GNU Wget is a free utility for non-interactive download of files from
the Web. It supports HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP protocols, as
well as retrieval through HTTP proxies.
Wget is non-interactive, meaning that it can work in the background,
while the user is not logged on. This allows you to start a retrieval
and disconnect from the system, letting Wget finish the work. By
contrast, most of the Web browsers require constant user's presence,
which can be a great hindrance when transferring a lot of data.
Wget can follow links in HTML 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
downloading.'' While doing that, Wget respects the Robot Exclusion
Standard (/robots.txt). Wget can be instructed to convert the
links in downloaded 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
supports regetting, it will instruct the server to continue the
download from where it left off.
OPTIONS
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.
-ecommand
--executecommand
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.
Logging and Input File Options
-ologfile
--output-file=logfile
Log all messages to logfile. The messages are normally reported
to standard error.
-alogfile
--append-output=logfile
Append to logfile. This is the same as -o, only it appends
to logfile instead of overwriting the old log file. If
logfile does not exist, a new file is created.
-d
--debug
Turn on debug output, meaning various information important to the
developers of Wget if it does not work properly. Your system
administrator may have chosen to compile Wget without debug support, in
which case -d will not work. Please note that compiling with
debug support is always safe---Wget compiled with the debug support will
not print any debug info unless requested with -d.
-q
--quiet
Turn off Wget's output.
-v
--verbose
Turn on verbose output, with all the available data. The default output
is verbose.
-nv
--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.
-ifile
--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.
-BURL
--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.
-tnumber
--tries=number
Set number of retries to number. Specify 0 or inf for
infinite retrying.
-Ofile
--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. -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:
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.
-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.
-wseconds
--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.
-Qquota
--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.
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.
-Pprefix
--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.
--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. 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.
For more information about security issues with Wget,
-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-cookiesfile
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:
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.
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.
Security considerations similar to those with --http-passwd
pertain here as well.
--referer=url
Include `Referer: url' header in HTTP request. Useful for
retrieving documents with server-side processing that assume they are
always being retrieved by interactive web browsers and only come out
properly when Referer is set to one of the pages that point to them.
-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.
-Uagent-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:
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.
-ldepth
--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.:
The -r option is to retrieve recursively, and -nd to not
create directories.
Note that --delete-after deletes files on the local machine. It
does not issue the DELE command to remote FTP sites, for
instance. Also note that when --delete-after is specified,
--convert-links is ignored, so .orig files are simply not
created in the first place.
-k
--convert-links
After the download is complete, convert the links in the document to
make them suitable for local viewing. This affects not only the visible
hyperlinks, but any part of the document that links to external content,
such as embedded images, links to style sheets, hyperlinks to non-HTML
content, etc.
Each link will be changed in one of the two ways:
*
The links to files that have been downloaded by Wget will be changed to
refer to the file they point to as a relative link.
Example: if the downloaded file /foo/doc.html links to
/bar/img.gif, also downloaded, then the link in doc.html
will be modified to point to ../bar/img.gif. This kind of
transformation works reliably for arbitrary combinations of directories.
*
The links to files that have not been downloaded by Wget will be changed
to include host name and absolute path of the location they point to.
Example: if the downloaded file /foo/doc.html links to
/bar/img.gif (or to ../bar/img.gif), then the link in
doc.html will be modified to point to
http://hostname/bar/img.gif.
Because of this, local browsing works reliably: if a linked file was
downloaded, the link will refer to its local name; if it was not
downloaded, the link will refer to its full Internet address rather than
presenting a broken link. The fact that the former links are converted
to relative links ensures that you can move the downloaded hierarchy to
another directory.
Note that only at the end of the download can Wget know which links have
been downloaded. Because of that, the work done by -k will be
performed at the end of all the downloads.
-K
--backup-converted
When converting a file, back up the original version with a .orig
suffix. Affects the behavior of -N.
-m
--mirror
Turn on options suitable for mirroring. This option turns on recursion
and time-stamping, sets infinite recursion depth and keeps FTP
directory listings. It is currently equivalent to
-r -N -l inf -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.
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:
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:
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:
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
-Aacclist--acceptacclist
-Rrejlist--rejectrejlist
Specify comma-separated lists of file name suffixes or patterns to
accept or reject.
-Ddomain-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-domainsdomain-list
Specify the domains that are not to be followed..
--follow-ftp
Follow FTP links from HTML documents. Without this option,
Wget will ignore all the FTP links.
--follow-tags=list
Wget has an internal table of HTML tag / attribute pairs that it
considers when looking for linked documents during a recursive
retrieval. If a user wants only a subset of those tags to be
considered, however, he or she should be specify such tags in a
comma-separated list with this option.
-Glist
--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:
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.
-L
--relative
Follow relative links only. Useful for retrieving a specific home page
without any distractions, not even those from the same hosts.
-Ilist
--include-directories=list
Specify a comma-separated list of directories you wish to follow when
downloading Elements
of list may contain wildcards.
-Xlist
--exclude-directories=list
Specify a comma-separated list of directories you wish to exclude from
download Elements of
list may contain wildcards.
-np
--no-parent
Do not ever ascend to the parent directory when retrieving recursively.
This is a useful option, since it guarantees that only the files
below a certain hierarchy will be downloaded.
EXAMPLES
The examples are divided into three sections loosely based on their
complexity.
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:
You have a file that contains the URLs you want to download? Use the
-i switch:
wget -i 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:
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.
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.
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:
More verbose, but the effect is the same. -r -l1 means to
retrieve recursively, with maximum depth
of 1. --no-parent means that references to the parent directory
are ignored, 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:
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:
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:
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.
You are welcome to send bug reports about GNU Wget to
<"bug-wget@gnu.org">.
Before actually submitting a bug report, please try to follow a few
simple guidelines.
1.
Please try to ascertain that the behaviour you see really is a bug. If
Wget crashes, it's a bug. If Wget does not behave as documented,
it's a bug. If things work strange, but you are not sure about the way
they are supposed to work, it might well be a bug.
2.
Try to repeat the bug in as simple circumstances as possible. E.g. if
Wget crashes while downloading wget -rl0 -kKE -t5 -Y0
http://yoyodyne.com -o /tmp/log, you should try to see if the crash is
repeatable, and if will occur with a simpler set of options. You might
even try to start the download at the page where the crash occurred to
see if that page somehow triggered the crash.
Also, while I will probably be interested to know the contents of your
.wgetrc file, just dumping it into the debug message is probably
a bad idea. Instead, you should first try to see if the bug repeats
with .wgetrc moved out of the way. Only if it turns out that
.wgetrc settings affect the bug, mail me the relevant parts of
the file.
3.
Please start Wget with -d option and send the log (or the
relevant parts of it). If Wget was compiled without debug support,
recompile it. It is much easier to trace bugs with debug support
on.
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.
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of
this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice
are preserved on all copies.
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 ``GNU General Public License'' and ``GNU Free
Documentation License'', with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no
Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section
entitled ``GNU Free Documentation License''.