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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | ENVIRONMENT | EXIT STATUS | FILES | BUGS | SEE ALSO | AUTHOR | COPYRIGHT | COLOPHON |
WGET(1) GNU Wget WGET(1)
Wget - The non-interactive network downloader.
wget [option]... [URL]...
GNU Wget is a free utility for non-interactive download of files from
the Web. It supports HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP protocols, as well as
retrieval through HTTP proxies.
Wget is non-interactive, meaning that it can work in the background,
while the user is not logged on. This allows you to start a
retrieval and disconnect from the system, letting Wget finish the
work. By contrast, most of the Web browsers require constant user's
presence, which can be a great hindrance when transferring a lot of
data.
Wget can follow links in HTML, XHTML, and CSS pages, to create local
versions of remote web sites, fully recreating the directory
structure of the original site. This is sometimes referred to as
"recursive downloading." While doing that, Wget respects the Robot
Exclusion Standard (/robots.txt). Wget can be instructed to convert
the links in downloaded files to point at the local files, for
offline viewing.
Wget has been designed for robustness over slow or unstable network
connections; if a download fails due to a network problem, it will
keep retrying until the whole file has been retrieved. If the server
supports regetting, it will instruct the server to continue the
download from where it left off.
Option Syntax
Since Wget uses GNU getopt to process command-line arguments, every
option has a long form along with the short one. Long options are
more convenient to remember, but take time to type. You may freely
mix different option styles, or specify options after the command-
line arguments. Thus you may write:
wget -r --tries=10 http://fly.srk.fer.hr/ -o log
The space between the option accepting an argument and the argument
may be omitted. Instead of -o log you can write -olog.
You may put several options that do not require arguments together,
like:
wget -drc <URL>
This is completely equivalent to:
wget -d -r -c <URL>
Since the options can be specified after the arguments, you may
terminate them with --. So the following will try to download URL
-x, reporting failure to log:
wget -o log -- -x
The options that accept comma-separated lists all respect the
convention that specifying an empty list clears its value. This can
be useful to clear the .wgetrc settings. For instance, if your
.wgetrc sets "exclude_directories" to /cgi-bin, the following example
will first reset it, and then set it to exclude /~nobody and
/~somebody. You can also clear the lists in .wgetrc.
wget -X " -X /~nobody,/~somebody
Most options that do not accept arguments are boolean options, so
named because their state can be captured with a yes-or-no
("boolean") variable. For example, --follow-ftp tells Wget to follow
FTP links from HTML files and, on the other hand, --no-glob tells it
not to perform file globbing on FTP URLs. A boolean option is either
affirmative or negative (beginning with --no). All such options
share several properties.
Unless stated otherwise, it is assumed that the default behavior is
the opposite of what the option accomplishes. For example, the
documented existence of --follow-ftp assumes that the default is to
not follow FTP links from HTML pages.
Affirmative options can be negated by prepending the --no- to the
option name; negative options can be negated by omitting the --no-
prefix. This might seem superfluous---if the default for an
affirmative option is to not do something, then why provide a way to
explicitly turn it off? But the startup file may in fact change the
default. For instance, using "follow_ftp = on" in .wgetrc makes Wget
follow FTP links by default, and using --no-follow-ftp is the only
way to restore the factory default from the command line.
Basic Startup Options
-V
--version
Display the version of Wget.
-h
--help
Print a help message describing all of Wget's command-line
options.
-b
--background
Go to background immediately after startup. If no output file is
specified via the -o, output is redirected to wget-log.
-e command
--execute command
Execute command as if it were a part of .wgetrc. A command thus
invoked will be executed after the commands in .wgetrc, thus
taking precedence over them. If you need to specify more than
one wgetrc command, use multiple instances of -e.
Logging and Input File Options
-o logfile
--output-file=logfile
Log all messages to logfile. The messages are normally reported
to standard error.
-a logfile
--append-output=logfile
Append to logfile. This is the same as -o, only it appends to
logfile instead of overwriting the old log file. If logfile does
not exist, a new file is created.
-d
--debug
Turn on debug output, meaning various information important to
the developers of Wget if it does not work properly. Your system
administrator may have chosen to compile Wget without debug
support, in which case -d will not work. Please note that
compiling with debug support is always safe---Wget compiled with
the debug support will not print any debug info unless requested
with -d.
-q
--quiet
Turn off Wget's output.
-v
--verbose
Turn on verbose output, with all the available data. The default
output is verbose.
-nv
--no-verbose
Turn off verbose without being completely quiet (use -q for
that), which means that error messages and basic information
still get printed.
--report-speed=type
Output bandwidth as type. The only accepted value is bits.
-i file
--input-file=file
Read URLs from a local or external file. If - is specified as
file, URLs are read from the standard input. (Use ./- to read
from a file literally named -.)
If this function is used, no URLs need be present on the command
line. If there are URLs both on the command line and in an input
file, those on the command lines will be the first ones to be
retrieved. If --force-html is not specified, then file should
consist of a series of URLs, one per line.
However, if you specify --force-html, the document will be
regarded as html. In that case you may have problems with
relative links, which you can solve either by adding "<base
href="url">" to the documents or by specifying --base=url on the
command line.
If the file is an external one, the document will be
automatically treated as html if the Content-Type matches
text/html. Furthermore, the file's location will be implicitly
used as base href if none was specified.
--input-metalink=file
Downloads files covered in local Metalink file. Metalink version
3 and 4 are supported.
--keep-badhash
Keeps downloaded Metalink's files with a bad hash. It appends
.badhash to the name of Metalink's files which have a checksum
mismatch, except without overwriting existing files.
--metalink-over-http
Issues HTTP HEAD request instead of GET and extracts Metalink
metadata from response headers. Then it switches to Metalink
download. If no valid Metalink metadata is found, it falls back
to ordinary HTTP download. Enables Content-Type:
application/metalink4+xml files download/processing.
--metalink-index=number
Set the Metalink application/metalink4+xml metaurl ordinal
NUMBER. From 1 to the total number of "application/metalink4+xml"
available. Specify 0 or inf to choose the first good one.
Metaurls, such as those from a --metalink-over-http, may have
been sorted by priority key's value; keep this in mind to choose
the right NUMBER.
--preferred-location
Set preferred location for Metalink resources. This has effect if
multiple resources with same priority are available.
-F
--force-html
When input is read from a file, force it to be treated as an HTML
file. This enables you to retrieve relative links from existing
HTML files on your local disk, by adding "<base href="url">" to
HTML, or using the --base command-line option.
-B URL
--base=URL
Resolves relative links using URL as the point of reference, when
reading links from an HTML file specified via the -i/--input-file
option (together with --force-html, or when the input file was
fetched remotely from a server describing it as HTML). This is
equivalent to the presence of a "BASE" tag in the HTML input
file, with URL as the value for the "href" attribute.
For instance, if you specify http://foo/bar/a.html for URL, and
Wget reads ../baz/b.html from the input file, it would be
resolved to http://foo/baz/b.html .
--config=FILE
Specify the location of a startup file you wish to use.
--rejected-log=logfile
Logs all URL rejections to logfile as comma separated values.
The values include the reason of rejection, the URL and the
parent URL it was found in.
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.
