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)

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.

---------- Footnotes ----------

(1) If you have a .netrc file in your home directory, password will also be searched for there.

Option Syntax

Since Wget uses GNU getopts to process its arguments, every option has a short form and a long form. 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 -o log you can write -olog.

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

wget -drc URL

This is a complete equivalent of:

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

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 (see Startup File.). A command thus invoked will be executed after the commands in .wgetrc, thus taking precedence over them.

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. See Reporting Bugs, for more information on how to use -d for sending bug reports.

-q

--quiet

Turn off Wget's output.

-v

--verbose

Turn on verbose output, with all the available data. The default output is verbose.

-nv

--non-verbose

Non-verbose output--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 file, in which case no URLs need to be 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. The file need not be an HTML document (but no harm if it is)--it is enough if the URLs are just listed sequentially.

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.

-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

When used in conjunction with -F, prepends URL to relative links in the file specified by -i.

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.

-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 file already exists, it will be overwritten. If the file is -, the documents will be written to standard output. Including this option automatically sets the number of tries to 1.

-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, or -r, 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. 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, but without -N 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, 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.

Note that when -nc is specified, files with the suffixes .html or (yuck) .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 "dot" indicator is used by default. 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).

Specifying --progress=bar will draw a nice ASCII progress bar graphics (a.k.a "thermometer" display) to indicate retrieval. If the output is not a TTY, this option will be ignored, and Wget will revert to the dot indicator. If you want to force the bar indicator, use --progress=bar:force.

-N

--timestamping

Turn on time-stamping. See Time-Stamping, for details.

-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. You can use it to check your bookmarks, e.g. with:

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

This feature needs much more work for Wget to get close to the functionality of real WWW spiders.

-T seconds

--timeout=seconds

Set the read timeout to seconds seconds. Whenever a network read is issued, the file descriptor is checked for a timeout, which could otherwise leave a pending connection (uninterrupted read). The default timeout is 900 seconds (fifteen minutes). Setting timeout to 0 will disable checking for timeouts.

Please do not lower the default timeout value with this option unless you know what you are doing.

-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.

--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.

Note that this option is turned on by default in the global wgetrc file.

--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 and 2 * wait seconds, where wait was specified using the -w or --wait options, in order to mask Wget's presence from such analysis.

A recent 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.

-Y on/off

--proxy=on/off

Turn proxy support on or off. The proxy is on by default if the appropriate environmental 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.

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.

--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

-E

--html-extension

If a file of type 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 the output of CGIs. 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. 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 (see Recursive Retrieval Options.).

--http-user=user

--http-passwd=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) or the digest authentication scheme.

Another way to specify username and password is in the URL itself (see URL Format.). For more information about security issues with Wget, See Security Considerations.

-C on/off

--cache=on/off

When set to off, 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.

--cookies=on/off

When set to off, 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 --cookies=off --header "Cookie: name=value"

--save-cookies file

Save cookies from file at the end of session. Cookies whose expiry time is not specified, or those that have already expired, are not saved.

--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=additional-header

Define an additional-header to be passed to the HTTP servers. Headers must contain a : preceded by one or more non-blank characters, 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.

--proxy-user=user

--proxy-passwd=password

Specify the username user and password password for authentication on a proxy server. Wget will encode them using the basic authentication scheme.

--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.

-s

--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 conceptually this is not such a bad idea, it has been abused by servers denying information to clients other than Mozilla or 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.

FTP Options

-nr

--dont-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.

-g on/off

--glob=on/off

Turn FTP globbing on or off. Globbing means you may use the 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).

--passive-ftp

Use the passive FTP retrieval scheme, in which the client initiates the data connection. This is sometimes required for FTP to work behind firewalls.

--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 commandline, 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. See Recursive Retrieval, for more details.

-l depth

--level=depth

Specify recursion maximum depth level depth (see Recursive Retrieval.). 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 (see HTTP Time-Stamping Internals.).

