclude from download (see Directory-Based Limits). Elements of list may contain wildcards.
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. See Directory-Based Limits, for more details.
Wget may return one of several error codes if it encounters problems.
No problems occurred.
Generic error code.
Parse error—for instance, when parsing command-line options, the ‘.wgetrc’ or ‘.netrc’...
File I/O error.
Network failure.
SSL verification failure.
Username/password authentication failure.
Protocol errors.
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.
GNU Wget is capable of traversing parts of the Web (or a single HTTP or FTP server), following links and directory structure. We refer to this as to recursive retrieval, or recursion.
With HTTP URLs, Wget retrieves and parses the HTML or
CSS from the given URL, retrieving the files the document
refers to, through markup like href or src, or CSS
URI values specified using the ‘url()’ functional notation.
If the freshly downloaded file is also of type text/html,
application/xhtml+xml, or text/css, it will be parsed
and followed further.
Recursive retrieval of HTTP and HTML/CSS content is breadth-first. This means that Wget first downloads the requested document, then the documents linked from that document, then the documents linked by them, and so on. In other words, Wget first downloads the documents at depth 1, then those at depth 2, and so on until the specified maximum depth.
The maximum depth to which the retrieval may descend is specified with the ‘-l’ option. The default maximum depth is five layers.
When retrieving an FTP URL recursively, Wget will retrieve all
the data from the given directory tree (including the subdirectories up
to the specified depth) on the remote server, creating its mirror image
locally. FTP retrieval is also limited by the depth
parameter. Unlike HTTP recursion, FTP recursion is performed
depth-first.
By default, Wget will create a local directory tree, corresponding to the one found on the remote server.
Recursive retrieving can find a number of applications, the most important of which is mirroring. It is also useful for WWW presentations, and any other opportunities where slow network connections should be bypassed by storing the files locally.
You should be warned that recursive downloads can overload the remote servers. Because of that, many administrators frown upon them and may ban access from your site if they detect very fast downloads of big amounts of content. When downloading from Internet servers, consider using the ‘-w’ option to introduce a delay between accesses to the server. The download will take a while longer, but the server administrator will not be alarmed by your rudeness.
Of course, recursive download may cause problems on your machine. If left to run unchecked, it can easily fill up the disk. If downloading from local network, it can also take bandwidth on the system, as well as consume memory and CPU.
Try to specify the criteria that match the kind of download you are trying to achieve. If you want to download only one page, use ‘--page-requisites’ without any additional recursion. If you want to download things under one directory, use ‘-np’ to avoid downloading things from other directories. If you want to download all the files from one directory, use ‘-l 1’ to make sure the recursion depth never exceeds one. See Following Links, for more information about this.
Recursive retrieval should be used with care. Don’t say you were not warned.
When retrieving recursively, one does not wish to retrieve loads of unnecessary data. Most of the time the users bear in mind exactly what they want to download, and want Wget to follow only specific links.
For example, if you wish to download the music archive from ‘fly.srk.fer.hr’, you will not want to download all the home pages that happen to be referenced by an obscure part of the archive.
Wget possesses several mechanisms that allows you to fine-tune which links it will follow.
Wget’s recursive retrieval normally refuses to visit hosts different than the one you specified on the command line. This is a reasonable default; without it, every retrieval would have the potential to turn your Wget into a small version of google.
However, visiting different hosts, or host spanning, is sometimes a useful option. Maybe the images are served from a different server. Maybe you’re mirroring a site that consists of pages interlinked between three servers. Maybe the server has two equivalent names, and the HTML pages refer to both interchangeably.
The ‘-H’ option turns on host spanning, thus allowing Wget’s recursive run to visit any host referenced by a link. Unless sufficient recursion-limiting criteria are applied depth, these foreign hosts will typically link to yet more hosts, and so on until Wget ends up sucking up much more data than you have intended.
The ‘-D’ option allows you to specify the domains that will be followed, thus limiting the recursion only to the hosts that belong to these domains. Obviously, this makes sense only in conjunction with ‘-H’. A typical example would be downloading the contents of ‘www.example.com’, but allowing downloads from ‘images.example.com’, etc.:
wget -rH -Dexample.com http://www.example.com/
You can specify more than one address by separating them with a comma, e.g. ‘-Ddomain1.com,domain2.com’.
If there are domains you want to exclude specifically, you can do it with ‘--exclude-domains’, which accepts the same type of arguments of ‘-D’, but will exclude all the listed domains. For example, if you want to download all the hosts from ‘foo.edu’ domain, with the exception of ‘sunsite.foo.edu’, you can do it like this:
wget -rH -Dfoo.edu --exclude-domains sunsite.foo.edu \
http://www.foo.edu/
When downloading material from the web, you will often want to restrict the retrieval to only certain file types. For example, if you are interested in downloading GIFs, you will not be overjoyed to get loads of PostScript documents, and vice versa.
Wget offers two options to deal with this problem. Each option description lists a short name, a long name, and the equivalent command in .wgetrc.
The argument to ‘--accept’ option is a list of file suffixes or patterns that Wget will download during recursive retrieval. A suffix is the ending part of a file, and consists of “normal” letters, e.g. ‘gif’ or ‘.jpg’. A matching pattern contains shell-like wildcards, e.g. ‘books*’ or ‘zelazny*196[0-9]*’.
So, specifying ‘wget -A gif,jpg’ will make Wget download only the files ending with ‘gif’ or ‘jpg’, i.e. GIFs and JPEGs. On the other hand, ‘wget -A "zelazny*196[0-9]*"’ will download only files beginning with ‘zelazny’ and containing numbers from 1960 to 1969 anywhere within. Look up the manual of your shell for a description of how pattern matching works.
Of course, any number of suffixes and patterns can be combined into a comma-separated list, and given as an argument to ‘-A’.
The argument to ‘--accept-regex’ option is a regular expression which is matched against the complete URL.
The ‘--reject’ option works the same way as ‘--accept’, only its logic is the reverse; Wget will download all files except the ones matching the suffixes (or patterns) in the list.
