wget(1) - Linux man page

Name

Wget - The non-interactive network downloader.

Synopsis

wget [option]... [ URL ]...

Description

GNU Wget is a free utility for non-interactive download of files from the Web. It
supports HTTP , HTTPS , and FTP protocols, as well as retrieval through HTTP
proxies.

Wget is non-interactive, meaning that it can work in the background, while the user
is not logged on. This allows you to start a retrieval and disconnect from the
system, letting Wget finish the work. By contrast, most of the Web browsers require
constant user's presence, which can be a great hindrance when transferring a lot of
data.

Wget can follow links in HTML , XHTML , and CSS pages, to create local versions of
remote web sites, fully recreating the directory structure of the original site.
This is sometimes referred to as "recursive downloading." While doing that, Wget
respects the Robot Exclusion Standard (/robots.txt). Wget can be instructed to
convert the links in downloaded files to point at the local files, for offline
viewing.

Wget has been designed for robustness over slow or unstable network connections; if
a download fails due to a network problem, it will keep retrying until the whole
file has been retrieved. If the server supports regetting, it will instruct the
server to continue the download from where it left off.
Options

Option Syntax

Since Wget uses GNU getopt to process command-line arguments, every option has a
long form along with the short one. Long options are more convenient to remember,
but take time to type. You may freely mix different option styles, or specify
options after the command-line arguments. Thus you may write:

wget -r --tries=10 http://fly.srk.fer.hr/ -o log

The space between the option accepting an argument and the argument may be omitted.
Instead of -o log you can write -olog.

You may put several options that do not require arguments together, like:

wget -drc <URL>

This is completely equivalent to:

wget -d -r -c <URL>

Since the options can be specified after the arguments, you may terminate them with
--. So the following will try to download URL -x, reporting failure to log:

wget -o log -- -x

The options that accept comma-separated lists all respect the convention that
specifying an empty list clears its value. This can be useful to clear the .wgetrc
settings. For instance, if your .wgetrc sets "exclude_directories" to /cgi-bin, the
following example will first reset it, and then set it to exclude /~nobody and
/~somebody. You can also clear the lists in .wgetrc.

wget -X " -X /~nobody,/~somebody

Most options that do not accept arguments are boolean options, so named because
their state can be captured with a yes-or-no ("boolean") variable. For example, --
follow-ftp tells Wget to follow FTP links from HTML files and, on the other hand,
--no-glob tells it not to perform file globbing on FTP URLs. A boolean option is
either affirmative or negative (beginning with --no). All such options share
several properties.

Unless stated otherwise, it is assumed that the default behavior is the opposite of
what the option accomplishes. For example, the documented existence of --follow-ftp
assumes that the default is to not follow FTP links from HTML pages.

Affirmative options can be negated by prepending the --no- to the option name;
negative options can be negated by omitting the --no- prefix. This might seem
superfluous---if the default for an affirmative option is to not do something, then
why provide a way to explicitly turn it off? But the startup file may in fact
change the default. For instance, using "follow_ftp = on" in .wgetrc makes Wget
follow FTP links by default, and using --no-follow-ftp is the only way to restore
the factory default from the command line.

Basic Startup Options

-V
--version
Display the version of Wget.
-h
--help
Print a help message describing all of Wget's command-line options.
-b
--background
Go to background immediately after startup. If no output file is specified via
the -o, output is redirected to wget-log.
-e command
--execute command
Execute command as if it were a part of .wgetrc. A command thus invoked will be
executed after the commands in .wgetrc, thus taking precedence over them. If you
need to specify more than one wgetrc command, use multiple instances of -e.

Logging and Input File Options

-o logfile
--output-file=logfile
Log all messages to logfile. The messages are normally reported to standard
error.
-a logfile
--append-output=logfile
Append to logfile. This is the same as -o, only it appends to logfile instead
of overwriting the old log file. If logfile does not exist, a new file is created.
-d
--debug
Turn on debug output, meaning various information important to the developers
of Wget if it does not work properly. Your system administrator may have chosen to
compile Wget without debug support, in which case -d will not work. Please note
that compiling with debug support is always safe---Wget compiled with the debug
support will not print any debug info unless requested with -d.
-q
--quiet
Turn off Wget's output.
-v
--verbose
Turn on verbose output, with all the available data. The default output is
verbose.
-nv
--no-verbose
Turn off verbose without being completely quiet (use -q for that), which means
that error messages and basic information still get printed.
-i file
--input-file=file
Read URLs from a local or external file. If - is specified as file, URLs are
read from the standard input. (Use ./- to read from a file literally named -.)

If this function is used, no URLs need be present on the command line. If there
are URLs both on the command line and in an input file, those on the command lines
will be the first ones to be retrieved. If --force-html is not specified, then file
should consist of a series of URLs, one per line.

However, if you specify --force-html, the document will be regarded as html. In

that case you may have problems with relative links, which you can solve either by
adding "<base href=" url ">" to the documents or by specifying --base=url on the
command line.

If the file is an external one, the document will be automatically treated as

html if the Content-Type matches text/html. Furthermore, the file's location will
be implicitly used as base href if none was specified.
-F
--force-html
When input is read from a file, force it to be treated as an HTML file. This
enables you to retrieve relative links from existing HTML files on your local disk,
by adding "<base href=" url ">" to HTML , or using the --base command-line option.
-B URL
--base= URL
Resolves relative links using URL as the point of reference, when reading links
from an HTML file specified via the -i/--input-file option (together with --force-
html, or when the input file was fetched remotely from a server describing it as
HTML ). This is equivalent to the presence of a "BASE" tag in the HTML input file,
with URL as the value for the "href" attribute.

For instance, if you specify http://foo/bar/a.html for URL , and Wget

reads ../baz/b.html from the input file, it would be resolved to
http://foo/baz/b.html.

Download Options

--bind-address= ADDRESS
When making client TCP/IP connections, bind to ADDRESS on the local machine.
ADDRESS may be specified as a hostname or IP address. This option can be useful if
your machine is bound to multiple IPs.
-t number
--tries=number
Set number of retries to number. Specify 0 or inf for infinite retrying. The
default is to retry 20 times, with the exception of fatal errors like "connection
refused" or "not found" (404), which are not retried.
-O file
--output-document=file
The documents will not be written to the appropriate files, but all will be
concatenated together and written to file. If - is used as file, documents will be
printed to standard output, disabling link conversion. (Use ./- to print to a file
literally named -.)

Use of -O is not intended to mean simply "use the name file instead of the one
in the URL ;" rather, it is analogous to shell redirection: wget -O file http://foo
is intended to work like wget -O - http://foo > file; file will be truncated
immediately, and all downloaded content will be written there.