--bind-dns-address=ADDRESS
[libcares only] This address overrides the route for DNS
requests. If you ever need to circumvent the standard settings
from /etc/resolv.conf, this option together with --dns-servers is
your friend. ADDRESS must be specified either as IPv4 or IPv6
address. Wget needs to be built with libcares for this option to
be available.
--dns-servers=ADDRESSES
[libcares only] The given address(es) override the standard
nameserver addresses, e.g. as configured in /etc/resolv.conf.
ADDRESSES may be specified either as IPv4 or IPv6 addresses,
comma-separated. Wget needs to be built with libcares for this
option to be available.
-t number
--tries=number
Set number of tries to number. Specify 0 or inf for infinite
retrying. The default is to retry 20 times, with the exception
of fatal errors like "connection refused" or "not found" (404),
which are not retried.
-O file
--output-document=file
The documents will not be written to the appropriate files, but
all will be concatenated together and written to file. If - is
used as file, documents will be printed to standard output,
disabling link conversion. (Use ./- to print to a file literally
named -.)
Use of -O is not intended to mean simply "use the name file
instead of the one in the URL;" rather, it is analogous to shell
redirection: wget -O file http://foo is intended to work like
wget -O - http://foo > file; file will be truncated immediately,
and all downloaded content will be written there.
For this reason, -N (for timestamp-checking) is not supported in
combination with -O: since file is always newly created, it will
always have a very new timestamp. A warning will be issued if
this combination is used.
Similarly, using -r or -p with -O may not work as you expect:
Wget won't just download the first file to file and then download
the rest to their normal names: all downloaded content will be
placed in file. This was disabled in version 1.11, but has been
reinstated (with a warning) in 1.11.2, as there are some cases
where this behavior can actually have some use.
A combination with -nc is only accepted if the given output file
does not exist.
Note that a combination with -k is only permitted when
downloading a single document, as in that case it will just
convert all relative URIs to external ones; -k makes no sense for
multiple URIs when they're all being downloaded to a single file;
-k can be used only when the output is a regular file.
-nc
--no-clobber
If a file is downloaded more than once in the same directory,
Wget's behavior depends on a few options, including -nc. In
certain cases, the local file will be clobbered, or overwritten,
upon repeated download. In other cases it will be preserved.
When running Wget without -N, -nc, -r, or -p, downloading the
same file in the same directory will result in the original copy
of file being preserved and the second copy being named file.1.
If that file is downloaded yet again, the third copy will be
named file.2, and so on. (This is also the behavior with -nd,
even if -r or -p are in effect.) When -nc is specified, this
behavior is suppressed, and Wget will refuse to download newer
copies of file. Therefore, ""no-clobber"" is actually a misnomer
in this mode---it's not clobbering that's prevented (as the
numeric suffixes were already preventing clobbering), but rather
the multiple version saving that's prevented.
When running Wget with -r or -p, but without -N, -nd, or -nc, re-
downloading a file will result in the new copy simply overwriting
the old. Adding -nc will prevent this behavior, instead causing
the original version to be preserved and any newer copies on the
server to be ignored.
When running Wget with -N, with or without -r or -p, the decision
as to whether or not to download a newer copy of a file depends
on the local and remote timestamp and size of the file. -nc may
not be specified at the same time as -N.
A combination with -O/--output-document is only accepted if the
given output file does not exist.
Note that when -nc is specified, files with the suffixes .html or
.htm will be loaded from the local disk and parsed as if they had
been retrieved from the Web.
--backups=backups
Before (over)writing a file, back up an existing file by adding a
.1 suffix (_1 on VMS) to the file name. Such backup files are
rotated to .2, .3, and so on, up to backups (and lost beyond
that).
-c
--continue
Continue getting a partially-downloaded file. This is useful
when you want to finish up a download started by a previous
instance of Wget, or by another program. For instance:
wget -c ftp://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/ls-lR.Z
If there is a file named ls-lR.Z in the current directory, Wget
will assume that it is the first portion of the remote file, and
will ask the server to continue the retrieval from an offset
equal to the length of the local file.
Note that you don't need to specify this option if you just want
the current invocation of Wget to retry downloading a file should
the connection be lost midway through. This is the default
behavior. -c only affects resumption of downloads started prior
to this invocation of Wget, and whose local files are still
sitting around.
Without -c, the previous example would just download the remote
file to ls-lR.Z.1, leaving the truncated ls-lR.Z file alone.
If you use -c on a non-empty file, and the server does not
support continued downloading, Wget will restart the download
from scratch and overwrite the existing file entirely.
Beginning with Wget 1.7, if you use -c on a file which is of
equal size as the one on the server, Wget will refuse to download
the file and print an explanatory message. The same happens when
the file is smaller on the server than locally (presumably
because it was changed on the server since your last download
attempt)---because "continuing" is not meaningful, no download
occurs.
On the other side of the coin, while using -c, any file that's
bigger on the server than locally will be considered an
incomplete download and only "(length(remote) - length(local))"
bytes will be downloaded and tacked onto the end of the local
file. This behavior can be desirable in certain cases---for
instance, you can use wget -c to download just the new portion
that's been appended to a data collection or log file.
However, if the file is bigger on the server because it's been
changed, as opposed to just appended to, you'll end up with a
garbled file. Wget has no way of verifying that the local file
is really a valid prefix of the remote file. You need to be
especially careful of this when using -c in conjunction with -r,
since every file will be considered as an "incomplete download"
candidate.
Another instance where you'll get a garbled file if you try to
use -c is if you have a lame HTTP proxy that inserts a "transfer
interrupted" string into the local file. In the future a
"rollback" option may be added to deal with this case.
Note that -c only works with FTP servers and with HTTP servers
that support the "Range" header.
--start-pos=OFFSET
Start downloading at zero-based position OFFSET. Offset may be
expressed in bytes, kilobytes with the `k' suffix, or megabytes
with the `m' suffix, etc.
--start-pos has higher precedence over --continue. When
--start-pos and --continue are both specified, wget will emit a
warning then proceed as if --continue was absent.
Server support for continued download is required, otherwise
--start-pos cannot help. See -c for details.
--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.
The progress type can also take one or more parameters. The
parameters vary based on the type selected. Parameters to type
are passed by appending them to the type sperated by a colon (:)
like this: --progress=type:parameter1:parameter2.
When using the dotted retrieval, you may set the style by
specifying the type as dot:style. Different styles assign
different meaning to one dot. With the "default" style each dot
represents 1K, there are ten dots in a cluster and 50 dots in a
line. The "binary" style has a more "computer"-like
orientation---8K dots, 16-dots clusters and 48 dots per line
(which makes for 384K lines). The "mega" style is suitable for
downloading large files---each dot represents 64K retrieved,
there are eight dots in a cluster, and 48 dots on each line (so
each line contains 3M). If "mega" is not enough then you can use
the "giga" style---each dot represents 1M retrieved, there are
eight dots in a cluster, and 32 dots on each line (so each line
contains 32M).
With --progress=bar, there are currently two possible parameters,
force and noscroll.
When the output is not a TTY, the progress bar always falls back
to "dot", even if --progress=bar was passed to Wget during
invocation. This behaviour can be overridden and the "bar" output
forced by using the "force" parameter as --progress=bar:force.
By default, the bar style progress bar scroll the name of the
file from left to right for the file being downloaded if the
filename exceeds the maximum length allotted for its display. In
certain cases, such as with --progress=bar:force, one may not
want the scrolling filename in the progress bar. By passing the
"noscroll" parameter, Wget can be forced to display as much of
the filename as possible without scrolling through it.