So, if you want to download a whole page except for the cumbersome MPEGs and .AU files, you can use ‘wget -R mpg,mpeg,au’. Analogously, to download all files except the ones beginning with ‘bjork’, use ‘wget -R "bjork*"’. The quotes are to prevent expansion by the shell.
The argument to ‘--accept-regex’ option is a regular expression which is matched against the complete URL.
The ‘-A’ and ‘-R’ options may be combined to achieve even better fine-tuning of which files to retrieve. E.g. ‘wget -A "*zelazny*" -R .ps’ will download all the files having ‘zelazny’ as a part of their name, but not the PostScript files.
Note that these two options do not affect the downloading of HTML files (as determined by a ‘.htm’ or ‘.html’ filename prefix). This behavior may not be desirable for all users, and may be changed for future versions of Wget.
Note, too, that query strings (strings at the end of a URL beginning with a question mark (‘?’) are not included as part of the filename for accept/reject rules, even though these will actually contribute to the name chosen for the local file. It is expected that a future version of Wget will provide an option to allow matching against query strings.
Finally, it’s worth noting that the accept/reject lists are matched twice against downloaded files: once against the URL’s filename portion, to determine if the file should be downloaded in the first place; then, after it has been accepted and successfully downloaded, the local file’s name is also checked against the accept/reject lists to see if it should be removed. The rationale was that, since ‘.htm’ and ‘.html’ files are always downloaded regardless of accept/reject rules, they should be removed after being downloaded and scanned for links, if they did match the accept/reject lists. However, this can lead to unexpected results, since the local filenames can differ from the original URL filenames in the following ways, all of which can change whether an accept/reject rule matches:
This behavior, too, is considered less-than-desirable, and may change in a future version of Wget.
Regardless of other link-following facilities, it is often useful to place the restriction of what files to retrieve based on the directories those files are placed in. There can be many reasons for this—the home pages may be organized in a reasonable directory structure; or some directories may contain useless information, e.g. /cgi-bin or /dev directories.
Wget offers three different options to deal with this requirement. Each option description lists a short name, a long name, and the equivalent command in .wgetrc.
‘-I’ option accepts a comma-separated list of directories included in the retrieval. Any other directories will simply be ignored. The directories are absolute paths.
So, if you wish to download from ‘http://host/people/bozo/’ following only links to bozo’s colleagues in the /people directory and the bogus scripts in /cgi-bin, you can specify:
wget -I /people,/cgi-bin http://host/people/bozo/
‘-X’ option is exactly the reverse of ‘-I’—this is a list of directories excluded from the download. E.g. if you do not want Wget to download things from /cgi-bin directory, specify ‘-X /cgi-bin’ on the command line.
The same as with ‘-A’/‘-R’, these two options can be combined to get a better fine-tuning of downloading subdirectories. E.g. if you want to load all the files from /pub hierarchy except for /pub/worthless, specify ‘-I/pub -X/pub/worthless’.
The simplest, and often very useful way of limiting directories is disallowing retrieval of the links that refer to the hierarchy above than the beginning directory, i.e. disallowing ascent to the parent directory/directories.
The ‘--no-parent’ option (short ‘-np’) is useful in this case. Using it guarantees that you will never leave the existing hierarchy. Supposing you issue Wget with:
wget -r --no-parent http://somehost/~luzer/my-archive/
You may rest assured that none of the references to /~his-girls-homepage/ or /~luzer/all-my-mpegs/ will be followed. Only the archive you are interested in will be downloaded. Essentially, ‘--no-parent’ is similar to ‘-I/~luzer/my-archive’, only it handles redirections in a more intelligent fashion.
Note that, for HTTP (and HTTPS), the trailing slash is very important to ‘--no-parent’. HTTP has no concept of a “directory”—Wget relies on you to indicate what’s a directory and what isn’t. In ‘http://foo/bar/’, Wget will consider ‘bar’ to be a directory, while in ‘http://foo/bar’ (no trailing slash), ‘bar’ will be considered a filename (so ‘--no-parent’ would be meaningless, as its parent is ‘/’).
When ‘-L’ is turned on, only the relative links are ever followed. Relative links are here defined those that do not refer to the web server root. For example, these links are relative:
<a href="foo.gif"> <a href="foo/bar.gif"> <a href="../foo/bar.gif">
These links are not relative:
<a href="/foo.gif"> <a href="/foo/bar.gif"> <a href="http://www.example.com/foo/bar.gif">
Using this option guarantees that recursive retrieval will not span hosts, even without ‘-H’. In simple cases it also allows downloads to “just work” without having to convert links.
This option is probably not very useful and might be removed in a future release.
The rules for FTP are somewhat specific, as it is necessary for them to be. FTP links in HTML documents are often included for purposes of reference, and it is often inconvenient to download them by default.
To have FTP links followed from HTML documents, you need to specify the ‘--follow-ftp’ option. Having done that, FTP links will span hosts regardless of ‘-H’ setting. This is logical, as FTP links rarely point to the same host where the HTTP server resides. For similar reasons, the ‘-L’ options has no effect on such downloads. On the other hand, domain acceptance (‘-D’) and suffix rules (‘-A’ and ‘-R’) apply normally.
Also note that followed links to FTP directories will not be retrieved recursively further.
One of the most important aspects of mirroring information from the Internet is updating your archives.
Downloading the whole archive again and again, just to replace a few changed files is expensive, both in terms of wasted bandwidth and money, and the time to do the update. This is why all the mirroring tools offer the option of incremental updating.
Such an updating mechanism means that the remote server is scanned in search of new files. Only those new files will be downloaded in the place of the old ones.
A file is considered new if one of these two conditions are met:
To implement this, the program needs to be aware of the time of last modification of both local and remote files. We call this information the time-stamp of a file.
The time-stamping in GNU Wget is turned on using ‘--timestamping’
(‘-N’) option, or through timestamping = on directive in
.wgetrc. With this option, for each file it intends to download,
Wget will check whether a local file of the same name exists. If it
does, and the remote file is not newer, Wget will not download it.