-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 -nr.

-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 commandline 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">.

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 (see Types of Files. for more details).

-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. (see Spanning Hosts.).

--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.

-G list

--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, the -G option was the best bet for downloading a single page and its requisites, using a commandline like:

wget -Ga,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 -G 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.

-H

--span-hosts

Enable spanning across hosts when doing recursive retrieving (see Spanning Hosts.).

-L

--relative

Follow relative links only. Useful for retrieving a specific home page without any distractions, not even those from the same hosts (see Relative Links.).

-I list

--include-directories=list

Specify a comma-separated list of directories you wish to follow when downloading (see Directory-Based Limits. for more details.) Elements of list may contain wildcards.

-X list

--exclude-directories=list

Specify a comma-separated list of directories you wish to exclude from download (see Directory-Based Limits. for more details.) 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. See Directory-Based Limits, for more details.

Recursive Retrieval

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 retrieving, or recursion.

With HTTP URLs, Wget retrieves and parses the HTML from the given URL, documents, retrieving the files the HTML document was referring to, through markups like href, or src. If the freshly downloaded file is also of type text/html, it will be parsed and followed further.

Recursive retrieval of HTTP and HTML content is breadth-first. This means that Wget first downloads the requested HTML 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.

Following Links

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.

Spanning Hosts	(Un)limiting retrieval based on host name.
Types of Files	Getting only certain files.
Directory-Based Limits	Getting only certain directories.
Relative Links	Follow relative links only.
FTP Links	Following FTP links.

Spanning Hosts

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.

Span to any host---H

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.

Limit spanning to certain domains---D

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.server.com, but allowing downloads from images.server.com, etc.:

wget -rH -Dserver.com http://www.server.com/

You can specify more than one address by separating them with a comma, e.g. -Ddomain1.com,domain2.com.

Keep download off certain domains----exclude-domains

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/

Types of Files

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.

-A acclist

--accept acclist

accept = acclist

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.

-R rejlist

--reject rejlist

reject = rejlist

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 -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; Wget must load all the HTMLs to know where to go at all--recursive retrieval would make no sense otherwise.

Directory-Based Limits

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 list

--include list

include_directories = list

-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 list

--exclude list

exclude_directories = list

-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.

-np

--no-parent

no_parent = on

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.

Relative Links

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.server.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.

Following FTP Links

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.

Time-Stamping

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:

1. A file of that name does not already exist locally.
2. A file of that name does exist, but the remote file was modified more recently than the local file.

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 older, 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.

Time-Stamping Usage
HTTP Time-Stamping Internals
FTP Time-Stamping Internals

Time-Stamping Usage

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 time stamp 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.).

HTTP 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.(1)

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.

---------- Footnotes ----------

(1) As an additional check, Wget will look at the Content-Length header, and compare the sizes; if they are not the same, the remote file will be downloaded no matter what the time-stamp says.

FTP Time-Stamping Internals

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.

Startup File

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.

Wgetrc Location	Location of various wgetrc files.
Wgetrc Syntax	Syntax of wgetrc.
Wgetrc Commands	List of available commands.
Sample Wgetrc	A wgetrc example.

Wgetrc Location

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!

Wgetrc Syntax

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-insensitive and underscore-insensitive. Thus DIr__PrefiX is the same as dirprefix. 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 =

Wgetrc Commands

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. A fancier kind of Boolean allowed in some cases is the lockable Boolean, which may be set to on, off, always, or never. If an option is set to always or never, that value will be locked in for the duration of the Wget invocation--commandline options will not override.