Note that you can set the default style using the "progress"
command in .wgetrc. That setting may be overridden from the
command line. For example, to force the bar output without
scrolling, use --progress=bar:force:noscroll.
--show-progress
Force wget to display the progress bar in any verbosity.
By default, wget only displays the progress bar in verbose mode.
One may however, want wget to display the progress bar on screen
in conjunction with any other verbosity modes like --no-verbose
or --quiet. This is often a desired a property when invoking
wget to download several small/large files. In such a case, wget
could simply be invoked with this parameter to get a much cleaner
output on the screen.
This option will also force the progress bar to be printed to
stderr when used alongside the --logfile option.
-N
--timestamping
Turn on time-stamping.
--no-if-modified-since
Do not send If-Modified-Since header in -N mode. Send preliminary
HEAD request instead. This has only effect in -N mode.
--no-use-server-timestamps
Don't set the local file's timestamp by the one on the server.
By default, when a file is downloaded, its timestamps are set to
match those from the remote file. This allows the use of
--timestamping on subsequent invocations of wget. However, it is
sometimes useful to base the local file's timestamp on when it
was actually downloaded; for that purpose, the
--no-use-server-timestamps option has been provided.
-S
--server-response
Print the headers sent by HTTP servers and responses sent by FTP
servers.
--spider
When invoked with this option, Wget will behave as a Web spider,
which means that it will not download the pages, just check that
they are there. For example, you can use Wget to check your
bookmarks:
wget --spider --force-html -i bookmarks.html
This feature needs much more work for Wget to get close to the
functionality of real web spiders.
-T seconds
--timeout=seconds
Set the network timeout to seconds seconds. This is equivalent
to specifying --dns-timeout, --connect-timeout, and
--read-timeout, all at the same time.
When interacting with the network, Wget can check for timeout and
abort the operation if it takes too long. This prevents
anomalies like hanging reads and infinite connects. The only
timeout enabled by default is a 900-second read timeout. Setting
a timeout to 0 disables it altogether. Unless you know what you
are doing, it is best not to change the default timeout settings.
All timeout-related options accept decimal values, as well as
subsecond values. For example, 0.1 seconds is a legal (though
unwise) choice of timeout. Subsecond timeouts are useful for
checking server response times or for testing network latency.
--dns-timeout=seconds
Set the DNS lookup timeout to seconds seconds. DNS lookups that
don't complete within the specified time will fail. By default,
there is no timeout on DNS lookups, other than that implemented
by system libraries.
--connect-timeout=seconds
Set the connect timeout to seconds seconds. TCP connections that
take longer to establish will be aborted. By default, there is
no connect timeout, other than that implemented by system
libraries.
--read-timeout=seconds
Set the read (and write) timeout to seconds seconds. The "time"
of this timeout refers to idle time: if, at any point in the
download, no data is received for more than the specified number
of seconds, reading fails and the download is restarted. This
option does not directly affect the duration of the entire
download.
Of course, the remote server may choose to terminate the
connection sooner than this option requires. The default read
timeout is 900 seconds.
--limit-rate=amount
Limit the download speed to amount bytes per second. Amount may
be expressed in bytes, kilobytes with the k suffix, or megabytes
with the m suffix. For example, --limit-rate=20k will limit the
retrieval rate to 20KB/s. This is useful when, for whatever
reason, you don't want Wget to consume the entire available
bandwidth.
This option allows the use of decimal numbers, usually in
conjunction with power suffixes; for example, --limit-rate=2.5k
is a legal value.
Note that Wget implements the limiting by sleeping the
appropriate amount of time after a network read that took less
time than specified by the rate. Eventually this strategy causes
the TCP transfer to slow down to approximately the specified
rate. However, it may take some time for this balance to be
achieved, so don't be surprised if limiting the rate doesn't work
well with very small files.
-w seconds
--wait=seconds
Wait the specified number of seconds between the retrievals. Use
of this option is recommended, as it lightens the server load by
making the requests less frequent. Instead of in seconds, the
time can be specified in minutes using the "m" suffix, in hours
using "h" suffix, or in days using "d" suffix.
Specifying a large value for this option is useful if the network
or the destination host is down, so that Wget can wait long
enough to reasonably expect the network error to be fixed before
the retry. The waiting interval specified by this function is
influenced by "--random-wait", which see.
--waitretry=seconds
If you don't want Wget to wait between every retrieval, but only
between retries of failed downloads, you can use this option.
Wget will use linear backoff, waiting 1 second after the first
failure on a given file, then waiting 2 seconds after the second
failure on that file, up to the maximum number of seconds you
specify.
By default, Wget will assume a value of 10 seconds.
--random-wait
Some web sites may perform log analysis to identify retrieval
programs such as Wget by looking for statistically significant
similarities in the time between requests. This option causes the
time between requests to vary between 0.5 and 1.5 * wait seconds,
where wait was specified using the --wait option, in order to
mask Wget's presence from such analysis.
A 2001 article in a publication devoted to development on a
popular consumer platform provided code to perform this analysis
on the fly. Its author suggested blocking at the class C address
level to ensure automated retrieval programs were blocked despite
changing DHCP-supplied addresses.
The --random-wait option was inspired by this ill-advised
recommendation to block many unrelated users from a web site due
to the actions of one.
--no-proxy
Don't use proxies, even if the appropriate *_proxy environment
variable is defined.
-Q quota
--quota=quota
Specify download quota for automatic retrievals. The value can
be specified in bytes (default), kilobytes (with k suffix), or
megabytes (with m suffix).
Note that quota will never affect downloading a single file. So
if you specify wget -Q10k https://example.com/ls-lR.gz, all of
the ls-lR.gz will be downloaded. The same goes even when several
URLs are specified on the command-line. However, quota is
respected when retrieving either recursively, or from an input
file. Thus you may safely type wget -Q2m -i sites---download
will be aborted when the quota is exceeded.
Setting quota to 0 or to inf unlimits the download quota.
--no-dns-cache
Turn off caching of DNS lookups. Normally, Wget remembers the IP
addresses it looked up from DNS so it doesn't have to repeatedly
contact the DNS server for the same (typically small) set of
hosts it retrieves from. This cache exists in memory only; a new
Wget run will contact DNS again.
However, it has been reported that in some situations it is not
desirable to cache host names, even for the duration of a short-
running application like Wget. With this option Wget issues a
new DNS lookup (more precisely, a new call to "gethostbyname" or
"getaddrinfo") each time it makes a new connection. Please note
that this option will not affect caching that might be performed
by the resolving library or by an external caching layer, such as
NSCD.
If you don't understand exactly what this option does, you
probably won't need it.
--restrict-file-names=modes
Change which characters found in remote URLs must be escaped
during generation of local filenames. Characters that are
restricted by this option are escaped, i.e. replaced with %HH,
where HH is the hexadecimal number that corresponds to the
restricted character. This option may also be used to force all
alphabetical cases to be either lower- or uppercase.
By default, Wget escapes the characters that are not valid or
safe as part of file names on your operating system, as well as
control characters that are typically unprintable. This option
is useful for changing these defaults, perhaps because you are
downloading to a non-native partition, or because you want to
disable escaping of the control characters, or you want to
further restrict characters to only those in the ASCII range of
values.