If the local file does not exist, or the sizes of the files do not match, Wget will download the remote file no matter what the time-stamps say.
The usage of time-stamping is simple. Say you would like to download a file so that it keeps its date of modification.
wget -S http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/
A simple ls -l shows that the timestamp on the local file equals
the state of the Last-Modified header, as returned by the server.
As you can see, the time-stamping info is preserved locally, even
without ‘-N’ (at least for HTTP).
Several days later, you would like Wget to check if the remote file has changed, and download it if it has.
wget -N http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/
Wget will ask the server for the last-modified date. If the local file has the same timestamp as the server, or a newer one, the remote file will not be re-fetched. However, if the remote file is more recent, Wget will proceed to fetch it.
The same goes for FTP. For example:
wget "ftp://ftp.ifi.uio.no/pub/emacs/gnus/*"
(The quotes around that URL are to prevent the shell from trying to interpret the ‘*’.)
After download, a local directory listing will show that the timestamps match those on the remote server. Reissuing the command with ‘-N’ will make Wget re-fetch only the files that have been modified since the last download.
If you wished to mirror the GNU archive every week, you would use a command like the following, weekly:
wget --timestamping -r ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/
Note that time-stamping will only work for files for which the server
gives a timestamp. For HTTP, this depends on getting a
Last-Modified header. For FTP, this depends on getting a
directory listing with dates in a format that Wget can parse
(see FTP Time-Stamping Internals).
Time-stamping in HTTP is implemented by checking of the
Last-Modified header. If you wish to retrieve the file
foo.html through HTTP, Wget will check whether
foo.html exists locally. If it doesn’t, foo.html will be
retrieved unconditionally.
If the file does exist locally, Wget will first check its local
time-stamp (similar to the way ls -l checks it), and then send a
HEAD request to the remote server, demanding the information on
the remote file.
The Last-Modified header is examined to find which file was
modified more recently (which makes it “newer”). If the remote file
is newer, it will be downloaded; if it is older, Wget will give
up.2
When ‘--backup-converted’ (‘-K’) is specified in conjunction with ‘-N’, server file ‘X’ is compared to local file ‘X.orig’, if extant, rather than being compared to local file ‘X’, which will always differ if it’s been converted by ‘--convert-links’ (‘-k’).
Arguably, HTTP time-stamping should be implemented using the
If-Modified-Since request.
In theory, FTP time-stamping works much the same as HTTP, only FTP has no headers—time-stamps must be ferreted out of directory listings.
If an FTP download is recursive or uses globbing, Wget will use the
FTP LIST command to get a file listing for the directory
containing the desired file(s). It will try to analyze the listing,
treating it like Unix ls -l output, extracting the time-stamps.
The rest is exactly the same as for HTTP. Note that when
retrieving individual files from an FTP server without using
globbing or recursion, listing files will not be downloaded (and thus
files will not be time-stamped) unless ‘-N’ is specified.
Assumption that every directory listing is a Unix-style listing may sound extremely constraining, but in practice it is not, as many non-Unix FTP servers use the Unixoid listing format because most (all?) of the clients understand it. Bear in mind that RFC959 defines no standard way to get a file list, let alone the time-stamps. We can only hope that a future standard will define this.
Another non-standard solution includes the use of MDTM command
that is supported by some FTP servers (including the popular
wu-ftpd), which returns the exact time of the specified file.
Wget may support this command in the future.
Once you know how to change default settings of Wget through command line arguments, you may wish to make some of those settings permanent. You can do that in a convenient way by creating the Wget startup file—.wgetrc.
Besides .wgetrc is the “main” initialization file, it is convenient to have a special facility for storing passwords. Thus Wget reads and interprets the contents of $HOME/.netrc, if it finds it. You can find .netrc format in your system manuals.
Wget reads .wgetrc upon startup, recognizing a limited set of commands.
When initializing, Wget will look for a global startup file, /usr/local/etc/wgetrc by default (or some prefix other than /usr/local, if Wget was not installed there) and read commands from there, if it exists.
Then it will look for the user’s file. If the environmental variable
WGETRC is set, Wget will try to load that file. Failing that, no
further attempts will be made.
If WGETRC is not set, Wget will try to load $HOME/.wgetrc.
The fact that user’s settings are loaded after the system-wide ones means that in case of collision user’s wgetrc overrides the system-wide wgetrc (in /usr/local/etc/wgetrc by default). Fascist admins, away!
The syntax of a wgetrc command is simple:
variable = value
The variable will also be called command. Valid values are different for different commands.
The commands are case-, underscore- and minus-insensitive. Thus ‘DIr__PrefiX’, ‘DIr-PrefiX’ and ‘dirprefix’ are the same. Empty lines, lines beginning with ‘#’ and lines containing white-space only are discarded.
Commands that expect a comma-separated list will clear the list on an empty command. So, if you wish to reset the rejection list specified in global wgetrc, you can do it with:
reject =
The complete set of commands is listed below. Legal values are listed after the ‘=’. Simple Boolean values can be set or unset using ‘on’ and ‘off’ or ‘1’ and ‘0’.
Some commands take pseudo-arbitrary values. address values can be hostnames or dotted-quad IP addresses. n can be any positive integer, or ‘inf’ for infinity, where appropriate. string values can be any non-empty string.
Most of these commands have direct command-line equivalents. Also, any wgetrc command can be specified on the command line using the ‘--execute’ switch (see Basic Startup Options.)
Same as ‘-A’/‘-R’ (see Types of Files).
Enable/disable host-prefixed file names. ‘-nH’ disables it.
Prompt for a password for each connection established. Cannot be specified when ‘--password’ is being used, because they are mutually exclusive. Equivalent to ‘--ask-password’.
If this option is given, Wget will send Basic HTTP authentication information (plaintext username and password) for all requests. See ‘--auth-no-challenge’.
Enable/disable going to background—the same as ‘-b’ (which enables it).