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 commandline equivalents (see Invoking.), though some of the more obscure or rarely used ones do not.

accept/reject = string

Same as -A/-R (see Types of Files.).

add_hostdir = on/off

Enable/disable host-prefixed file names. -nH disables it.

continue = on/off

If set to on, force continuation of preexistent partially retrieved files. See -c before setting it.

background = on/off

Enable/disable going to background--the same as -b (which enables it).

backup_converted = on/off

Enable/disable saving pre-converted files with the suffix .orig--the same as -K (which enables it).

base = string

Consider relative URLs in URL input files forced to be interpreted as HTML as being relative to string--the same as -B.

bind_address = address

Bind to address, like the --bind-address option.

cache = on/off

When set to off, disallow server-caching. See the -C option.

convert links = on/off

Convert non-relative links locally. The same as -k.

cookies = on/off

When set to off, disallow cookies. See the --cookies option.

load_cookies = file

Load cookies from file. See --load-cookies.

save_cookies = file

Save cookies to file. See --save-cookies.

cut_dirs = n

Ignore n remote directory components.

debug = on/off

Debug mode, same as -d.

delete_after = on/off

Delete after download--the same as --delete-after.

dir_prefix = string

Top of directory tree--the same as -P.

dirstruct = on/off

Turning dirstruct on or off--the same as -x or -nd, respectively.

domains = string

Same as -D (see Spanning Hosts.).

dot_bytes = n

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.).

dots_in_line = n

Specify the number of dots that will be printed in each line throughout the retrieval (50 by default).

dot_spacing = n

Specify the number of dots in a single cluster (10 by default).

exclude_directories = string

Specify a comma-separated list of directories you wish to exclude from download--the same as -X (see Directory-Based Limits.).

exclude_domains = string

Same as --exclude-domains (see Spanning Hosts.).

follow_ftp = on/off

Follow FTP links from HTML documents--the same as --follow-ftp.

follow_tags = string

Only follow certain HTML tags when doing a recursive retrieval, just like --follow-tags.

force_html = on/off

If set to on, force the input filename to be regarded as an HTML document--the same as -F.

ftp_proxy = string

Use string as FTP proxy, instead of the one specified in environment.

glob = on/off

Turn globbing on/off--the same as -g.

header = string

Define an additional header, like --header.

html_extension = on/off

Add a .html extension to text/html files without it, like -E.

http_passwd = string

Set HTTP password.

http_proxy = string

Use string as HTTP proxy, instead of the one specified in environment.

http_user = string

Set HTTP user to string.

ignore_length = on/off

When set to on, ignore Content-Length header; the same as --ignore-length.

ignore_tags = string

Ignore certain HTML tags when doing a recursive retrieval, just like -G / --ignore-tags.

include_directories = string

Specify a comma-separated list of directories you wish to follow when downloading--the same as -I.

input = string

Read the URLs from string, like -i.

kill_longer = on/off

Consider data longer than specified in content-length header as invalid (and retry getting it). The default behaviour is to save as much data as there is, provided there is more than or equal to the value in Content-Length.

logfile = string

Set logfile--the same as -o.

login = string

Your user name on the remote machine, for FTP. Defaults to anonymous.

mirror = on/off

Turn mirroring on/off. The same as -m.

netrc = on/off

Turn reading netrc on or off.

noclobber = on/off

Same as -nc.

no_parent = on/off

Disallow retrieving outside the directory hierarchy, like --no-parent (see Directory-Based Limits.).

no_proxy = string

Use string as the comma-separated list of domains to avoid in proxy loading, instead of the one specified in environment.

output_document = string

Set the output filename--the same as -O.

page_requisites = on/off

Download all ancillary documents necessary for a single HTML page to display properly--the same as -p.

passive_ftp = on/off/always/never

Set passive FTP--the same as --passive-ftp. Some scripts and .pm (Perl module) files download files using wget --passive-ftp. If your firewall does not allow this, you can set passive_ftp = never to override the commandline.

passwd = string

Set your FTP password to password. Without this setting, the password defaults to username@hostname.domainname.

progress = string

Set the type of the progress indicator. Legal types are "dot" and "bar".

proxy_user = string

Set proxy authentication user name to string, like --proxy-user.

proxy_passwd = string

Set proxy authentication password to string, like --proxy-passwd.