For this reason, -N (for timestamp-checking) is not supported in combination

with -O: since file is always newly created, it will always have a very new
timestamp. A warning will be issued if this combination is used.

Similarly, using -r or -p with -O may not work as you expect: Wget won't just
download the first file to file and then download the rest to their normal names:
all downloaded content will be placed in file. This was disabled in version 1.11,
but has been reinstated (with a warning) in 1.11.2, as there are some cases where
this behavior can actually have some use.

Note that a combination with -k is only permitted when downloading a single

document, as in that case it will just convert all relative URIs to external ones;
-k makes no sense for multiple URIs when they're all being downloaded to a single
file.
-nc
--no-clobber
If a file is downloaded more than once in the same directory, Wget's behavior
depends on a few options, including -nc. In certain cases, the local file will be
clobbered, or overwritten, upon repeated download. In other cases it will be
preserved.

When running Wget without -N, -nc, -r, or -p, downloading the same file in the
same directory will result in the original copy of file being preserved and the
second copy being named file.1. If that file is downloaded yet again, the third
copy will be named file.2, and so on. (This is also the behavior with -nd, even if
-r or -p are in effect.) When -nc is specified, this behavior is suppressed, and
Wget will refuse to download newer copies of file. Therefore, ""no-clobber"" is
actually a misnomer in this mode---it's not clobbering that's prevented (as the
numeric suffixes were already preventing clobbering), but rather the multiple
version saving that's prevented.

When running Wget with -r or -p, but without -N, -nd, or -nc, re-downloading a
file will result in the new copy simply overwriting the old. Adding -nc will
prevent this behavior, instead causing the original version to be preserved and any
newer copies on the server to be ignored.

When running Wget with -N, with or without -r or -p, the decision as to whether
or not to download a newer copy of a file depends on the local and remote timestamp
and size of the file. -nc may not be specified at the same time as -N.

Note that when -nc is specified, files with the suffixes .html or .htm will be
loaded from the local disk and parsed as if they had been retrieved from the Web.
-c
--continue
Continue getting a partially-downloaded file. This is useful when you want to
finish up a download started by a previous instance of Wget, or by another program.
For instance:
 wget -c ftp://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/ls-lR.Z

If there is a file named ls-lR.Z in the current directory, Wget will assume
that it is the first portion of the remote file, and will ask the server to
continue the retrieval from an offset equal to the length of the local file.

Note that you don't need to specify this option if you just want the current
invocation of Wget to retry downloading a file should the connection be lost midway
through. This is the default behavior. -c only affects resumption of downloads
started prior to this invocation of Wget, and whose local files are still sitting
around.

Without -c, the previous example would just download the remote file to ls-
lR.Z.1, leaving the truncated ls-lR.Z file alone.

Beginning with Wget 1.7, if you use -c on a non-empty file, and it turns out
that the server does not support continued downloading, Wget will refuse to start
the download from scratch, which would effectively ruin existing contents. If you
really want the download to start from scratch, remove the file.

Also beginning with Wget 1.7, if you use -c on a file which is of equal size as
the one on the server, Wget will refuse to download the file and print an
explanatory message. The same happens when the file is smaller on the server than
locally (presumably because it was changed on the server since your last download
attempt)---because "continuing" is not meaningful, no download occurs.

On the other side of the coin, while using -c, any file that's bigger on the
server than locally will be considered an incomplete download and only
"(length(remote) - length(local))" bytes will be downloaded and tacked onto the end
of the local file. This behavior can be desirable in certain cases---for instance,
you can use wget -c to download just the new portion that's been appended to a data
collection or log file.

However, if the file is bigger on the server because it's been changed, as
opposed to just appended to, you'll end up with a garbled file. Wget has no way of
verifying that the local file is really a valid prefix of the remote file. You need
to be especially careful of this when using -c in conjunction with -r, since every
file will be considered as an "incomplete download" candidate.

Another instance where you'll get a garbled file if you try to use -c is if you
have a lame HTTP proxy that inserts a "transfer interrupted" string into the local
file. In the future a "rollback" option may be added to deal with this case.

Note that -c only works with FTP servers and with HTTP servers that support the
"Range" header.
--progress=type
Select the type of the progress indicator you wish to use. Legal indicators are
"dot" and "bar".

The "bar" indicator is used by default. It draws an ASCII progress bar graphics
(a.k.a "thermometer" display) indicating the status of retrieval. If the output is
not a TTY , the "dot" bar will be used by default.

Use --progress=dot to switch to the "dot" display. It traces the retrieval by

printing dots on the screen, each dot representing a fixed amount of downloaded
data.

When using the dotted retrieval, you may also set the style by specifying the
type as dot:style. Different styles assign different meaning to one dot. With the
"default" style each dot represents 1K, there are ten dots in a cluster and 50 dots
in a line. The "binary" style has a more "computer"-like orientation---8K dots, 16-
dots clusters and 48 dots per line (which makes for 384K lines). The "mega" style
is suitable for downloading very large files---each dot represents 64K retrieved,
there are eight dots in a cluster, and 48 dots on each line (so each line contains
3M).

Note that you can set the default style using the "progress" command
in .wgetrc. That setting may be overridden from the command line. The exception is
that, when the output is not a TTY , the "dot" progress will be favored over "bar".
To force the bar output, use --progress=bar:force.
-N
--timestamping
Turn on time-stamping.
-S
--server-response
Print the headers sent by HTTP servers and responses sent by FTP servers.
--spider
When invoked with this option, Wget will behave as a Web spider, which means
that it will not download the pages, just check that they are there. For example,
you can use Wget to check your bookmarks:

wget --spider --force-html -i bookmarks.html

This feature needs much more work for Wget to get close to the functionality of
real web spiders.
-T seconds
--timeout=seconds
Set the network timeout to seconds seconds. This is equivalent to specifying --
dns-timeout, --connect-timeout, and --read-timeout, all at the same time.

When interacting with the network, Wget can check for timeout and abort the
operation if it takes too long. This prevents anomalies like hanging reads and
infinite connects. The only timeout enabled by default is a 900-second read
timeout. Setting a timeout to 0 disables it altogether. Unless you know what you
are doing, it is best not to change the default timeout settings.

All timeout-related options accept decimal values, as well as subsecond values.

For example, 0.1 seconds is a legal (though unwise) choice of timeout. Subsecond
timeouts are useful for checking server response times or for testing network
latency.
--dns-timeout=seconds
Set the DNS lookup timeout to seconds seconds. DNS lookups that don't complete
within the specified time will fail. By default, there is no timeout on DNS
lookups, other than that implemented by system libraries.
--connect-timeout=seconds
Set the connect timeout to seconds seconds. TCP connections that take longer to
establish will be aborted. By default, there is no connect timeout, other than that
implemented by system libraries.
--read-timeout=seconds
Set the read (and write) timeout to seconds seconds. The "time" of this timeout
refers to idle time: if, at any point in the download, no data is received for more
than the specified number of seconds, reading fails and the download is restarted.
This option does not directly affect the duration of the entire download.