Enable/disable saving pre-converted files with the suffix ‘.orig’—the same as ‘-K’ (which enables it).
Use up to number backups for a file. Backups are rotated by adding an incremental counter that starts at ‘1’. The default is ‘0’.
Consider relative URLs in input files (specified via the ‘input’ command or the ‘--input-file’/‘-i’ option, together with ‘force_html’ or ‘--force-html’) as being relative to string—the same as ‘--base=string’.
Bind to address, like the ‘--bind-address=address’.
Set the certificate authority bundle file to file. The same as ‘--ca-certificate=file’.
Set the directory used for certificate authorities. The same as ‘--ca-directory=directory’.
When set to off, disallow server-caching. See the ‘--no-cache’ option.
Set the client certificate file name to file. The same as ‘--certificate=file’.
Specify the type of the client certificate, legal values being ‘PEM’ (the default) and ‘DER’ (aka ASN1). The same as ‘--certificate-type=string’.
If this is set to off, the server certificate is not checked against the specified client authorities. The default is “on”. The same as ‘--check-certificate’.
Set the connect timeout—the same as ‘--connect-timeout’.
Turn on recognition of the (non-standard) ‘Content-Disposition’ HTTP header—if set to ‘on’, the same as ‘--content-disposition’.
If set to on, construct the local file name from redirection URLs rather than original URLs.
If set to on, force continuation of preexistent partially retrieved files. See ‘-c’ before setting it.
Convert non-relative links locally. The same as ‘-k’.
When set to off, disallow cookies. See the ‘--cookies’ option.
Ignore n remote directory components. Equivalent to ‘--cut-dirs=n’.
Debug mode, same as ‘-d’.
Default page name—the same as ‘--default-page=string’.
Delete after download—the same as ‘--delete-after’.
Top of directory tree—the same as ‘-P string’.
Turning dirstruct on or off—the same as ‘-x’ or ‘-nd’, respectively.
Turn DNS caching on/off. Since DNS caching is on by default, this option is normally used to turn it off and is equivalent to ‘--no-dns-cache’.
Set the DNS timeout—the same as ‘--dns-timeout’.
Same as ‘-D’ (see Spanning Hosts).
Specify the number of bytes “contained” in a dot, as seen throughout the retrieval (1024 by default). You can postfix the value with ‘k’ or ‘m’, representing kilobytes and megabytes, respectively. With dot settings you can tailor the dot retrieval to suit your needs, or you can use the predefined styles (see Download Options).
Specify the number of dots in a single cluster (10 by default).
Specify the number of dots that will be printed in each line throughout the retrieval (50 by default).
Use string as the EGD socket file name. The same as ‘--egd-file=file’.
Specify a comma-separated list of directories you wish to exclude from download—the same as ‘-X string’ (see Directory-Based Limits).
Same as ‘--exclude-domains=string’ (see Spanning Hosts).
Follow FTP links from HTML documents—the same as ‘--follow-ftp’.
Only follow certain HTML tags when doing a recursive retrieval, just like ‘--follow-tags=string’.
If set to on, force the input filename to be regarded as an HTML document—the same as ‘-F’.
Set your FTP password to string. Without this setting, the password defaults to ‘-wget@’, which is a useful default for anonymous FTP access.
This command used to be named passwd prior to Wget 1.10.
Use string as FTP proxy, instead of the one specified in environment.
Set FTP user to string.
This command used to be named login prior to Wget 1.10.
Turn globbing on/off—the same as ‘--glob’ and ‘--no-glob’.
Define a header for HTTP downloads, like using ‘--header=string’.
Choose the compression type to be used. Legal values are ‘auto’ (the default), ‘gzip’, and ‘none’. The same as ‘--compression=string’.
Add a ‘.html’ extension to ‘text/html’ or ‘application/xhtml+xml’ files that lack one, a ‘.css’ extension to ‘text/css’ files that lack one, and a ‘.br’, ‘.Z’, ‘.zlib’ or ‘.gz’ to compressed files like ‘-E’. Previously named ‘html_extension’ (still acceptable, but deprecated).
Turn the keep-alive feature on or off (defaults to on). Turning it off is equivalent to ‘--no-http-keep-alive’.
Set HTTP password, equivalent to ‘--http-password=string’.
Use string as HTTP proxy, instead of the one specified in environment.
Set HTTP user to string, equivalent to ‘--http-user=string’.
When in recursive mode, only HTTPS links are followed (defaults to off).
Use string as HTTPS proxy, instead of the one specified in environment.
When set to on, match files and directories case insensitively; the same as ‘--ignore-case’.
When set to on, ignore Content-Length header; the same as
‘--ignore-length’.
Ignore certain HTML tags when doing a recursive retrieval, like ‘--ignore-tags=string’.
Specify a comma-separated list of directories you wish to follow when downloading—the same as ‘-I string’.
When set to on, enable internationalized URI (IRI) support; the same as ‘--iri’.
Force connecting to IPv4 addresses, off by default. You can put this in the global init file to disable Wget’s attempts to resolve and connect to IPv6 hosts. Available only if Wget was compiled with IPv6 support. The same as ‘--inet4-only’ or ‘-4’.
Force connecting to IPv6 addresses, off by default. Available only if Wget was compiled with IPv6 support. The same as ‘--inet6-only’ or ‘-6’.
Read the URLs from string, like ‘-i file’.
When specified, causes ‘save_cookies = on’ to also save session cookies. See ‘--keep-session-cookies’.
Limit the download speed to no more than rate bytes per second. The same as ‘--limit-rate=rate’.
Load cookies from file. See ‘--load-cookies file’.
Force Wget to use encoding as the default system encoding. See ‘--local-encoding’.
Set logfile to file, the same as ‘-o file’.
Specifies the maximum number of redirections to follow for a resource. See ‘--max-redirect=number’.
Turn mirroring on/off. The same as ‘-m’.
Turn reading netrc on or off.
Same as ‘-nc’.
Disallow retrieving outside the directory hierarchy, like ‘--no-parent’ (see Directory-Based Limits).
