Linux Software Tutorials: Wget Manual

WGET(1) GNU Wget WGET(1)

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 con-

trast, 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 and XHTML pages and create local versions

of remote web sites, fully recreating the directory structure of the

original site. This is sometimes referred to as "recursive download-

ing." While doing that, Wget respects the Robot Exclusion Standard

(/robots.txt). Wget can be instructed to convert the links in down-

loaded HTML files to 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 sup-

ports 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 dif-

ferent option styles, or specify options after the command-line argu-

ments. 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

This is a complete equivalent of:

wget -d -r -c

Since the options can be specified after the arguments, you may termi-

nate 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 conven-

tion that specifying an empty list clears its value. This can be use-

ful 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") vari-

able. 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 proper-

ties.

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- pre-

fix. 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 = off" in .wgetrc makes Wget not 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 log-

file 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 sup-

port, 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 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. 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 "" 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 "" to

HTML, or using the --base command-line option.

-B URL

--base=URL

Prepends URL to relative links read from the file specified with

the -i option.

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 redirec-

tion: 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.

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

a single document, and combination with any of -r, -p, or -N is not

allowed.

-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 cer-

tain 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. 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 clob-

bering that's prevented (as the numeric suffixes were already pre-

venting clobbering), but rather the multiple version saving that's

prevented.

When running Wget with -r or -p, but without -N or -nc, re-down-

loading 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 behav-

ior. -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 down-

load 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 big-

ger 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 behav-

ior 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 gar-

bled file. Wget has no way of verifying that the local file is

really a valid prefix of the remote file. You need to be espe-

cially careful of this when using -c in conjunction with -r, since

every file will be considered as an "incomplete download" candi-

date.

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 inter-

rupted" 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 differ-

ent meaning to one dot. With the "default" style each dot repre-

sents 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" com-

mand 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 out-

put, 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 book-

marks:

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 sub-

second 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 rea-

son, you don't want Wget to consume the entire available bandwidth.

This option allows the use of decimal numbers, usually in conjunc-

tion 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. How-

ever, 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 influ-

enced 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. There-

fore, 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 pro-

grams such as Wget by looking for statistically significant simi-

larities 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 recommen-

dation 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=mode

Change which characters found in remote URLs may show up in local

file names generated from those URLs. 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.

By default, Wget escapes the characters that are not valid as part

of file names on your operating system, as well as control charac-

ters that are typically unprintable. This option is useful for

changing these defaults, either because you are downloading to a

non-native partition, or because you want to disable escaping of

the control characters.

When mode is set to "unix", Wget escapes the character / and the

control characters in the ranges 0--31 and 128--159. This is the

default on Unix-like OS'es.

When mode is set to "windows", 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 append ,nocontrol to the mode, as in unix,nocontrol, escap-

ing of the control characters is also switched off. You can use

--restrict-file-names=nocontrol to turn off escaping of control

characters without affecting the choice of the OS to use as file

name restriction mode.

-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 debug-

ging 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=IPv4/IPv6/none

When given a choice of several addresses, connect to the addresses

with specified address family first. IPv4 addresses are preferred

by default.

This avoids spurious errors and connect attempts when accessing

hosts that resolve to both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses from IPv4 net-

works. 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 fam-

ily. 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.

Directory Options

-nd

--no-directories

Do not create a hierarchy of directories when retrieving recur-

sively. 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 struc-

ture 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 sev-

eral 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 direc-

tory 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 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 arti-

cle.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 applica-

tion/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.

--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-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 maintain-

ing 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 own-

ers to keep track of visitors and for sites to exchange this infor-

mation, 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 cook-

ies.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 con-

tent. 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 cook-

ies.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:

@asis

The cookies are in ~/.netscape/cookies.txt.

@asis

Mozilla's cookie file is also named cookies.txt, located some-

where under ~/.mozilla, in the directory of your profile. The

full path usually ends up looking somewhat like

~/.mozilla/default/some-weird-string/cookies.txt.

@asis

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.

@asis

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 alterna-

tive. 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 sup-

port:

wget --no-cookies --header "Cookie: ="

--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, mul-

tiple 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 cook-

ies, 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-ses-

sion-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 other-

wise generated automatically. This example instructs Wget to con-

nect 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 send-

ing 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 neces-

sary. 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" authen-

tication scheme.

Security considerations similar to those with --http-password per-

tain here as well.

--referer=url

Include `Referer: url' header in HTTP request. Useful for retriev-

ing 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 proto-

col 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 tailor-

ing 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.

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 reg-

ular 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 trans-

fer 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 regu-

lar page, which does not desire or accept POST. It is not com-

pletely 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 pro-

ceed 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 authentica-

tion, 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 cur-

rently 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.

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 with-

out 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 sup-

port for SSLv3 and TLSv1. This is the default.

Specifying SSLv2, SSLv3, or TLSv1 forces the use of the correspond-

ing 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 certifi-

cate 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 inter-

operability with some sites that worked with previous Wget ver-

sions, 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 warn-

ings 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 down-

load. 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 for-

mat.

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 pro-

cessing a certificate directory with the "c_rehash" utility sup-

plied 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 random-

ness 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 Dae-

mon, a user-space program that collects data from various unpre-

dictable 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 list-

ings 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 sym-

bolic 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 glob-

bing 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 man-

dates 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 filesys-

tem. The pointed-to file will not be downloaded unless this recur-

sive retrieval would have encountered it separately and downloaded

it anyway.

When --retr-symlinks is specified, however, symbolic links are tra-

versed 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.

--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.

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 transfor-

mation works reliably for arbitrary combinations of directo-

ries.

* The links to files that have not been downloaded by Wget will

be changed to include host name and absolute path of the loca-

tion 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 neces-

sary 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 doc-

uments that may be needed to display it properly are not down-

loaded. 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 "" tag referenc-

ing 1.gif and an "" 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:///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:///1.html

all the above files and 3.html's requisite 3.gif will be down-

loaded. Similarly,

wget -r -l 1 -p http:///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:///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:///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:///

To finish off this topic, it's worth knowing that Wget's idea of an

external document link is any URL specified in an "" tag, an

"" tag, or a "" tag other than " REL="stylesheet">".

--strict-comments

Turn on strict parsing of HTML comments. The default is to termi-

nate 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 , that may contain comments

between a pair of -- delimiters. HTML comments are "empty declara-

tions", SGML declarations without any non-comment text. Therefore,

is a valid comment, and so is , but

is not.

On the other hand, most HTML writers don't perceive comments as

anything other than text delimited with , 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

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 com-

ments. 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 con-

sidered, 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, spec-

ify 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:///

However, the author of this option came across a page with tags

like "" and came to the realization that

specifying tags to ignore was not enough. One can't just tell Wget

to ignore "", because then stylesheets will not be down-

loaded. 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 recur-

sively. This is a useful option, since it guarantees that only the

files below a certain hierarchy will be downloaded.

FILES

/etc/wgetrc

Default location of the global startup file.

.wgetrc

User startup file.

BUGS

You are welcome to submit bug reports via the GNU Wget bug tracker (see

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 docu-

mented, 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 mail-

ing 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 proba-

bly 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 informa-

tion 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 commu-

nication 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.

Linux Software Tutorials

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Wget Manual

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