Of course, the remote server may choose to terminate the connection sooner than
this option requires. The default read timeout is 900 seconds.
--limit-rate=amount
Limit the download speed to amount bytes per second. Amount may be expressed in
bytes, kilobytes with the k suffix, or megabytes with the m suffix. For example, --
limit-rate=20k will limit the retrieval rate to 20KB/s. This is useful when, for
whatever reason, you don't want Wget to consume the entire available bandwidth.

This option allows the use of decimal numbers, usually in conjunction with
power suffixes; for example, --limit-rate=2.5k is a legal value.

Note that Wget implements the limiting by sleeping the appropriate amount of
time after a network read that took less time than specified by the rate.
Eventually this strategy causes the TCP transfer to slow down to approximately the
specified rate. However, it may take some time for this balance to be achieved, so
don't be surprised if limiting the rate doesn't work well with very small files.
-w seconds
--wait=seconds
Wait the specified number of seconds between the retrievals. Use of this option
is recommended, as it lightens the server load by making the requests less
frequent. Instead of in seconds, the time can be specified in minutes using the "m"
suffix, in hours using "h" suffix, or in days using "d" suffix.

Specifying a large value for this option is useful if the network or the
destination host is down, so that Wget can wait long enough to reasonably expect
the network error to be fixed before the retry. The waiting interval specified by
this function is influenced by "--random-wait", which see.
--waitretry=seconds
If you don't want Wget to wait between every retrieval, but only between
retries of failed downloads, you can use this option. Wget will use linear backoff,
waiting 1 second after the first failure on a given file, then waiting 2 seconds
after the second failure on that file, up to the maximum number of seconds you
specify. Therefore, a value of 10 will actually make Wget wait up to (1 + 2 + ... +
10) = 55 seconds per file.

By default, Wget will assume a value of 10 seconds.

--random-wait
Some web sites may perform log analysis to identify retrieval programs such as
Wget by looking for statistically significant similarities in the time between
requests. This option causes the time between requests to vary between 0.5 and 1.5
* wait seconds, where wait was specified using the --wait option, in order to mask
Wget's presence from such analysis.

A 2001 article in a publication devoted to development on a popular consumer

platform provided code to perform this analysis on the fly. Its author suggested
blocking at the class C address level to ensure automated retrieval programs were
blocked despite changing DHCP-supplied addresses.

The --random-wait option was inspired by this ill-advised recommendation to

block many unrelated users from a web site due to the actions of one.
--no-proxy
Don't use proxies, even if the appropriate *_proxy environment variable is
defined.
-Q quota
--quota=quota
Specify download quota for automatic retrievals. The value can be specified in
bytes (default), kilobytes (with k suffix), or megabytes (with m suffix).

Note that quota will never affect downloading a single file. So if you specify
wget -Q10k ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/ls-lR.gz, all of the ls-lR.gz will be
downloaded. The same goes even when several URLs are specified on the command-line.
However, quota is respected when retrieving either recursively, or from an input
file. Thus you may safely type wget -Q2m -i sites---download will be aborted when
the quota is exceeded.

Setting quota to 0 or to inf unlimits the download quota.

--no-dns-cache
Turn off caching of DNS lookups. Normally, Wget remembers the IP addresses it
looked up from DNS so it doesn't have to repeatedly contact the DNS server for the
same (typically small) set of hosts it retrieves from. This cache exists in memory
only; a new Wget run will contact DNS again.

However, it has been reported that in some situations it is not desirable to

cache host names, even for the duration of a short-running application like Wget.
With this option Wget issues a new DNS lookup (more precisely, a new call to
"gethostbyname" or "getaddrinfo") each time it makes a new connection. Please note
that this option will not affect caching that might be performed by the resolving
library or by an external caching layer, such as NSCD .

If you don't understand exactly what this option does, you probably won't need
it.
--restrict-file-names=modes
Change which characters found in remote URLs must be escaped during generation
of local filenames. Characters that are restricted by this option are escaped, i.e.
replaced with %HH, where HH is the hexadecimal number that corresponds to the
restricted character. This option may also be used to force all alphabetical cases
to be either lower- or uppercase.

By default, Wget escapes the characters that are not valid or safe as part of
file names on your operating system, as well as control characters that are
typically unprintable. This option is useful for changing these defaults, perhaps
because you are downloading to a non-native partition, or because you want to
disable escaping of the control characters, or you want to further restrict
characters to only those in the ASCII range of values.

The modes are a comma-separated set of text values. The acceptable values are
unix, windows, nocontrol, ascii, lowercase, and uppercase. The values unix and
windows are mutually exclusive (one will override the other), as are lowercase and
uppercase. Those last are special cases, as they do not change the set of
characters that would be escaped, but rather force local file paths to be converted
either to lower- or uppercase.

When "unix" is specified, Wget escapes the character / and the control
characters in the ranges 0--31 and 128--159. This is the default on Unix-like
operating systems.

When "windows" is given, Wget escapes the characters \, |, /, :, ?, ", *, <, >,
and the control characters in the ranges 0--31 and 128--159. In addition to this,
Wget in Windows mode uses + instead of : to separate host and port in local file
names, and uses @ instead of ? to separate the query portion of the file name from
the rest. Therefore, a URL that would be saved as www.xemacs.org:4300/search.pl?
input=blah in Unix mode would be saved as www.xemacs.org+4300/search.pl@input=blah
in Windows mode. This mode is the default on Windows.

If you specify nocontrol, then the escaping of the control characters is also
switched off. This option may make sense when you are downloading URLs whose names
contain UTF-8 characters, on a system which can save and display filenames in UTF-8
(some possible byte values used in UTF-8 byte sequences fall in the range of values
designated by Wget as "controls").

The ascii mode is used to specify that any bytes whose values are outside the
range of ASCII characters (that is, greater than 127) shall be escaped. This can be
useful when saving filenames whose encoding does not match the one used locally.
-4
--inet4-only
-6
--inet6-only
Force connecting to IPv4 or IPv6 addresses. With --inet4-only or -4, Wget will
only connect to IPv4 hosts, ignoring AAAA records in DNS , and refusing to connect
to IPv6 addresses specified in URLs. Conversely, with --inet6-only or -6, Wget will
only connect to IPv6 hosts and ignore A records and IPv4 addresses.

Neither options should be needed normally. By default, an IPv6-aware Wget will

use the address family specified by the host's DNS record. If the DNS responds with
both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, Wget will try them in sequence until it finds one it
can connect to. (Also see "--prefer-family" option described below.)