Use string as the comma-separated list of domains to avoid in proxy loading, instead of the one specified in environment.
Set the output filename—the same as ‘-O file’.
Download all ancillary documents necessary for a single HTML page to display properly—the same as ‘-p’.
Change setting of passive FTP, equivalent to the ‘--passive-ftp’ option.
Specify password string for both FTP and HTTP file retrieval. This command can be overridden using the ‘ftp_password’ and ‘http_password’ command for FTP and HTTP respectively.
Use POST as the method for all HTTP requests and send string in the request body. The same as ‘--post-data=string’.
Use POST as the method for all HTTP requests and send the contents of file in the request body. The same as ‘--post-file=file’.
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. The same as ‘--prefer-family’, which see for a detailed discussion of why this is useful.
Set the private key file to file. The same as ‘--private-key=file’.
Specify the type of the private key, legal values being ‘PEM’ (the default) and ‘DER’ (aka ASN1). The same as ‘--private-type=string’.
Set the type of the progress indicator. Legal types are ‘dot’ and ‘bar’. Equivalent to ‘--progress=string’.
When set, use the protocol name as a directory component of local file names. The same as ‘--protocol-directories’.
Set proxy authentication password to string, like ‘--proxy-password=string’.
Set proxy authentication user name to string, like ‘--proxy-user=string’.
Quiet mode—the same as ‘-q’.
Specify the download quota, which is useful to put in the global wgetrc. When download quota is specified, Wget will stop retrieving after the download sum has become greater than quota. The quota can be specified in bytes (default), kbytes ‘k’ appended) or mbytes (‘m’ appended). Thus ‘quota = 5m’ will set the quota to 5 megabytes. Note that the user’s startup file overrides system settings.
Use file as a source of randomness on systems lacking /dev/random.
Turn random between-request wait times on or off. The same as ‘--random-wait’.
Set the read (and write) timeout—the same as ‘--read-timeout=n’.
Recursion level (depth)—the same as ‘-l n’.
Recursive on/off—the same as ‘-r’.
Set HTTP ‘Referer:’ header just like ‘--referer=string’. (Note that it was the folks who wrote the HTTP spec who got the spelling of “referrer” wrong.)
Follow only relative links—the same as ‘-L’ (see Relative Links).
Force Wget to use encoding as the default remote server encoding. See ‘--remote-encoding’.
If set to on, remove FTP listings downloaded by Wget. Setting it to off is the same as ‘--no-remove-listing’.
Restrict the file names generated by Wget from URLs. See ‘--restrict-file-names’ for a more detailed description.
When set to on, retrieve symbolic links as if they were plain files; the same as ‘--retr-symlinks’.
When set to on, consider “connection refused” a transient error—the same as ‘--retry-connrefused’.
Specify whether the norobots convention is respected by Wget, “on” by default. This switch controls both the /robots.txt and the ‘nofollow’ aspect of the spec. See Robot Exclusion, for more details about this. Be sure you know what you are doing before turning this off.
Save cookies to file. The same as ‘--save-cookies file’.
Same as ‘--save-headers’.
Choose the secure protocol to be used. Legal values are ‘auto’ (the default), ‘SSLv2’, ‘SSLv3’, and ‘TLSv1’. The same as ‘--secure-protocol=string’.
Choose whether or not to print the HTTP and FTP server responses—the same as ‘-S’.
When a DNS name is resolved, show all the IP addresses, not just the first three.
Same as ‘-H’.
Same as ‘--spider’.
Same as ‘--strict-comments’.
Set all applicable timeout values to n, the same as ‘-T n’.
Turn timestamping on/off. The same as ‘-N’ (see Time-Stamping).
If set to ‘off’, Wget won’t set the local file’s timestamp by the one on the server (same as ‘--no-use-server-timestamps’).
Set number of retries per URL—the same as ‘-t n’.
When set to off, don’t use proxy even when proxy-related environment variables are set. In that case it is the same as using ‘--no-proxy’.
Specify username string for both FTP and HTTP file retrieval. This command can be overridden using the ‘ftp_user’ and ‘http_user’ command for FTP and HTTP respectively.
User agent identification sent to the HTTP Server—the same as ‘--user-agent=string’.
Turn verbose on/off—the same as ‘-v’/‘-nv’.
Wait n seconds between retrievals—the same as ‘-w n’.
Wait up to n seconds between retries of failed retrievals only—the same as ‘--waitretry=n’. Note that this is turned on by default in the global wgetrc.
This is the sample initialization file, as given in the distribution. It is divided in two section—one for global usage (suitable for global startup file), and one for local usage (suitable for $HOME/.wgetrc). Be careful about the things you change.
Note that almost all the lines are commented out. For a command to have any effect, you must remove the ‘#’ character at the beginning of its line.