referer = string

Set HTTP Referer: header just like --referer. (Note it was the folks who wrote the HTTP spec who got the spelling of "referrer" wrong.)

quiet = on/off

Quiet mode--the same as -q.

quota = quota

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 mbytes. Note that the user's startup file overrides system settings.

reclevel = n

Recursion level--the same as -l.

recursive = on/off

Recursive on/off--the same as -r.

relative_only = on/off

Follow only relative links--the same as -L (see Relative Links.).

remove_listing = on/off

If set to on, remove FTP listings downloaded by Wget. Setting it to off is the same as -nr.

retr_symlinks = on/off

When set to on, retrieve symbolic links as if they were plain files; the same as --retr-symlinks.

robots = on/off

Use (or not) /robots.txt file (see Robots.). Be sure to know what you are doing before changing the default (which is on).

server_response = on/off

Choose whether or not to print the HTTP and FTP server responses--the same as -S.

span_hosts = on/off

Same as -H.

timeout = n

Set timeout value--the same as -T.

timestamping = on/off

Turn timestamping on/off. The same as -N (see Time-Stamping.).

tries = n

Set number of retries per URL--the same as -t.

use_proxy = on/off

Turn proxy support on/off. The same as -Y.

verbose = on/off

Turn verbose on/off--the same as -v/-nv.

wait = n

Wait n seconds between retrievals--the same as -w.

waitretry = n

Wait up to n seconds between retries of failed retrievals only--the same as --waitretry. Note that this is turned on by default in the global wgetrc.

randomwait = on/off

Turn random between-request wait times on or off. The same as --random-wait.

Sample 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.
##
## 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").


##
## 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

# Many sites are behind firewalls that do not allow initiation of
# connections from the outside.  On these sites you have to use the
# `passive' feature of FTP.  If you are behind such a firewall, you
# can turn this on to make Wget use passive FTP by default.
#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 and ftp.
# They will override the value in the environment.
#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

Examples

The examples are divided into three sections loosely based on their complexity.

Simple Usage	Simple, basic usage of the program.
Advanced Usage	Advanced tips.
Very Advanced Usage	The hairy stuff.

Simple Usage

• Say you want to download a URL. Just type:

  wget http://fly.srk.fer.hr/
  

• But what will happen if the connection is slow, and the file is lengthy? The connection will probably fail before the whole file is retrieved, more than once. In this case, Wget will try getting the file until it either gets the whole of it, or exceeds the default number of retries (this being 20). It is easy to change the number of tries to 45, to insure that the whole file will arrive safely:

  wget --tries=45 http://fly.srk.fer.hr/jpg/flyweb.jpg
  

• Now let's leave Wget to work in the background, and write its progress to log file log. It is tiring to type --tries, so we shall use -t.

  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.

• The usage of FTP is as simple. Wget will take care of login and password.

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

• If you specify a directory, Wget will retrieve the directory listing, parse it and convert it to HTML. Try:

  wget ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/
  links index.html
  

Advanced Usage

• You have a file that contains the URLs you want to download? Use the -i switch:

  wget -i file
  

  If you specify - as file name, the URLs will be read from standard input.

• Create a five levels deep mirror image of the GNU web site, with the same directory structure the original has, with only one try per document, saving the log of the activities to gnulog:

  wget -r http://www.gnu.org/ -o gnulog
  

• The same as the above, but convert the links in the HTML files to point to local files, so you can view the documents off-line:

  wget --convert-links -r http://www.gnu.org/ -o gnulog
  

• Retrieve only one HTML page, but make sure that all the elements needed for the page to be displayed, such as inline images and external style sheets, are also downloaded. Also make sure the downloaded page references the downloaded links.

  wget -p --convert-links http://www.server.com/dir/page.html
  

  The HTML page will be saved to www.server.com/dir/page.html, and the images, stylesheets, etc., somewhere under www.server.com/, depending on where they were on the remote server.