These options can be used to deliberately force the use of IPv4 or IPv6 address
families on dual family systems, usually to aid debugging or to deal with broken
network configuration. Only one of --inet6-only and --inet4-only may be specified
at the same time. Neither option is available in Wget compiled without IPv6
support.
--prefer-family=none/IPv4/IPv6
When given a choice of several addresses, connect to the addresses with
specified address family first. The address order returned by DNS is used without
change by default.

This avoids spurious errors and connect attempts when accessing hosts that
resolve to both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses from IPv4 networks. For example,
www.kame.net resolves to 2001:200:0:8002:203:47ff:fea5:3085 and to 203.178.141.194.
When the preferred family is "IPv4", the IPv4 address is used first; when the
preferred family is "IPv6", the IPv6 address is used first; if the specified value
is "none", the address order returned by DNS is used without change.

Unlike -4 and -6, this option doesn't inhibit access to any address family, it
only changes the order in which the addresses are accessed. Also note that the
reordering performed by this option is stable---it doesn't affect order of
addresses of the same family. That is, the relative order of all IPv4 addresses and
of all IPv6 addresses remains intact in all cases.
--retry-connrefused
Consider "connection refused" a transient error and try again. Normally Wget
gives up on a URL when it is unable to connect to the site because failure to
connect is taken as a sign that the server is not running at all and that retries
would not help. This option is for mirroring unreliable sites whose servers tend to
disappear for short periods of time.
--user=user
--password=password
Specify the username user and password password for both FTP and HTTP file
retrieval. These parameters can be overridden using the --ftp-user and --ftp-
password options for FTP connections and the --http-user and --http-password
options for HTTP connections.
--ask-password
Prompt for a password for each connection established. Cannot be specified when
--password is being used, because they are mutually exclusive.
--no-iri
Turn off internationalized URI ( IRI ) support. Use --iri to turn it on. IRI
support is activated by default.

You can set the default state of IRI support using the "iri" command
in .wgetrc. That setting may be overridden from the command line.
--local-encoding=encoding
 Force Wget to use encoding as the default system encoding. That affects how
Wget converts URLs specified as arguments from locale to UTF-8 for IRI support.

Wget use the function "nl_langinfo()" and then the "CHARSET" environment
variable to get the locale. If it fails, ASCII is used.

You can set the default local encoding using the "local_encoding" command
in .wgetrc. That setting may be overridden from the command line.
--remote-encoding=encoding
Force Wget to use encoding as the default remote server encoding. That affects
how Wget converts URIs found in files from remote encoding to UTF-8 during a
recursive fetch. This options is only useful for IRI support, for the
interpretation of non-ASCII characters.

For HTTP , remote encoding can be found in HTTP "Content-Type" header and in
HTML "Content-Type http-equiv" meta tag.

You can set the default encoding using the "remoteencoding" command in .wgetrc.
That setting may be overridden from the command line.

Directory Options

-nd
--no-directories
Do not create a hierarchy of directories when retrieving recursively. With this
option turned on, all files will get saved to the current directory, without
clobbering (if a name shows up more than once, the filenames will get
extensions .n).
-x
--force-directories
The opposite of -nd---create a hierarchy of directories, even if one would not
have been created otherwise. E.g. wget -x http://fly.srk.fer.hr/robots.txt will
save the downloaded file to fly.srk.fer.hr/robots.txt.
-nH
--no-host-directories
Disable generation of host-prefixed directories. By default, invoking Wget with
-r http://fly.srk.fer.hr/ will create a structure of directories beginning with
fly.srk.fer.hr/. This option disables such behavior.
--protocol-directories
Use the protocol name as a directory component of local file names. For
example, with this option, wget -r http://host will save to http/host/... rather
than just to host/....
--cut-dirs=number
Ignore number directory components. This is useful for getting a fine-grained
control over the directory where recursive retrieval will be saved.

Take, for example, the directory at ftp://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/. If you

retrieve it with -r, it will be saved locally under ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/.
While the -nH option can remove the ftp.xemacs.org/ part, you are still stuck with
pub/xemacs. This is where --cut-dirs comes in handy; it makes Wget not "see" number
remote directory components. Here are several examples of how --cut-dirs option
works.

No options -> ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/

-nH -> pub/xemacs/
-nH --cut-dirs=1 -> xemacs/
-nH --cut-dirs=2 -> .

--cut-dirs=1 -> ftp.xemacs.org/xemacs/

 ...

If you just want to get rid of the directory structure, this option is similar
to a combination of -nd and -P. However, unlike -nd, --cut-dirs does not lose with
subdirectories---for instance, with -nH --cut-dirs=1, a beta/ subdirectory will be
placed to xemacs/beta, as one would expect.
-P prefix
--directory-prefix=prefix
Set directory prefix to prefix. The directory prefix is the directory where all
other files and subdirectories will be saved to, i.e. the top of the retrieval
tree. The default is . (the current directory).

HTTP Options

--default-page=name
Use name as the default file name when it isn't known (i.e., for URLs that end
in a slash), instead of index.html.
-E
--adjust-extension
If a file of type application/xhtml+xml or text/html is downloaded and the URL
does not end with the regexp \.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?, this option will cause the suffix
.html to be appended to the local filename. This is useful, for instance, when
you're mirroring a remote site that uses .asp pages, but you want the mirrored
pages to be viewable on your stock Apache server. Another good use for this is when
you're downloading CGI-generated materials. A URL like http://site.com/article.cgi?
25 will be saved as article.cgi?25.html.

Note that filenames changed in this way will be re-downloaded every time you
re-mirror a site, because Wget can't tell that the local X.html file corresponds to
remote URL X (since it doesn't yet know that the URL produces output of type
text/html or application/xhtml+xml. To prevent this re-downloading, you must use -k
and -K so that the original version of the file will be saved as X.orig.

As of version 1.12, Wget will also ensure that any downloaded files of type
text/css end in the suffix .css, and the option was renamed from --html-extension,
to better reflect its new behavior. The old option name is still acceptable, but
should now be considered deprecated.

At some point in the future, this option may well be expanded to include
suffixes for other types of content, including content types that are not parsed by
Wget.
--http-user=user
--http-password=password
Specify the username user and password password on an HTTP server. According to
the type of the challenge, Wget will encode them using either the "basic"
(insecure), the "digest", or the Windows "NTLM" authentication scheme.