### ### Sample Wget initialization file .wgetrc ### ## You can use this file to change the default behaviour of wget or to ## avoid having to type many many command-line options. This file does ## not contain a comprehensive list of commands -- look at the manual ## to find out what you can put into this file. You can find this here: ## $ info wget.info 'Startup File' ## Or online here: ## https://www.gnu.org/software/wget/manual/wget.html#Startup-File ## ## Wget initialization file can reside in /usr/local/etc/wgetrc ## (global, for all users) or $HOME/.wgetrc (for a single user). ## ## To use the settings in this file, you will have to uncomment them, ## as well as change them, in most cases, as the values on the ## commented-out lines are the default values (e.g. "off"). ## ## Command are case-, underscore- and minus-insensitive. ## For example ftp_proxy, ftp-proxy and ftpproxy are the same. ## ## Global settings (useful for setting up in /usr/local/etc/wgetrc). ## Think well before you change them, since they may reduce wget's ## functionality, and make it behave contrary to the documentation: ## # You can set retrieve quota for beginners by specifying a value # optionally followed by 'K' (kilobytes) or 'M' (megabytes). The # default quota is unlimited. #quota = inf # You can lower (or raise) the default number of retries when # downloading a file (default is 20). #tries = 20 # Lowering the maximum depth of the recursive retrieval is handy to # prevent newbies from going too "deep" when they unwittingly start # the recursive retrieval. The default is 5. #reclevel = 5 # By default Wget uses "passive FTP" transfer where the client # initiates the data connection to the server rather than the other # way around. That is required on systems behind NAT where the client # computer cannot be easily reached from the Internet. However, some # firewalls software explicitly supports active FTP and in fact has # problems supporting passive transfer. If you are in such # environment, use "passive_ftp = off" to revert to active FTP. #passive_ftp = off # The "wait" command below makes Wget wait between every connection. # If, instead, you want Wget to wait only between retries of failed # downloads, set waitretry to maximum number of seconds to wait (Wget # will use "linear backoff", waiting 1 second after the first failure # on a file, 2 seconds after the second failure, etc. up to this max). #waitretry = 10 ## ## Local settings (for a user to set in his $HOME/.wgetrc). It is ## *highly* undesirable to put these settings in the global file, since ## they are potentially dangerous to "normal" users. ## ## Even when setting up your own ~/.wgetrc, you should know what you ## are doing before doing so. ## # Set this to on to use timestamping by default: #timestamping = off # It is a good idea to make Wget send your email address in a `From:' # header with your request (so that server administrators can contact # you in case of errors). Wget does *not* send `From:' by default. #header = From: Your Name <username@site.domain> # You can set up other headers, like Accept-Language. Accept-Language # is *not* sent by default. #header = Accept-Language: en # You can set the default proxies for Wget to use for http, https, and ftp. # They will override the value in the environment. #https_proxy = http://proxy.yoyodyne.com:18023/ #http_proxy = http://proxy.yoyodyne.com:18023/ #ftp_proxy = http://proxy.yoyodyne.com:18023/ # If you do not want to use proxy at all, set this to off. #use_proxy = on # You can customize the retrieval outlook. Valid options are default, # binary, mega and micro. #dot_style = default # Setting this to off makes Wget not download /robots.txt. Be sure to # know *exactly* what /robots.txt is and how it is used before changing # the default! #robots = on # It can be useful to make Wget wait between connections. Set this to # the number of seconds you want Wget to wait. #wait = 0 # You can force creating directory structure, even if a single is being # retrieved, by setting this to on. #dirstruct = off # You can turn on recursive retrieving by default (don't do this if # you are not sure you know what it means) by setting this to on. #recursive = off # To always back up file X as X.orig before converting its links (due # to -k / --convert-links / convert_links = on having been specified), # set this variable to on: #backup_converted = off # To have Wget follow FTP links from HTML files by default, set this # to on: #follow_ftp = off # To try ipv6 addresses first: #prefer-family = IPv6 # Set default IRI support state #iri = off # Force the default system encoding #localencoding = UTF-8 # Force the default remote server encoding #remoteencoding = UTF-8 # Turn on to prevent following non-HTTPS links when in recursive mode #httpsonly = off # Tune HTTPS security (auto, SSLv2, SSLv3, TLSv1, PFS) #secureprotocol = auto
The examples are divided into three sections loosely based on their complexity.
wget http://fly.srk.fer.hr/
wget --tries=45 http://fly.srk.fer.hr/jpg/flyweb.jpg
wget -t 45 -o log http://fly.srk.fer.hr/jpg/flyweb.jpg &
The ampersand at the end of the line makes sure that Wget works in the background. To unlimit the number of retries, use ‘-t inf’.
wget ftp://gnjilux.srk.fer.hr/welcome.msg
wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/ links index.html
wget -i file
If you specify ‘-’ as file name, the URLs will be read from standard input.
wget -r https://www.gnu.org/ -o gnulog
wget --convert-links -r https://www.gnu.org/ -o gnulog
wget -p --convert-links http://www.example.com/dir/page.html
The HTML page will be saved to www.example.com/dir/page.html, and the images, stylesheets, etc., somewhere under www.example.com/, depending on where they were on the remote server.
wget -p --convert-links -nH -nd -Pdownload \
http://www.example.com/dir/page.html
wget -S http://www.lycos.com/
wget --save-headers http://www.lycos.com/ more index.html
wget -r -l2 -P/tmp ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/
wget -r -l1 --no-parent -A.gif http://www.example.com/dir/
More verbose, but the effect is the same. ‘-r -l1’ means to retrieve recursively (see Recursive Download), with maximum depth of 1. ‘--no-parent’ means that references to the parent directory are ignored (see Directory-Based Limits), and ‘-A.gif’ means to download only the GIF files. ‘-A "*.gif"’ would have worked too.
wget -nc -r https://www.gnu.org/
wget ftp://hniksic:mypassword@unix.example.com/.emacs
Note, however, that this usage is not advisable on multi-user systems
because it reveals your password to anyone who looks at the output of
ps.
wget -O - http://jagor.srce.hr/ http://www.srce.hr/
You can also combine the two options and make pipelines to retrieve the documents from remote hotlists:
wget -O - http://cool.list.com/ | wget --force-html -i -
crontab 0 0 * * 0 wget --mirror https://www.gnu.org/ -o /home/me/weeklog
wget --mirror --convert-links --backup-converted \
https://www.gnu.org/ -o /home/me/weeklog
wget --mirror --convert-links --backup-converted \
--adjust-extension -o /home/me/weeklog \
https://www.gnu.org/
Or, with less typing:
wget -m -k -K -E https://www.gnu.org/ -o /home/me/weeklog
This chapter contains all the stuff that could not fit anywhere else.
Proxies are special-purpose HTTP servers designed to transfer data from remote servers to local clients. One typical use of proxies is lightening network load for users behind a slow connection. This is achieved by channeling all HTTP and FTP requests through the proxy which caches the transferred data. When a cached resource is requested again, proxy will return the data from cache. Another use for proxies is for companies that separate (for security reasons) their internal networks from the rest of Internet. In order to obtain information from the Web, their users connect and retrieve remote data using an authorized proxy.