The modes are a comma-separated set of text values. The
acceptable values are unix, windows, nocontrol, ascii, lowercase,
and uppercase. The values unix and windows are mutually exclusive
(one will override the other), as are lowercase and uppercase.
Those last are special cases, as they do not change the set of
characters that would be escaped, but rather force local file
paths to be converted either to lower- or uppercase.
When "unix" is specified, Wget escapes the character / and the
control characters in the ranges 0--31 and 128--159. This is the
default on Unix-like operating systems.
When "windows" is given, Wget escapes the characters \, |, /, :,
?, ", *, <, >, and the control characters in the ranges 0--31 and
128--159. In addition to this, Wget in Windows mode uses +
instead of : to separate host and port in local file names, and
uses @ instead of ? to separate the query portion of the file
name from the rest. Therefore, a URL that would be saved as
www.xemacs.org:4300/search.pl?input=blah in Unix mode would be
saved as www.xemacs.org+4300/search.pl@input=blah in Windows
mode. This mode is the default on Windows.
If you specify nocontrol, then the escaping of the control
characters is also switched off. This option may make sense when
you are downloading URLs whose names contain UTF-8 characters, on
a system which can save and display filenames in UTF-8 (some
possible byte values used in UTF-8 byte sequences fall in the
range of values designated by Wget as "controls").
The ascii mode is used to specify that any bytes whose values are
outside the range of ASCII characters (that is, greater than 127)
shall be escaped. This can be useful when saving filenames whose
encoding does not match the one used locally.
-4
--inet4-only
-6
--inet6-only
Force connecting to IPv4 or IPv6 addresses. With --inet4-only or
-4, Wget will only connect to IPv4 hosts, ignoring AAAA records
in DNS, and refusing to connect to IPv6 addresses specified in
URLs. Conversely, with --inet6-only or -6, Wget will only
connect to IPv6 hosts and ignore A records and IPv4 addresses.
Neither options should be needed normally. By default, an
IPv6-aware Wget will use the address family specified by the
host's DNS record. If the DNS responds with both IPv4 and IPv6
addresses, Wget will try them in sequence until it finds one it
can connect to. (Also see "--prefer-family" option described
below.)
These options can be used to deliberately force the use of IPv4
or IPv6 address families on dual family systems, usually to aid
debugging or to deal with broken network configuration. Only one
of --inet6-only and --inet4-only may be specified at the same
time. Neither option is available in Wget compiled without IPv6
support.
--prefer-family=none/IPv4/IPv6
When given a choice of several addresses, connect to the
addresses with specified address family first. The address order
returned by DNS is used without change by default.
This avoids spurious errors and connect attempts when accessing
hosts that resolve to both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses from IPv4
networks. For example, www.kame.net resolves to
2001:200:0:8002:203:47ff:fea5:3085 and to 203.178.141.194. When
the preferred family is "IPv4", the IPv4 address is used first;
when the preferred family is "IPv6", the IPv6 address is used
first; if the specified value is "none", the address order
returned by DNS is used without change.
Unlike -4 and -6, this option doesn't inhibit access to any
address family, it only changes the order in which the addresses
are accessed. Also note that the reordering performed by this
option is stable---it doesn't affect order of addresses of the
same family. That is, the relative order of all IPv4 addresses
and of all IPv6 addresses remains intact in all cases.
--retry-connrefused
Consider "connection refused" a transient error and try again.
Normally Wget gives up on a URL when it is unable to connect to
the site because failure to connect is taken as a sign that the
server is not running at all and that retries would not help.
This option is for mirroring unreliable sites whose servers tend
to disappear for short periods of time.
--user=user
--password=password
Specify the username user and password password for both FTP and
HTTP file retrieval. These parameters can be overridden using
the --ftp-user and --ftp-password options for FTP connections and
the --http-user and --http-password options for HTTP connections.
--ask-password
Prompt for a password for each connection established. Cannot be
specified when --password is being used, because they are
mutually exclusive.
--use-askpass=command
Prompt for a user and password using the specified command. If
no command is specified then the command in the environment
variable WGET_ASKPASS is used. If WGET_ASKPASS is not set then
the command in the environment variable SSH_ASKPASS is used.
You can set the default command for use-askpass in the .wgetrc.
That setting may be overridden from the command line.
--no-iri
Turn off internationalized URI (IRI) support. Use --iri to turn
it on. IRI support is activated by default.
You can set the default state of IRI support using the "iri"
command in .wgetrc. That setting may be overridden from the
command line.
--local-encoding=encoding
Force Wget to use encoding as the default system encoding. That
affects how Wget converts URLs specified as arguments from locale
to UTF-8 for IRI support.
Wget use the function "nl_langinfo()" and then the "CHARSET"
environment variable to get the locale. If it fails, ASCII is
used.
You can set the default local encoding using the "local_encoding"
command in .wgetrc. That setting may be overridden from the
command line.
--remote-encoding=encoding
Force Wget to use encoding as the default remote server encoding.
That affects how Wget converts URIs found in files from remote
encoding to UTF-8 during a recursive fetch. This options is only
useful for IRI support, for the interpretation of non-ASCII
characters.
For HTTP, remote encoding can be found in HTTP "Content-Type"
header and in HTML "Content-Type http-equiv" meta tag.
You can set the default encoding using the "remoteencoding"
command in .wgetrc. That setting may be overridden from the
command line.
--unlink
Force Wget to unlink file instead of clobbering existing file.
This option is useful for downloading to the directory with
hardlinks.
Directory Options
-nd
--no-directories
Do not create a hierarchy of directories when retrieving
recursively. With this option turned on, all files will get
saved to the current directory, without clobbering (if a name
shows up more than once, the filenames will get extensions .n).
-x
--force-directories
The opposite of -nd---create a hierarchy of directories, even if
one would not have been created otherwise. E.g. wget -x
http://fly.srk.fer.hr/robots.txt will save the downloaded file to
fly.srk.fer.hr/robots.txt.
-nH
--no-host-directories
Disable generation of host-prefixed directories. By default,
invoking Wget with -r http://fly.srk.fer.hr/ will create a
structure of directories beginning with fly.srk.fer.hr/. This
option disables such behavior.
--protocol-directories
Use the protocol name as a directory component of local file
names. For example, with this option, wget -r http://host will
save to http/host/... rather than just to host/....
--cut-dirs=number
Ignore number directory components. This is useful for getting a
fine-grained control over the directory where recursive retrieval
will be saved.
Take, for example, the directory at
ftp://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/. If you retrieve it with -r, it
will be saved locally under ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/. While
the -nH option can remove the ftp.xemacs.org/ part, you are still
stuck with pub/xemacs. This is where --cut-dirs comes in handy;
it makes Wget not "see" number remote directory components. Here
are several examples of how --cut-dirs option works.
No options -> ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/
-nH -> pub/xemacs/
-nH --cut-dirs=1 -> xemacs/
-nH --cut-dirs=2 -> .
--cut-dirs=1 -> ftp.xemacs.org/xemacs/
...
If you just want to get rid of the directory structure, this
option is similar to a combination of -nd and -P. However,
unlike -nd, --cut-dirs does not lose with subdirectories---for
instance, with -nH --cut-dirs=1, a beta/ subdirectory will be
placed to xemacs/beta, as one would expect.