Another way to specify username and password is in the URL itself. Either
method reveals your password to anyone who bothers to run "ps". To prevent the
passwords from being seen, store them in .wgetrc or .netrc, and make sure to
protect those files from other users with "chmod". If the passwords are really
important, do not leave them lying in those files either---edit the files and
delete them after Wget has started the download.
--no-http-keep-alive
Turn off the "keep-alive" feature for HTTP downloads. Normally, Wget asks the
server to keep the connection open so that, when you download more than one
document from the same server, they get transferred over the same TCP connection.
This saves time and at the same time reduces the load on the server.
 This option is useful when, for some reason, persistent (keep-alive)
connections don't work for you, for example due to a server bug or due to the
inability of server-side scripts to cope with the connections.
--no-cache
Disable server-side cache. In this case, Wget will send the remote server an
appropriate directive (Pragma: no-cache) to get the file from the remote service,
rather than returning the cached version. This is especially useful for retrieving
and flushing out-of-date documents on proxy servers.

Caching is allowed by default.

--no-cookies
Disable the use of cookies. Cookies are a mechanism for maintaining server-side
state. The server sends the client a cookie using the "Set-Cookie" header, and the
client responds with the same cookie upon further requests. Since cookies allow the
server owners to keep track of visitors and for sites to exchange this information,
some consider them a breach of privacy. The default is to use cookies; however,
storing cookies is not on by default.
--load-cookies file
Load cookies from file before the first HTTP retrieval. file is a textual file
in the format originally used by Netscape's cookies.txt file.

You will typically use this option when mirroring sites that require that you
be logged in to access some or all of their content. The login process typically
works by the web server issuing an HTTP cookie upon receiving and verifying your
credentials. The cookie is then resent by the browser when accessing that part of
the site, and so proves your identity.

Mirroring such a site requires Wget to send the same cookies your browser sends
when communicating with the site. This is achieved by --load-cookies---simply point
Wget to the location of the cookies.txt file, and it will send the same cookies
your browser would send in the same situation. Different browsers keep textual
cookie files in different locations:
Netscape 4.x.
The cookies are in ~/.netscape/cookies.txt.
Mozilla and Netscape 6.x.
Mozilla's cookie file is also named cookies.txt, located somewhere under
~/.mozilla, in the directory of your profile. The full path usually ends up looking
somewhat like ~/.mozilla/default/some-weird-string/cookies.txt.
Internet Explorer.
You can produce a cookie file Wget can use by using the File menu, Import and
Export, Export Cookies. This has been tested with Internet Explorer 5; it is not
guaranteed to work with earlier versions.
Other browsers.
If you are using a different browser to create your cookies, --load-cookies
will only work if you can locate or produce a cookie file in the Netscape format
that Wget expects.
If you cannot use --load-cookies, there might still be an alternative. If your
browser supports a "cookie manager", you can use it to view the cookies used when
accessing the site you're mirroring. Write down the name and value of the cookie,
and manually instruct Wget to send those cookies, bypassing the "official" cookie
support:

wget --no-cookies --header "Cookie: <name>=<value>"

--save-cookies file
Save cookies to file before exiting. This will not save cookies that have
expired or that have no expiry time (so-called "session cookies"), but also see --
keep-session-cookies.
--keep-session-cookies
 When specified, causes --save-cookies to also save session cookies. Session
cookies are normally not saved because they are meant to be kept in memory and
forgotten when you exit the browser. Saving them is useful on sites that require
you to log in or to visit the home page before you can access some pages. With this
option, multiple Wget runs are considered a single browser session as far as the
site is concerned.

Since the cookie file format does not normally carry session cookies, Wget
marks them with an expiry timestamp of 0. Wget's --load-cookies recognizes those as
session cookies, but it might confuse other browsers. Also note that cookies so
loaded will be treated as other session cookies, which means that if you want --
save-cookies to preserve them again, you must use --keep-session-cookies again.
--ignore-length
Unfortunately, some HTTP servers ( CGI programs, to be more precise) send out
bogus "Content-Length" headers, which makes Wget go wild, as it thinks not all the
document was retrieved. You can spot this syndrome if Wget retries getting the same
document again and again, each time claiming that the (otherwise normal) connection
has closed on the very same byte.

With this option, Wget will ignore the "Content-Length" header---as if it never
existed.
--header=header-line
Send header-line along with the rest of the headers in each HTTP request. The
supplied header is sent as-is, which means it must contain name and value separated
by colon, and must not contain newlines.

You may define more than one additional header by specifying --header more than
once.

wget --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2' \

--header='Accept-Language: hr' \
http://fly.srk.fer.hr/

Specification of an empty string as the header value will clear all previous
user-defined headers.

As of Wget 1.10, this option can be used to override headers otherwise

generated automatically. This example instructs Wget to connect to localhost, but
to specify foo.bar in the "Host" header:

wget --header="Host: foo.bar" http://localhost/

In versions of Wget prior to 1.10 such use of --header caused sending of

duplicate headers.
--max-redirect=number
Specifies the maximum number of redirections to follow for a resource. The
default is 20, which is usually far more than necessary. However, on those
occasions where you want to allow more (or fewer), this is the option to use.
--proxy-user=user
--proxy-password=password
Specify the username user and password password for authentication on a proxy
server. Wget will encode them using the "basic" authentication scheme.

Security considerations similar to those with --http-password pertain here as

well.
--referer=url
Include 'Referer: url' header in HTTP request. Useful for retrieving documents
with server-side processing that assume they are always being retrieved by
interactive web browsers and only come out properly when Referer is set to one of
the pages that point to them.
--save-headers
Save the headers sent by the HTTP server to the file, preceding the actual
contents, with an empty line as the separator.
-U agent-string
--user-agent=agent-string
Identify as agent-string to the HTTP server.

The HTTP protocol allows the clients to identify themselves using a "User-
Agent" header field. This enables distinguishing the WWW software, usually for
statistical purposes or for tracing of protocol violations. Wget normally
identifies as Wget/version, version being the current version number of Wget.

However, some sites have been known to impose the policy of tailoring the
output according to the "User-Agent"-supplied information. While this is not such a
bad idea in theory, it has been abused by servers denying information to clients
other than (historically) Netscape or, more frequently, Microsoft Internet
Explorer. This option allows you to change the "User-Agent" line issued by Wget.
Use of this option is discouraged, unless you really know what you are doing.

Specifying empty user agent with --user-agent="" instructs Wget not to send the
"User-Agent" header in HTTP requests.
--post-data=string
--post-file=file
Use POST as the method for all HTTP requests and send the specified data in the
request body. --post-data sends string as data, whereas --post-file sends the
contents of file. Other than that, they work in exactly the same way. In
particular, they both expect content of the form "key1=value1&key2=value2", with
percent-encoding for special characters; the only difference is that one expects
its content as a command-line paramter and the other accepts its content from a
file. In particular, --post-file is not for transmitting files as form attachments:
those must appear as "key=value" data (with appropriate percent-coding) just like
everything else. Wget does not currently support "multipart/form-data" for
transmitting POST data; only "application/x-www-form-urlencoded". Only one of --
post-data and --post-file should be specified.