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_proxyhttps_proxyIf set, the http_proxy and https_proxy variables should
contain the URLs of the proxies for HTTP and HTTPS
connections respectively.
ftp_proxyThis 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_proxyThis 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.
In addition to the environment variables, proxy location and settings may be specified from within Wget itself.
This option and the corresponding command may be used to suppress the use of proxy, even if the appropriate environment variables are set.
These startup file variables allow you to override the proxy settings specified by the environment.
Some proxy servers require authorization to enable you to use them. The
authorization consists of username and password, which must
be sent by Wget. As with HTTP authorization, several
authentication schemes exist. For proxy authorization only the
Basic authentication scheme is currently implemented.
You may specify your username and password either through the proxy URL or through the command-line options. Assuming that the company’s proxy is located at ‘proxy.company.com’ at port 8001, a proxy URL location containing authorization data might look like this:
http://hniksic:mypassword@proxy.company.com:8001/
Alternatively, you may use the ‘proxy-user’ and
‘proxy-password’ options, and the equivalent .wgetrc
settings proxy_user and proxy_password to set the proxy
username and password.
Like all GNU utilities, the latest version of Wget can be found at the master GNU archive site ftp.gnu.org, and its mirrors. For example, Wget 1.24.5 can be found at https://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/wget/wget-1.24.5.tar.gz
The official web site for GNU Wget is at https//www.gnu.org/software/wget/. However, most useful information resides at “The Wget Wgiki”, http://wget.addictivecode.org/.
The primary mailinglist for discussion, bug-reports, or questions about GNU Wget is at bug-wget@gnu.org. To subscribe, send an email to bug-wget-join@gnu.org, or visit https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-wget.
You do not need to subscribe to send a message to the list; however, please note that unsubscribed messages are moderated, and may take a while before they hit the list—usually around a day. If you want your message to show up immediately, please subscribe to the list before posting. Archives for the list may be found at https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-wget/.
An NNTP/Usenettish gateway is also available via Gmane. You can see the Gmane archives at http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.wget.general. Note that the Gmane archives conveniently include messages from both the current list, and the previous one. Messages also show up in the Gmane archives sooner than they do at https://lists.gnu.org.
Previously, the mailing list wget@sunsite.dk was used as the main discussion list, and another list, wget-patches@sunsite.dk was used for submitting and discussing patches to GNU Wget.
Messages from wget@sunsite.dk are archived at
Messages from wget-patches@sunsite.dk are archived at
In addition to the mailinglists, we also have a support channel set up
via IRC at irc.freenode.org, #wget. Come check it out!
You are welcome to submit bug reports via the GNU Wget bug tracker (see https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?func=additem&group=wget) or to our mailing list bug-wget@gnu.org.
Visit https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-wget to get more info (how to subscribe, list archives, ...).
Before actually submitting a bug report, please try to follow a few simple guidelines.
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.
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 publicly archived, you
may assume that all bug reports are visible to the public.
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.
Like all GNU software, Wget works on the GNU system. However, since it uses GNU Autoconf for building and configuring, and mostly avoids using “special” features of any particular Unix, it should compile (and work) on all common Unix flavors.
Various Wget versions have been compiled and tested under many kinds of Unix systems, including GNU/Linux, Solaris, SunOS 4.x, Mac OS X, OSF (aka Digital Unix or Tru64), Ultrix, *BSD, IRIX, AIX, and others. Some of those systems are no longer in widespread use and may not be able to support recent versions of Wget. If Wget fails to compile on your system, we would like to know about it.
Thanks to kind contributors, this version of Wget compiles and works on 32-bit Microsoft Windows platforms. It has been compiled successfully using MS Visual C++ 6.0, Watcom, Borland C, and GCC compilers. Naturally, it is crippled of some features available on Unix, but it should work as a substitute for people stuck with Windows. Note that Windows-specific portions of Wget are not guaranteed to be supported in the future, although this has been the case in practice for many years now. All questions and problems in Windows usage should be reported to Wget mailing list at wget@sunsite.dk where the volunteers who maintain the Windows-related features might look at them.
Support for building on MS-DOS via DJGPP has been contributed by Gisle Vanem; a port to VMS is maintained by Steven Schweda, and is available at https://antinode.info/dec/sw/wget.html.
Since the purpose of Wget is background work, it catches the hangup
signal (SIGHUP) and ignores it. If the output was on standard
output, it will be redirected to a file named wget-log.
Otherwise, SIGHUP is ignored. This is convenient when you wish
to redirect the output of Wget after having started it.
$ wget http://www.gnus.org/dist/gnus.tar.gz & ... $ kill -HUP %% SIGHUP received, redirecting output to `wget-log'.
Other than that, Wget will not try to interfere with signals in any way.
C-c, kill -TERM and kill -KILL should kill it alike.
This chapter contains some references I consider useful.
It is extremely easy to make Wget wander aimlessly around a web site, sucking all the available data in progress. ‘wget -r site’, and you’re set. Great? Not for the server admin.
As long as Wget is only retrieving static pages, and doing it at a
reasonable rate (see the ‘--wait’ option), there’s not much of a
problem. The trouble is that Wget can’t tell the difference between the
smallest static page and the most demanding CGI. A site I know has a
section handled by a CGI Perl script that converts Info files to HTML on
the fly. The script is slow, but works well enough for human users
viewing an occasional Info file. However, when someone’s recursive Wget
download stumbles upon the index page that links to all the Info files
through the script, the system is brought to its knees without providing
anything useful to the user (This task of converting Info files could be
done locally and access to Info documentation for all installed GNU
software on a system is available from the info command).
To avoid this kind of accident, as well as to preserve privacy for documents that need to be protected from well-behaved robots, the concept of robot exclusion was invented. The idea is that the server administrators and document authors can specify which portions of the site they wish to protect from robots and those they will permit access.