• The same as the above, but without the www.server.com/ directory. In fact, I don't want to have all those random server directories anyway--just save all those files under a download/ subdirectory of the current directory.

  wget -p --convert-links -nH -nd -Pdownload \
       http://www.server.com/dir/page.html
  

• Retrieve the index.html of www.lycos.com, showing the original server headers:

  wget -S http://www.lycos.com/
  

• Save the server headers with the file, perhaps for post-processing.

  wget -s http://www.lycos.com/
  more index.html
  

• Retrieve the first two levels of wuarchive.wustl.edu, saving them to /tmp.

  wget -r -l2 -P/tmp ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/
  

• You want to download all the GIFs from a directory on an HTTP server. You tried wget http://www.server.com/dir/*.gif, but that didn't work because HTTP retrieval does not support globbing. In that case, use:

  wget -r -l1 --no-parent -A.gif http://www.server.com/dir/
  

  More verbose, but the effect is the same. -r -l1 means to retrieve recursively (see Recursive Retrieval.), 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.

• Suppose you were in the middle of downloading, when Wget was interrupted. Now you do not want to clobber the files already present. It would be:

  wget -nc -r http://www.gnu.org/
  

• If you want to encode your own username and password to HTTP or FTP, use the appropriate URL syntax (see URL Format.).

  wget ftp://hniksic:mypassword@unix.server.com/.emacs
  

• You would like the output documents to go to standard output instead of to files?

  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 -
  

Very Advanced Usage

• If you wish Wget to keep a mirror of a page (or FTP subdirectories), use --mirror (-m), which is the shorthand for -r -l inf -N. You can put Wget in the crontab file asking it to recheck a site each Sunday:

  crontab
  0 0 * * 0 wget --mirror http://www.gnu.org/ -o /home/me/weeklog
  

• In addition to the above, you want the links to be converted for local viewing. But, after having read this manual, you know that link conversion doesn't play well with timestamping, so you also want Wget to back up the original HTML files before the conversion. Wget invocation would look like this:

  wget --mirror --convert-links --backup-converted  \
       http://www.gnu.org/ -o /home/me/weeklog
  

• But you've also noticed that local viewing doesn't work all that well when HTML files are saved under extensions other than .html, perhaps because they were served as index.cgi. So you'd like Wget to rename all the files served with content-type text/html to name.html.

  wget --mirror --convert-links --backup-converted \
       --html-extension -o /home/me/weeklog        \
       http://www.gnu.org/
  

  Or, with less typing:

  wget -m -k -K -E http://www.gnu.org/ -o /home/me/weeklog
  

Various

This chapter contains all the stuff that could not fit anywhere else.

Proxies	Support for proxy servers
Distribution	Getting the latest version.
Mailing List	Wget mailing list for announcements and discussion.
Reporting Bugs	How and where to report bugs.
Portability	The systems Wget works on.
Signals	Signal-handling performed by Wget.

Proxies

http://hniksic:mypassword@proxy.company.com:8001/

$ wget http://www.ifi.uio.no/~larsi/gnus.tar.gz &
$ kill -HUP %%     # Redirect the output to wget-log

wget -r http://www.server.com/

<meta name="robots" content="nofollow">

one line to give the program's name and an idea of what it does.
Copyright (C) 19yy  name of author

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

Gnomovision version 69, Copyright (C) 19yy name of author
Gnomovision comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details
type `show w'.  This is free software, and you are welcome
to redistribute it under certain conditions; type `show c'
for details.

Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright
interest in the program `Gnomovision'
(which makes passes at compilers) written
by James Hacker.

signature of Ty Coon, 1 April 1989
Ty Coon, President of Vice

Copyright (C)  year  your name.
  Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
  under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1
  or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;
  with the Invariant Sections being list their titles, with the
  Front-Cover Texts being list, and with the Back-Cover Texts being list.
  A copy of the license is included in the section entitled ``GNU
  Free Documentation License''.