Please be aware that Wget needs to know the size of the POST data in advance.
Therefore the argument to "--post-file" must be a regular file; specifying a FIFO
or something like /dev/stdin won't work. It's not quite clear how to work around
this limitation inherent in HTTP/1 .0. Although HTTP/1 .1 introduces chunked
transfer that doesn't require knowing the request length in advance, a client can't
use chunked unless it knows it's talking to an HTTP/1 .1 server. And it can't know
that until it receives a response, which in turn requires the request to have been
completed -- a chicken-and-egg problem.

Note: if Wget is redirected after the POST request is completed, it will not
send the POST data to the redirected URL . This is because URLs that process POST
often respond with a redirection to a regular page, which does not desire or accept
POST . It is not completely clear that this behavior is optimal; if it doesn't work
out, it might be changed in the future.

This example shows how to log to a server using POST and then proceed to
download the desired pages, presumably only accessible to authorized users:

# Log in to the server. This can be done only once.

wget --save-cookies cookies.txt \
--post-data 'user=foo&password=bar' \
http://server.com/auth.php
 # Now grab the page or pages we care about.
wget --load-cookies cookies.txt \
-p http://server.com/interesting/article.php

If the server is using session cookies to track user authentication, the above
will not work because --save-cookies will not save them (and neither will browsers)
and the cookies.txt file will be empty. In that case use --keep-session-cookies
along with --save-cookies to force saving of session cookies.
--content-disposition
If this is set to on, experimental (not fully-functional) support for "Content-
Disposition" headers is enabled. This can currently result in extra round-trips to
the server for a "HEAD" request, and is known to suffer from a few bugs, which is
why it is not currently enabled by default.

This option is useful for some file-downloading CGI programs that use "Content-
Disposition" headers to describe what the name of a downloaded file should be.
--auth-no-challenge
If this option is given, Wget will send Basic HTTP authentication information
(plaintext username and password) for all requests, just like Wget 1.10.2 and prior
did by default.

Use of this option is not recommended, and is intended only to support some few
obscure servers, which never send HTTP authentication challenges, but accept
unsolicited auth info, say, in addition to form-based authentication.

HTTPS ( SSL/TLS ) Options

To support encrypted HTTP ( HTTPS ) downloads, Wget must be compiled with an

external SSL library, currently OpenSSL. If Wget is compiled without SSL support,
none of these options are available.
--secure-protocol=protocol
Choose the secure protocol to be used. Legal values are auto, SSLv2, SSLv3, and
TLSv1. If auto is used, the SSL library is given the liberty of choosing the
appropriate protocol automatically, which is achieved by sending an SSLv2 greeting
and announcing support for SSLv3 and TLSv1. This is the default.

Specifying SSLv2, SSLv3, or TLSv1 forces the use of the corresponding protocol.
This is useful when talking to old and buggy SSL server implementations that make
it hard for OpenSSL to choose the correct protocol version. Fortunately, such
servers are quite rare.
--no-check-certificate
Don't check the server certificate against the available certificate
authorities. Also don't require the URL host name to match the common name
presented by the certificate.

As of Wget 1.10, the default is to verify the server's certificate against the
recognized certificate authorities, breaking the SSL handshake and aborting the
download if the verification fails. Although this provides more secure downloads,
it does break interoperability with some sites that worked with previous Wget
versions, particularly those using self-signed, expired, or otherwise invalid
certificates. This option forces an "insecure" mode of operation that turns the
certificate verification errors into warnings and allows you to proceed.

If you encounter "certificate verification" errors or ones saying that "common

name doesn't match requested host name", you can use this option to bypass the
verification and proceed with the download. Only use this option if you are
otherwise convinced of the site's authenticity, or if you really don't care about
the validity of its certificate. It is almost always a bad idea not to check the
certificates when transmitting confidential or important data.
--certificate=file
Use the client certificate stored in file. This is needed for servers that are
configured to require certificates from the clients that connect to them. Normally
a certificate is not required and this switch is optional.
--certificate-type=type
Specify the type of the client certificate. Legal values are PEM (assumed by
default) and DER , also known as ASN1 .
--private-key=file
Read the private key from file. This allows you to provide the private key in a
file separate from the certificate.
--private-key-type=type
Specify the type of the private key. Accepted values are PEM (the default) and
DER .
--ca-certificate=file
Use file as the file with the bundle of certificate authorities (" CA ") to
verify the peers. The certificates must be in PEM format.

Without this option Wget looks for CA certificates at the system-specified

locations, chosen at OpenSSL installation time.
--ca-directory=directory
Specifies directory containing CA certificates in PEM format. Each file
contains one CA certificate, and the file name is based on a hash value derived
from the certificate. This is achieved by processing a certificate directory with
the "c_rehash" utility supplied with OpenSSL. Using --ca-directory is more
efficient than --ca-certificate when many certificates are installed because it
allows Wget to fetch certificates on demand.

Without this option Wget looks for CA certificates at the system-specified

locations, chosen at OpenSSL installation time.
--random-file=file
Use file as the source of random data for seeding the pseudo-random number
generator on systems without /dev/random.

On such systems the SSL library needs an external source of randomness to

initialize. Randomness may be provided by EGD (see --egd-file below) or read from
an external source specified by the user. If this option is not specified, Wget
looks for random data in $RANDFILE or, if that is unset, in $HOME/.rnd. If none of
those are available, it is likely that SSL encryption will not be usable.

If you're getting the "Could not seed OpenSSL PRNG ; disabling SSL ." error,
you should provide random data using some of the methods described above.
--egd-file=file
Use file as the EGD socket. EGD stands for Entropy Gathering Daemon, a user-
space program that collects data from various unpredictable system sources and
makes it available to other programs that might need it. Encryption software, such
as the SSL library, needs sources of non-repeating randomness to seed the random
number generator used to produce cryptographically strong keys.

OpenSSL allows the user to specify his own source of entropy using the
"RAND_FILE" environment variable. If this variable is unset, or if the specified
file does not produce enough randomness, OpenSSL will read random data from EGD
socket specified using this option.

If this option is not specified (and the equivalent startup command is not
used), EGD is never contacted. EGD is not needed on modern Unix systems that
support /dev/random.

FTP Options
--ftp-user=user
--ftp-password=password
Specify the username user and password password on an FTP server. Without this,
or the corresponding startup option, the password defaults to -wget@, normally used
for anonymous FTP .