-P prefix
--directory-prefix=prefix
Set directory prefix to prefix. The directory prefix is the
directory where all other files and subdirectories will be saved
to, i.e. the top of the retrieval tree. The default is . (the
current directory).
HTTP Options
--default-page=name
Use name as the default file name when it isn't known (i.e., for
URLs that end in a slash), instead of index.html.
-E
--adjust-extension
If a file of type application/xhtml+xml or text/html is
downloaded and the URL does not end with the regexp
\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?, this option will cause the suffix .html to
be appended to the local filename. This is useful, for instance,
when you're mirroring a remote site that uses .asp pages, but you
want the mirrored pages to be viewable on your stock Apache
server. Another good use for this is when you're downloading
CGI-generated materials. A URL like
http://site.com/article.cgi?25 will be saved as
article.cgi?25.html.
Note that filenames changed in this way will be re-downloaded
every time you re-mirror a site, because Wget can't tell that the
local X.html file corresponds to remote URL X (since it doesn't
yet know that the URL produces output of type text/html or
application/xhtml+xml.
As of version 1.12, Wget will also ensure that any downloaded
files of type text/css end in the suffix .css, and the option was
renamed from --html-extension, to better reflect its new
behavior. The old option name is still acceptable, but should now
be considered deprecated.
At some point in the future, this option may well be expanded to
include suffixes for other types of content, including content
types that are not parsed by Wget.
--http-user=user
--http-password=password
Specify the username user and password password on an HTTP
server. According to the type of the challenge, Wget will encode
them using either the "basic" (insecure), the "digest", or the
Windows "NTLM" authentication scheme.
Another way to specify username and password is in the URL
itself. Either method reveals your password to anyone who
bothers to run "ps". To prevent the passwords from being seen,
use the --use-askpass or store them in .wgetrc or .netrc, and
make sure to protect those files from other users with "chmod".
If the passwords are really important, do not leave them lying in
those files either---edit the files and delete them after Wget
has started the download.
--no-http-keep-alive
Turn off the "keep-alive" feature for HTTP downloads. Normally,
Wget asks the server to keep the connection open so that, when
you download more than one document from the same server, they
get transferred over the same TCP connection. This saves time
and at the same time reduces the load on the server.
This option is useful when, for some reason, persistent (keep-
alive) connections don't work for you, for example due to a
server bug or due to the inability of server-side scripts to cope
with the connections.
--no-cache
Disable server-side cache. In this case, Wget will send the
remote server an appropriate directive (Pragma: no-cache) to get
the file from the remote service, rather than returning the
cached version. This is especially useful for retrieving and
flushing out-of-date documents on proxy servers.
Caching is allowed by default.
--no-cookies
Disable the use of cookies. Cookies are a mechanism for
maintaining server-side state. The server sends the client a
cookie using the "Set-Cookie" header, and the client responds
with the same cookie upon further requests. Since cookies allow
the server owners to keep track of visitors and for sites to
exchange this information, some consider them a breach of
privacy. The default is to use cookies; however, storing cookies
is not on by default.
--load-cookies file
Load cookies from file before the first HTTP retrieval. file is
a textual file in the format originally used by Netscape's
cookies.txt file.
You will typically use this option when mirroring sites that
require that you be logged in to access some or all of their
content. The login process typically works by the web server
issuing an HTTP cookie upon receiving and verifying your
credentials. The cookie is then resent by the browser when
accessing that part of the site, and so proves your identity.
Mirroring such a site requires Wget to send the same cookies your
browser sends when communicating with the site. This is achieved
by --load-cookies---simply point Wget to the location of the
cookies.txt file, and it will send the same cookies your browser
would send in the same situation. Different browsers keep
textual cookie files in different locations:
"Netscape 4.x."
The cookies are in ~/.netscape/cookies.txt.
"Mozilla and Netscape 6.x."
Mozilla's cookie file is also named cookies.txt, located
somewhere under ~/.mozilla, in the directory of your profile.
The full path usually ends up looking somewhat like
~/.mozilla/default/some-weird-string/cookies.txt.
"Internet Explorer."
You can produce a cookie file Wget can use by using the File
menu, Import and Export, Export Cookies. This has been
tested with Internet Explorer 5; it is not guaranteed to work
with earlier versions.
"Other browsers."
If you are using a different browser to create your cookies,
--load-cookies will only work if you can locate or produce a
cookie file in the Netscape format that Wget expects.
If you cannot use --load-cookies, there might still be an
alternative. If your browser supports a "cookie manager", you
can use it to view the cookies used when accessing the site
you're mirroring. Write down the name and value of the cookie,
and manually instruct Wget to send those cookies, bypassing the
"official" cookie support:
wget --no-cookies --header "Cookie: <name>=<value>"
--save-cookies file
Save cookies to file before exiting. This will not save cookies
that have expired or that have no expiry time (so-called "session
cookies"), but also see --keep-session-cookies.
--keep-session-cookies
When specified, causes --save-cookies to also save session
cookies. Session cookies are normally not saved because they are
meant to be kept in memory and forgotten when you exit the
browser. Saving them is useful on sites that require you to log
in or to visit the home page before you can access some pages.
With this option, multiple Wget runs are considered a single
browser session as far as the site is concerned.
Since the cookie file format does not normally carry session
cookies, Wget marks them with an expiry timestamp of 0. Wget's
--load-cookies recognizes those as session cookies, but it might
confuse other browsers. Also note that cookies so loaded will be
treated as other session cookies, which means that if you want
--save-cookies to preserve them again, you must use
--keep-session-cookies again.
--ignore-length
Unfortunately, some HTTP servers (CGI programs, to be more
precise) send out bogus "Content-Length" headers, which makes
Wget go wild, as it thinks not all the document was retrieved.
You can spot this syndrome if Wget retries getting the same
document again and again, each time claiming that the (otherwise
normal) connection has closed on the very same byte.
With this option, Wget will ignore the "Content-Length"
header---as if it never existed.
--header=header-line
Send header-line along with the rest of the headers in each HTTP
request. The supplied header is sent as-is, which means it must
contain name and value separated by colon, and must not contain
newlines.
You may define more than one additional header by specifying
--header more than once.
wget --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2' \
--header='Accept-Language: hr' \
http://fly.srk.fer.hr/
Specification of an empty string as the header value will clear
all previous user-defined headers.
As of Wget 1.10, this option can be used to override headers
otherwise generated automatically. This example instructs Wget
to connect to localhost, but to specify foo.bar in the "Host"
header:
wget --header="Host: foo.bar" http://localhost/
In versions of Wget prior to 1.10 such use of --header caused
sending of duplicate headers.
--max-redirect=number
Specifies the maximum number of redirections to follow for a
resource. The default is 20, which is usually far more than
necessary. However, on those occasions where you want to allow
more (or fewer), this is the option to use.
--proxy-user=user
--proxy-password=password
Specify the username user and password password for
authentication on a proxy server. Wget will encode them using
the "basic" authentication scheme.
Security considerations similar to those with --http-password
pertain here as well.
--referer=url
Include `Referer: url' header in HTTP request. Useful for
retrieving documents with server-side processing that assume they
are always being retrieved by interactive web browsers and only
come out properly when Referer is set to one of the pages that
point to them.
--save-headers
Save the headers sent by the HTTP server to the file, preceding
the actual contents, with an empty line as the separator.
-U agent-string
--user-agent=agent-string
Identify as agent-string to the HTTP server.