The most popular mechanism, and the de facto standard supported by all the major robots, is the “Robots Exclusion Standard” (RES) written by Martijn Koster et al. in 1994. It specifies the format of a text file containing directives that instruct the robots which URL paths to avoid. To be found by the robots, the specifications must be placed in /robots.txt in the server root, which the robots are expected to download and parse.
Although Wget is not a web robot in the strictest sense of the word, it can download large parts of the site without the user’s intervention to download an individual page. Because of that, Wget honors RES when downloading recursively. For instance, when you issue:
wget -r http://www.example.com/
First the index of ‘www.example.com’ will be downloaded. If Wget finds that it wants to download more documents from that server, it will request ‘http://www.example.com/robots.txt’ and, if found, use it for further downloads. robots.txt is loaded only once per each server.
Until version 1.8, Wget supported the first version of the standard, written by Martijn Koster in 1994 and available at http://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html. As of version 1.8, Wget has supported the additional directives specified in the internet draft ‘<draft-koster-robots-00.txt>’ titled “A Method for Web Robots Control”. The draft, which has as far as I know never made to an RFC, is available at http://www.robotstxt.org/norobots-rfc.txt.
This manual no longer includes the text of the Robot Exclusion Standard.
The second, less known mechanism, enables the author of an individual
document to specify whether they want the links from the file to be
followed by a robot. This is achieved using the META tag, like
this:
<meta name="robots" content="nofollow">
This is explained in some detail at http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html. Wget supports this method of robot exclusion in addition to the usual /robots.txt exclusion.
If you know what you are doing and really really wish to turn off the
robot exclusion, set the robots variable to ‘off’ in your
.wgetrc. You can achieve the same effect from the command line
using the -e switch, e.g. ‘wget -e robots=off url...’.
When using Wget, you must be aware that it sends unencrypted passwords through the network, which may present a security problem. Here are the main issues, and some solutions.
ps. The best
way around it is to use wget -i - and feed the URLs to
Wget’s standard input, each on a separate line, terminated by C-d.
Another workaround is to use .netrc to store passwords; however,
storing unencrypted passwords is also considered a security risk.
GNU Wget was written by Hrvoje Nikšić hniksic@xemacs.org,
However, the development of Wget could never have gone as far as it has, were it not for the help of many people, either with bug reports, feature proposals, patches, or letters saying “Thanks!”.
Special thanks goes to the following people (no particular order):
--page-requisites and
related options. He was the principal maintainer for some time and
released Wget 1.6.
ansi2knr-ization. Lots of
portability fixes.
Digest
authentication.
The following people have provided patches, bug/build reports, useful suggestions, beta testing services, fan mail and all the other things that make maintenance so much fun:
Tim Adam, Adrian Aichner, Martin Baehr, Dieter Baron, Roger Beeman, Dan Berger, T. Bharath, Christian Biere, Paul Bludov, Daniel Bodea, Mark Boyns, John Burden, Julien Buty, Wanderlei Cavassin, Gilles Cedoc, Tim Charron, Noel Cragg, Kristijan Čonkaš, John Daily, Andreas Damm, Ahmon Dancy, Andrew Davison, Bertrand Demiddelaer, Alexander Dergachev, Andrew Deryabin, Ulrich Drepper, Marc Duponcheel, Damir Džeko, Alan Eldridge, Hans-Andreas Engel, Aleksandar Erkalović, Andy Eskilsson, João Ferreira, Christian Fraenkel, David Fritz, Mike Frysinger, Charles C. Fu, FUJISHIMA Satsuki, Masashi Fujita, Howard Gayle, Marcel Gerrits, Lemble Gregory, Hans Grobler, Alain Guibert, Mathieu Guillaume, Aaron Hawley, Jochen Hein, Karl Heuer, Madhusudan Hosaagrahara, HIROSE Masaaki, Ulf Harnhammar, Gregor Hoffleit, Erik Magnus Hulthen, Richard Huveneers, Jonas Jensen, Larry Jones, Simon Josefsson, Mario Jurić, Hack Kampbjørn, Const Kaplinsky, Goran Kezunović, Igor Khristophorov, Robert Kleine, KOJIMA Haime, Fila Kolodny, Alexander Kourakos, Martin Kraemer, Sami Krank, Jay Krell, Σίμος Ξενιτέλλης (Simos KSenitellis), Christian Lackas, Hrvoje Lacko, Daniel S. Lewart, Nicolás Lichtmeier, Dave Love, Alexander V. Lukyanov, Thomas Lußnig, Andre Majorel, Aurelien Marchand, Matthew J. Mellon, Jordan Mendelson, Ted Mielczarek, Robert Millan, Lin Zhe Min, Jan Minar, Tim Mooney, Keith Moore, Adam D. Moss, Simon Munton, Charlie Negyesi, R. K. Owen, Jim Paris, Kenny Parnell, Leonid Petrov, Simone Piunno, Andrew Pollock, Steve Pothier, Jan Přikryl, Marin Purgar, Csaba Ráduly, Keith Refson, Bill Richardson, Tyler Riddle, Tobias Ringstrom, Jochen Roderburg, Juan José Rodríguez, Maciej W. Rozycki, Edward J. Sabol, Heinz Salzmann, Robert Schmidt, Nicolas Schodet, Benno Schulenberg, Andreas Schwab, Steven M. Schweda, Chris Seawood, Pranab Shenoy, Dennis Smit, Toomas Soome, Tage Stabell-Kulo, Philip Stadermann, Daniel Stenberg, Sven Sternberger, Markus Strasser, John Summerfield, Szakacsits Szabolcs, Mike Thomas, Philipp Thomas, Mauro Tortonesi, Dave Turner, Gisle Vanem, Rabin Vincent, Russell Vincent, Željko Vrba, Charles G Waldman, Douglas E. Wegscheid, Ralf Wildenhues, Joshua David Williams, Benjamin Wolsey, Saint Xavier, YAMAZAKI Makoto, Jasmin Zainul, Bojan Ždrnja, Kristijan Zimmer, Xin Zou.
Apologies to all who I accidentally left out, and many thanks to all the subscribers of the Wget mailing list.
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