Another way to specify username and password is in the URL itself. Either
method reveals your password to anyone who bothers to run "ps". To prevent the
passwords from being seen, store them in .wgetrc or .netrc, and make sure to
protect those files from other users with "chmod". If the passwords are really
important, do not leave them lying in those files either---edit the files and
delete them after Wget has started the download.
--no-remove-listing
Don't remove the temporary .listing files generated by FTP retrievals.
Normally, these files contain the raw directory listings received from FTP servers.
Not removing them can be useful for debugging purposes, or when you want to be able
to easily check on the contents of remote server directories (e.g. to verify that a
mirror you're running is complete).

Note that even though Wget writes to a known filename for this file, this is
not a security hole in the scenario of a user making .listing a symbolic link to
/etc/passwd or something and asking "root" to run Wget in his or her directory.
Depending on the options used, either Wget will refuse to write to .listing, making
the globbing/recursion/time-stamping operation fail, or the symbolic link will be
deleted and replaced with the actual .listing file, or the listing will be written
to a .listing.number file.

Even though this situation isn't a problem, though, "root" should never run
Wget in a non-trusted user's directory. A user could do something as simple as
linking index.html to /etc/passwd and asking "root" to run Wget with -N or -r so
the file will be overwritten.
--no-glob
Turn off FTP globbing. Globbing refers to the use of shell-like special
characters (wildcards), like *, ?, [ and ] to retrieve more than one file from the
same directory at once, like:

wget ftp://gnjilux.srk.fer.hr/*.msg

By default, globbing will be turned on if the URL contains a globbing

character. This option may be used to turn globbing on or off permanently.

You may have to quote the URL to protect it from being expanded by your shell.
Globbing makes Wget look for a directory listing, which is system-specific. This is
why it currently works only with Unix FTP servers (and the ones emulating Unix "ls"
output).
--no-passive-ftp
Disable the use of the passive FTP transfer mode. Passive FTP mandates that the
client connect to the server to establish the data connection rather than the other
way around.

If the machine is connected to the Internet directly, both passive and active
FTP should work equally well. Behind most firewall and NAT configurations passive
FTP has a better chance of working. However, in some rare firewall configurations,
active FTP actually works when passive FTP doesn't. If you suspect this to be the
case, use this option, or set "passive_ftp=off" in your init file.
--retr-symlinks
Usually, when retrieving FTP directories recursively and a symbolic link is
encountered, the linked-to file is not downloaded. Instead, a matching symbolic
link is created on the local filesystem. The pointed-to file will not be downloaded
unless this recursive retrieval would have encountered it separately and downloaded
it anyway.

When --retr-symlinks is specified, however, symbolic links are traversed and

the pointed-to files are retrieved. At this time, this option does not cause Wget
to traverse symlinks to directories and recurse through them, but in the future it
should be enhanced to do this.

Note that when retrieving a file (not a directory) because it was specified on
the command-line, rather than because it was recursed to, this option has no
effect. Symbolic links are always traversed in this case.

Recursive Retrieval Options

-r
--recursive
Turn on recursive retrieving.
-l depth
--level=depth
Specify recursion maximum depth level depth. The default maximum depth is 5.
--delete-after
This option tells Wget to delete every single file it downloads, after having
done so. It is useful for pre-fetching popular pages through a proxy, e.g.:

wget -r -nd --delete-after http://whatever.com/~popular/page/

The -r option is to retrieve recursively, and -nd to not create directories.

Note that --delete-after deletes files on the local machine. It does not issue
the DELE command to remote FTP sites, for instance. Also note that when --delete-
after is specified, --convert-links is ignored, so .orig files are simply not
created in the first place.
-k
--convert-links
After the download is complete, convert the links in the document to make them
suitable for local viewing. This affects not only the visible hyperlinks, but any
part of the document that links to external content, such as embedded images, links
to style sheets, hyperlinks to non-HTML content, etc.

Each link will be changed in one of the two ways:

• The links to files that have been downloaded by Wget will be changed to
refer to the file they point to as a relative link.
Example: if the downloaded file /foo/doc.html links to /bar/img.gif, also
downloaded, then the link in doc.html will be modified to point to ../bar/img.gif.
This kind of transformation works reliably for arbitrary combinations of
directories.
• The links to files that have not been downloaded by Wget will be changed to
include host name and absolute path of the location they point to.
Example: if the downloaded file /foo/doc.html links to /bar/img.gif (or to
../bar/img.gif), then the link in doc.html will be modified to point to
http://hostname/bar/img.gif.
Because of this, local browsing works reliably: if a linked file was
downloaded, the link will refer to its local name; if it was not downloaded, the
link will refer to its full Internet address rather than presenting a broken link.
The fact that the former links are converted to relative links ensures that you can
move the downloaded hierarchy to another directory.

Note that only at the end of the download can Wget know which links have been
downloaded. Because of that, the work done by -k will be performed at the end of
all the downloads.
-K
--backup-converted
When converting a file, back up the original version with a .orig suffix.
Affects the behavior of -N.
-m
--mirror
Turn on options suitable for mirroring. This option turns on recursion and
time-stamping, sets infinite recursion depth and keeps FTP directory listings. It
is currently equivalent to -r -N -l inf --no-remove-listing.
-p
--page-requisites
This option causes Wget to download all the files that are necessary to
properly display a given HTML page. This includes such things as inlined images,
sounds, and referenced stylesheets.

Ordinarily, when downloading a single HTML page, any requisite documents that
may be needed to display it properly are not downloaded. Using -r together with -l
can help, but since Wget does not ordinarily distinguish between external and
inlined documents, one is generally left with "leaf documents" that are missing
their requisites.

For instance, say document 1.html contains an "<IMG>" tag referencing 1.gif and
an "<A>" tag pointing to external document 2.html. Say that 2.html is similar but
that its image is 2.gif and it links to 3.html. Say this continues up to some
arbitrarily high number.

If one executes the command:

wget -r -l 2 http://<site>/1.html

then 1.html, 1.gif, 2.html, 2.gif, and 3.html will be downloaded. As you can
see, 3.html is without its requisite 3.gif because Wget is simply counting the
number of hops (up to 2) away from 1.html in order to determine where to stop the
recursion. However, with this command:

wget -r -l 2 -p http://<site>/1.html

all the above files and 3.html's requisite 3.gif will be downloaded. Similarly,

wget -r -l 1 -p http://<site>/1.html

will cause 1.html, 1.gif, 2.html, and 2.gif to be downloaded. One might think
that:

wget -r -l 0 -p http://<site>/1.html

would download just 1.html and 1.gif, but unfortunately this is not the case,
because -l 0 is equivalent to -l inf---that is, infinite recursion. To download a
single HTML page (or a handful of them, all specified on the command-line or in a -
i URL input file) and its (or their) requisites, simply leave off -r and -l:

wget -p http://<site>/1.html

Note that Wget will behave as if -r had been specified, but only that single
page and its requisites will be downloaded. Links from that page to external
documents will not be followed. Actually, to download a single page and all its
requisites (even if they exist on separate websites), and make sure the lot
displays properly locally, this author likes to use a few options in addition to -
p:

wget -E -H -k -K -p http://<site>/<document>

To finish off this topic, it's worth knowing that Wget's idea of an external
document link is any URL specified in an "<A>" tag, an "<AREA>" tag, or a "<LINK>"
tag other than "<LINK REL="stylesheet">".
--strict-comments
Turn on strict parsing of HTML comments. The default is to terminate comments
at the first occurrence of -->.