The HTTP protocol allows the clients to identify themselves using
a "User-Agent" header field. This enables distinguishing the WWW
software, usually for statistical purposes or for tracing of
protocol violations. Wget normally identifies as Wget/version,
version being the current version number of Wget.
However, some sites have been known to impose the policy of
tailoring the output according to the "User-Agent"-supplied
information. While this is not such a bad idea in theory, it has
been abused by servers denying information to clients other than
(historically) Netscape or, more frequently, Microsoft Internet
Explorer. This option allows you to change the "User-Agent" line
issued by Wget. Use of this option is discouraged, unless you
really know what you are doing.
Specifying empty user agent with --user-agent="" instructs Wget
not to send the "User-Agent" header in HTTP requests.
--post-data=string
--post-file=file
Use POST as the method for all HTTP requests and send the
specified data in the request body. --post-data sends string as
data, whereas --post-file sends the contents of file. Other than
that, they work in exactly the same way. In particular, they both
expect content of the form "key1=value1&key2=value2", with
percent-encoding for special characters; the only difference is
that one expects its content as a command-line parameter and the
other accepts its content from a file. In particular, --post-file
is not for transmitting files as form attachments: those must
appear as "key=value" data (with appropriate percent-coding) just
like everything else. Wget does not currently support
"multipart/form-data" for transmitting POST data; only
"application/x-www-form-urlencoded". Only one of --post-data and
--post-file should be specified.
Please note that wget does not require the content to be of the
form "key1=value1&key2=value2", and neither does it test for it.
Wget will simply transmit whatever data is provided to it. Most
servers however expect the POST data to be in the above format
when processing HTML Forms.
When sending a POST request using the --post-file option, Wget
treats the file as a binary file and will send every character in
the POST request without stripping trailing newline or formfeed
characters. Any other control characters in the text will also be
sent as-is in the POST request.
Please be aware that Wget needs to know the size of the POST data
in advance. Therefore the argument to "--post-file" must be a
regular file; specifying a FIFO or something like /dev/stdin
won't work. It's not quite clear how to work around this
limitation inherent in HTTP/1.0. Although HTTP/1.1 introduces
chunked transfer that doesn't require knowing the request length
in advance, a client can't use chunked unless it knows it's
talking to an HTTP/1.1 server. And it can't know that until it
receives a response, which in turn requires the request to have
been completed -- a chicken-and-egg problem.
Note: As of version 1.15 if Wget is redirected after the POST
request is completed, its behaviour will depend on the response
code returned by the server. In case of a 301 Moved Permanently,
302 Moved Temporarily or 307 Temporary Redirect, Wget will, in
accordance with RFC2616, continue to send a POST request. In
case a server wants the client to change the Request method upon
redirection, it should send a 303 See Other response code.
This example shows how to log in to a server using POST and then
proceed to download the desired pages, presumably only accessible
to authorized users:
# Log in to the server. This can be done only once.
wget --save-cookies cookies.txt \
--post-data 'user=foo&password=bar' \
http://example.com/auth.php
# Now grab the page or pages we care about.
wget --load-cookies cookies.txt \
-p http://example.com/interesting/article.php
If the server is using session cookies to track user
authentication, the above will not work because --save-cookies
will not save them (and neither will browsers) and the
cookies.txt file will be empty. In that case use
--keep-session-cookies along with --save-cookies to force saving
of session cookies.
--method=HTTP-Method
For the purpose of RESTful scripting, Wget allows sending of
other HTTP Methods without the need to explicitly set them using
--header=Header-Line. Wget will use whatever string is passed to
it after --method as the HTTP Method to the server.
--body-data=Data-String
--body-file=Data-File
Must be set when additional data needs to be sent to the server
along with the Method specified using --method. --body-data
sends string as data, whereas --body-file sends the contents of
file. Other than that, they work in exactly the same way.
Currently, --body-file is not for transmitting files as a whole.
Wget does not currently support "multipart/form-data" for
transmitting data; only "application/x-www-form-urlencoded". In
the future, this may be changed so that wget sends the
--body-file as a complete file instead of sending its contents to
the server. Please be aware that Wget needs to know the contents
of BODY Data in advance, and hence the argument to --body-file
should be a regular file. See --post-file for a more detailed
explanation. Only one of --body-data and --body-file should be
specified.
If Wget is redirected after the request is completed, Wget will
suspend the current method and send a GET request till the
redirection is completed. This is true for all redirection
response codes except 307 Temporary Redirect which is used to
explicitly specify that the request method should not change.
Another exception is when the method is set to "POST", in which
case the redirection rules specified under --post-data are
followed.
--content-disposition
If this is set to on, experimental (not fully-functional) support
for "Content-Disposition" headers is enabled. This can currently
result in extra round-trips to the server for a "HEAD" request,
and is known to suffer from a few bugs, which is why it is not
currently enabled by default.
This option is useful for some file-downloading CGI programs that
use "Content-Disposition" headers to describe what the name of a
downloaded file should be.
When combined with --metalink-over-http and --trust-server-names,
a Content-Type: application/metalink4+xml file is named using the
"Content-Disposition" filename field, if available.
--content-on-error
If this is set to on, wget will not skip the content when the
server responds with a http status code that indicates error.
--trust-server-names
If this is set, on a redirect, the local file name will be based
on the redirection URL. By default the local file name is based
on the original URL. When doing recursive retrieving this can be
helpful because in many web sites redirected URLs correspond to
an underlying file structure, while link URLs do not.
--auth-no-challenge
If this option is given, Wget will send Basic HTTP authentication
information (plaintext username and password) for all requests,
just like Wget 1.10.2 and prior did by default.
Use of this option is not recommended, and is intended only to
support some few obscure servers, which never send HTTP
authentication challenges, but accept unsolicited auth info, say,
in addition to form-based authentication.
--retry-on-http-error=code[,code,...]
Consider given HTTP response codes as non-fatal, transient
errors. Supply a comma-separated list of 3-digit HTTP response
codes as argument. Useful to work around special circumstances
where retries are required, but the server responds with an error
code normally not retried by Wget. Such errors might be 503
(Service Unavailable) and 429 (Too Many Requests). Retries
enabled by this option are performed subject to the normal retry
timing and retry count limitations of Wget.
Using this option is intended to support special use cases only
and is generally not recommended, as it can force retries even in
cases where the server is actually trying to decrease its load.
Please use wisely and only if you know what you are doing.
HTTPS (SSL/TLS) Options
To support encrypted HTTP (HTTPS) downloads, Wget must be compiled
with an external SSL library. The current default is GnuTLS. In
addition, Wget also supports HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security).
If Wget is compiled without SSL support, none of these options are
available.
--secure-protocol=protocol
Choose the secure protocol to be used. Legal values are auto,
SSLv2, SSLv3, TLSv1, TLSv1_1, TLSv1_2 and PFS. If auto is used,
the SSL library is given the liberty of choosing the appropriate
protocol automatically, which is achieved by sending a TLSv1
greeting. This is the default.
Specifying SSLv2, SSLv3, TLSv1, TLSv1_1 or TLSv1_2 forces the use
of the corresponding protocol. This is useful when talking to
old and buggy SSL server implementations that make it hard for
the underlying SSL library to choose the correct protocol
version. Fortunately, such servers are quite rare.