According to specifications, HTML comments are expressed as SGML declarations.

Declaration is special markup that begins with <! and ends with >, such as <!
DOCTYPE ...>, that may contain comments between a pair of -- delimiters. HTML
comments are "empty declarations", SGML declarations without any non-comment text.
Therefore, <!--foo--> is a valid comment, and so is <!--one-- --two-->, but <!--1--
2--> is not.

On the other hand, most HTML writers don't perceive comments as anything other
than text delimited with <!-- and -->, which is not quite the same. For example,
something like <!------------> works as a valid comment as long as the number of
dashes is a multiple of four (!). If not, the comment technically lasts until the
next --, which may be at the other end of the document. Because of this, many
popular browsers completely ignore the specification and implement what users have
come to expect: comments delimited with <!-- and -->.

Until version 1.9, Wget interpreted comments strictly, which resulted in

missing links in many web pages that displayed fine in browsers, but had the
misfortune of containing non-compliant comments. Beginning with version 1.9, Wget
has joined the ranks of clients that implements "naive" comments, terminating each
comment at the first occurrence of -->.

If, for whatever reason, you want strict comment parsing, use this option to
turn it on.

Recursive Accept/Reject Options

-A acclist --accept acclist

-R rejlist --reject rejlist
Specify comma-separated lists of file name suffixes or patterns to accept or
reject. Note that if any of the wildcard characters, *, ?, [ or ], appear in an
element of acclist or rejlist, it will be treated as a pattern, rather than a
suffix.
-D domain-list
--domains=domain-list
Set domains to be followed. domain-list is a comma-separated list of domains.
Note that it does not turn on -H.
--exclude-domains domain-list
Specify the domains that are not to be followed..
--follow-ftp
Follow FTP links from HTML documents. Without this option, Wget will ignore all
the FTP links.
--follow-tags=list
Wget has an internal table of HTML tag / attribute pairs that it considers when
looking for linked documents during a recursive retrieval. If a user wants only a
subset of those tags to be considered, however, he or she should be specify such
tags in a comma-separated list with this option.
--ignore-tags=list
This is the opposite of the --follow-tags option. To skip certain HTML tags
when recursively looking for documents to download, specify them in a comma-
separated list.

In the past, this option was the best bet for downloading a single page and its
requisites, using a command-line like:

wget --ignore-tags=a,area -H -k -K -r http://<site>/<document>

However, the author of this option came across a page with tags like "<LINK
REL="home" HREF="/">" and came to the realization that specifying tags to ignore
was not enough. One can't just tell Wget to ignore "<LINK>", because then
stylesheets will not be downloaded. Now the best bet for downloading a single page
and its requisites is the dedicated --page-requisites option.
--ignore-case
Ignore case when matching files and directories. This influences the behavior
of -R, -A, -I, and -X options, as well as globbing implemented when downloading
from FTP sites. For example, with this option, -A *.txt will match file1.txt, but
also file2.TXT, file3.TxT, and so on.
-H
--span-hosts
Enable spanning across hosts when doing recursive retrieving.
-L
--relative
Follow relative links only. Useful for retrieving a specific home page without
any distractions, not even those from the same hosts.
-I list
--include-directories=list
Specify a comma-separated list of directories you wish to follow when
downloading. Elements of list may contain wildcards.
-X list
--exclude-directories=list
Specify a comma-separated list of directories you wish to exclude from
download. Elements of list may contain wildcards.
-np
--no-parent
Do not ever ascend to the parent directory when retrieving recursively. This is
a useful option, since it guarantees that only the files below a certain hierarchy
will be downloaded.

Exit Status

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.

4

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.

Files

/etc/wgetrc

Default location of the global startup file.

.wgetrc
User startup file.

Bugs

You are welcome to submit bug reports via the GNU Wget bug tracker (see
<http://wget.addictivecode.org/BugTracker>).

Before actually submitting a bug report, please try to follow a few simple
guidelines.

1.

Please try to ascertain that the behavior you see really is a bug. If Wget crashes,
it's a bug. If Wget does not behave as documented, it's a bug. If things work
strange, but you are not sure about the way they are supposed to work, it might
well be a bug, but you might want to double-check the documentation and the mailing
lists.

2.

Try to repeat the bug in as simple circumstances as possible. E.g. if Wget crashes
while downloading wget -rl0 -kKE -t5 --no-proxy http://yoyodyne.com -o /tmp/log,
you should try to see if the crash is repeatable, and if will occur with a simpler
set of options. You might even try to start the download at the page where the
crash occurred to see if that page somehow triggered the crash.
Also, while I will probably be interested to know the contents of your .wgetrc
file, just dumping it into the debug message is probably a bad idea. Instead, you
should first try to see if the bug repeats with .wgetrc moved out of the way. Only
if it turns out that .wgetrc settings affect the bug, mail me the relevant parts of
the file.
3.

Please start Wget with -d option and send us the resulting output (or relevant
parts thereof). If Wget was compiled without debug support, recompile it---it is
much easier to trace bugs with debug support on.
Note: please make sure to remove any potentially sensitive information from the
debug log before sending it to the bug address. The "-d" won't go out of its way to
collect sensitive information, but the log will contain a fairly complete
transcript of Wget's communication with the server, which may include passwords and
pieces of downloaded data. Since the bug address is publically archived, you may
assume that all bug reports are visible to the public.
4.

If Wget has crashed, try to run it in a debugger, e.g. "gdb `which wget` core" and
type "where" to get the backtrace. This may not work if the system administrator
has disabled core files, but it is safe to try.

See Also

This is not the complete manual for GNU Wget. For more complete information,
including more detailed explanations of some of the options, and a number of
commands available for use with .wgetrc files and the -e option, see the GNU Info
entry for wget.
Author

Originally written by Hrvoje Niksic <[email protected]>. Currently maintained by

Micah Cowan <[email protected]>.
Copyright

Copyright © 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006,
2007, 2008, 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the
terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version
published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-
Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the
section entitled " GNU Free Documentation License".
Referenced By
abcde(1), cntlm(1), curl(1), elinks(1), htcp(1), jigdo-lite(1), lftpget(1),
mpg123(1), nsc(1), sox(1), soxformat(7)