Specifying PFS enforces the use of the so-called Perfect Forward
Security cipher suites. In short, PFS adds security by creating a
one-time key for each SSL connection. It has a bit more CPU
impact on client and server. We use known to be secure ciphers
(e.g. no MD4) and the TLS protocol.
--https-only
When in recursive mode, only HTTPS links are followed.
--no-check-certificate
Don't check the server certificate against the available
certificate authorities. Also don't require the URL host name to
match the common name presented by the certificate.
As of Wget 1.10, the default is to verify the server's
certificate against the recognized certificate authorities,
breaking the SSL handshake and aborting the download if the
verification fails. Although this provides more secure
downloads, it does break interoperability with some sites that
worked with previous Wget versions, particularly those using
self-signed, expired, or otherwise invalid certificates. This
option forces an "insecure" mode of operation that turns the
certificate verification errors into warnings and allows you to
proceed.
If you encounter "certificate verification" errors or ones saying
that "common name doesn't match requested host name", you can use
this option to bypass the verification and proceed with the
download. Only use this option if you are otherwise convinced of
the site's authenticity, or if you really don't care about the
validity of its certificate. It is almost always a bad idea not
to check the certificates when transmitting confidential or
important data. For self-signed/internal certificates, you
should download the certificate and verify against that instead
of forcing this insecure mode. If you are really sure of not
desiring any certificate verification, you can specify
--check-certificate=quiet to tell wget to not print any warning
about invalid certificates, albeit in most cases this is the
wrong thing to do.
--certificate=file
Use the client certificate stored in file. This is needed for
servers that are configured to require certificates from the
clients that connect to them. Normally a certificate is not
required and this switch is optional.
--certificate-type=type
Specify the type of the client certificate. Legal values are PEM
(assumed by default) and DER, also known as ASN1.
--private-key=file
Read the private key from file. This allows you to provide the
private key in a file separate from the certificate.
--private-key-type=type
Specify the type of the private key. Accepted values are PEM
(the default) and DER.
--ca-certificate=file
Use file as the file with the bundle of certificate authorities
("CA") to verify the peers. The certificates must be in PEM
format.
Without this option Wget looks for CA certificates at the system-
specified locations, chosen at OpenSSL installation time.
--ca-directory=directory
Specifies directory containing CA certificates in PEM format.
Each file contains one CA certificate, and the file name is based
on a hash value derived from the certificate. This is achieved
by processing a certificate directory with the "c_rehash" utility
supplied with OpenSSL. Using --ca-directory is more efficient
than --ca-certificate when many certificates are installed
because it allows Wget to fetch certificates on demand.
Without this option Wget looks for CA certificates at the system-
specified locations, chosen at OpenSSL installation time.
--crl-file=file
Specifies a CRL file in file. This is needed for certificates
that have been revocated by the CAs.
--pinnedpubkey=file/hashes
Tells wget to use the specified public key file (or hashes) to
verify the peer. This can be a path to a file which contains a
single public key in PEM or DER format, or any number of base64
encoded sha256 hashes preceded by "sha256//" and separated by ";"
When negotiating a TLS or SSL connection, the server sends a
certificate indicating its identity. A public key is extracted
from this certificate and if it does not exactly match the public
key(s) provided to this option, wget will abort the connection
before sending or receiving any data.
--random-file=file
[OpenSSL and LibreSSL only] Use file as the source of random data
for seeding the pseudo-random number generator on systems without
/dev/urandom.
On such systems the SSL library needs an external source of
randomness to initialize. Randomness may be provided by EGD (see
--egd-file below) or read from an external source specified by
the user. If this option is not specified, Wget looks for random
data in $RANDFILE or, if that is unset, in $HOME/.rnd.
If you're getting the "Could not seed OpenSSL PRNG; disabling
SSL." error, you should provide random data using some of the
methods described above.
--egd-file=file
[OpenSSL only] Use file as the EGD socket. EGD stands for
Entropy Gathering Daemon, a user-space program that collects data
from various unpredictable system sources and makes it available
to other programs that might need it. Encryption software, such
as the SSL library, needs sources of non-repeating randomness to
seed the random number generator used to produce
cryptographically strong keys.
OpenSSL allows the user to specify his own source of entropy
using the "RAND_FILE" environment variable. If this variable is
unset, or if the specified file does not produce enough
randomness, OpenSSL will read random data from EGD socket
specified using this option.
If this option is not specified (and the equivalent startup
command is not used), EGD is never contacted. EGD is not needed
on modern Unix systems that support /dev/urandom.
--no-hsts
Wget supports HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security, RFC 6797) by
default. Use --no-hsts to make Wget act as a non-HSTS-compliant
UA. As a consequence, Wget would ignore all the
"Strict-Transport-Security" headers, and would not enforce any
existing HSTS policy.
--hsts-file=file
By default, Wget stores its HSTS database in ~/.wget-hsts. You
can use --hsts-file to override this. Wget will use the supplied
file as the HSTS database. Such file must conform to the correct
HSTS database format used by Wget. If Wget cannot parse the
provided file, the behaviour is unspecified.
The Wget's HSTS database is a plain text file. Each line contains
an HSTS entry (ie. a site that has issued a
"Strict-Transport-Security" header and that therefore has
specified a concrete HSTS policy to be applied). Lines starting
with a dash ("#") are ignored by Wget. Please note that in spite
of this convenient human-readability hand-hacking the HSTS
database is generally not a good idea.
An HSTS entry line consists of several fields separated by one or
more whitespace:
"<hostname> SP [<port>] SP <include subdomains> SP <created> SP
<max-age>"
The hostname and port fields indicate the hostname and port to
which the given HSTS policy applies. The port field may be zero,
and it will, in most of the cases. That means that the port
number will not be taken into account when deciding whether such
HSTS policy should be applied on a given request (only the
hostname will be evaluated). When port is different to zero, both
the target hostname and the port will be evaluated and the HSTS
policy will only be applied if both of them match. This feature
has been included for testing/development purposes only. The
Wget testsuite (in testenv/) creates HSTS databases with explicit
ports with the purpose of ensuring Wget's correct behaviour.
Applying HSTS policies to ports other than the default ones is
discouraged by RFC 6797 (see Appendix B "Differences between HSTS
Policy and Same-Origin Policy"). Thus, this functionality should
not be used in production environments and port will typically be
zero. The last three fields do what they are expected to. The
field include_subdomains can either be 1 or 0 and it signals
whether the subdomains of the target domain should be part of the
given HSTS policy as well. The created and max-age fields hold
the timestamp values of when such entry was created (first seen
by Wget) and the HSTS-defined value 'max-age', which states how
long should that HSTS policy remain active, measured in seconds
elapsed since the timestamp stored in created. Once that time has
passed, that HSTS policy will no longer be valid and will
eventually be removed from the database.
If you supply your own HSTS database via --hsts-file, be aware
that Wget may modify the provided file if any change occurs
between the HSTS policies requested by the remote servers and
those in the file. When Wget exists, it effectively updates the
HSTS database by rewriting the database file with the new
entries.
If the supplied file does not exist, Wget will create one. This
file will contain the new HSTS entries. If no HSTS entries were
generated (no "Strict-Transport-Security" headers were sent by
any of the servers) then no file will be created, not even an
empty one. This behaviour applies to the default database file
(~/.wget-hsts) as well: it will not be created until some server
enforces an HSTS policy.
Care is taken not to override possible changes made by other Wget
processes at the same time over the HSTS database. Before dumping
the updated HSTS entries on the file, Wget will re-read it and
merge the changes.
Using a custom HSTS database and/or modifying an existing one is
discouraged. For more information about the potential security
threats arised from such practice, see section 14 "Security
Considerations" of RFC 6797, specially section 14.9 "Creative
Manipulation of HSTS Policy Store".
--warc-file=file
Use file as the destination WARC file.
--warc-header=string
Use string into as the warcinfo record.
--warc-max-size=size
Set the maximum size of the WARC files to size.
--warc-cdx
Write CDX index files.
--warc-dedup=file
Do not store records listed in this CDX file.
--no-warc-compression
Do not compress WARC files with GZIP.
--no-warc-digests
Do not calculate SHA1 digests.
--no-warc-keep-log
Do not store the log file in a WARC record.
--warc-tempdir=dir
Specify the location for temporary files created by the WARC
writer.
FTP Options
--ftp-user=user
--ftp-password=password
Specify the username user and password password on an FTP server.
Without this, or the corresponding startup option, the password
defaults to -wget@, normally used for anonymous FTP.
Another way to specify username and password is in the URL
itself. Either method reveals your password to anyone who
bothers to run "ps". To prevent the passwords from being seen,
store them in .wgetrc or .netrc, and make sure to protect those
files from other users with "chmod". If the passwords are really
important, do not leave them lying in those files either---edit
the files and delete them after Wget has started the download.
--no-remove-listing
Don't remove the temporary .listing files generated by FTP
retrievals. Normally, these files contain the raw directory
listings received from FTP servers. Not removing them can be
useful for debugging purposes, or when you want to be able to
easily check on the contents of remote server directories (e.g.
to verify that a mirror you're running is complete).
Note that even though Wget writes to a known filename for this
file, this is not a security hole in the scenario of a user
making .listing a symbolic link to /etc/passwd or something and
asking "root" to run Wget in his or her directory. Depending on
the options used, either Wget will refuse to write to .listing,
making the globbing/recursion/time-stamping operation fail, or
the symbolic link will be deleted and replaced with the actual
.listing file, or the listing will be written to a
.listing.number file.
Even though this situation isn't a problem, though, "root" should
never run Wget in a non-trusted user's directory. A user could
do something as simple as linking index.html to /etc/passwd and
asking "root" to run Wget with -N or -r so the file will be
overwritten.
--no-glob
Turn off FTP globbing. Globbing refers to the use of shell-like
special characters (wildcards), like *, ?, [ and ] to retrieve
more than one file from the same directory at once, like:
wget ftp://gnjilux.srk.fer.hr/*.msg
By default, globbing will be turned on if the URL contains a
globbing character. This option may be used to turn globbing on
or off permanently.
You may have to quote the URL to protect it from being expanded
by your shell. Globbing makes Wget look for a directory listing,
which is system-specific. This is why it currently works only
with Unix FTP servers (and the ones emulating Unix "ls" output).
--no-passive-ftp
Disable the use of the passive FTP transfer mode. Passive FTP
mandates that the client connect to the server to establish the
data connection rather than the other way around.
If the machine is connected to the Internet directly, both
passive and active FTP should work equally well. Behind most
firewall and NAT configurations passive FTP has a better chance
of working. However, in some rare firewall configurations,
active FTP actually works when passive FTP doesn't. If you
suspect this to be the case, use this option, or set
"passive_ftp=off" in your init file.
--preserve-permissions
Preserve remote file permissions instead of permissions set by
umask.
--retr-symlinks
By default, when retrieving FTP directories recursively and a
symbolic link is encountered, the symbolic link is traversed and
the pointed-to files are retrieved. Currently, Wget does not
traverse symbolic links to directories to download them
recursively, though this feature may be added in the future.
When --retr-symlinks=no is specified, the linked-to file is not
downloaded. Instead, a matching symbolic link is created on the
local filesystem. The pointed-to file will not be retrieved
unless this recursive retrieval would have encountered it
separately and downloaded it anyway. This option poses a
security risk where a malicious FTP Server may cause Wget to
write to files outside of the intended directories through a
specially crafted .LISTING file.
Note that when retrieving a file (not a directory) because it was
specified on the command-line, rather than because it was
recursed to, this option has no effect. Symbolic links are
always traversed in this case.
FTPS Options
--ftps-implicit
This option tells Wget to use FTPS implicitly. Implicit FTPS
consists of initializing SSL/TLS from the very beginning of the
control connection. This option does not send an "AUTH TLS"
command: it assumes the server speaks FTPS and directly starts an
SSL/TLS connection. If the attempt is successful, the session
continues just like regular FTPS ("PBSZ" and "PROT" are sent,
etc.). Implicit FTPS is no longer a requirement for FTPS
implementations, and thus many servers may not support it. If
--ftps-implicit is passed and no explicit port number specified,
the default port for implicit FTPS, 990, will be used, instead of
the default port for the "normal" (explicit) FTPS which is the
same as that of FTP, 21.
--no-ftps-resume-ssl
Do not resume the SSL/TLS session in the data channel. When
starting a data connection, Wget tries to resume the SSL/TLS
session previously started in the control connection. SSL/TLS
session resumption avoids performing an entirely new handshake by
reusing the SSL/TLS parameters of a previous session. Typically,
the FTPS servers want it that way, so Wget does this by default.
Under rare circumstances however, one might want to start an
entirely new SSL/TLS session in every data connection. This is
what --no-ftps-resume-ssl is for.
--ftps-clear-data-connection
All the data connections will be in plain text. Only the control
connection will be under SSL/TLS. Wget will send a "PROT C"
command to achieve this, which must be approved by the server.
--ftps-fallback-to-ftp
Fall back to FTP if FTPS is not supported by the target server.
For security reasons, this option is not asserted by default. The
default behaviour is to exit with an error. If a server does not
successfully reply to the initial "AUTH TLS" command, or in the
case of implicit FTPS, if the initial SSL/TLS connection attempt
is rejected, it is considered that such server does not support
FTPS.
Recursive Retrieval Options
-r
--recursive
Turn on recursive retrieving. The default maximum depth is 5.
-l depth
--level=depth
Specify recursion maximum depth level depth.
--delete-after
This option tells Wget to delete every single file it downloads,
after having done so. It is useful for pre-fetching popular
pages through a proxy, e.g.:
wget -r -nd --delete-after http://whatever.com/~popular/page/
The -r option is to retrieve recursively, and -nd to not create
directories.
Note that --delete-after deletes files on the local machine. It
does not issue the DELE command to remote FTP sites, for
instance. Also note that when --delete-after is specified,
--convert-links is ignored, so .orig files are simply not created
in the first place.
-k
--convert-links
After the download is complete, convert the links in the document
to make them suitable for local viewing. This affects not only
the visible hyperlinks, but any part of the document that links
to external content, such as embedded images, links to style
sheets, hyperlinks to non-HTML content, etc.
Each link will be changed in one of the two ways:
· The links to files that have been downloaded by Wget will be
changed to refer to the file they point to as a relative
link.
Example: if the downloaded file /foo/doc.html links to
/bar/img.gif, also downloaded, then the link in doc.html will
be modified to point to ../bar/img.gif. This kind of
transformation works reliably for arbitrary combinations of
directories.
· The links to files that have not been downloaded by Wget will
be changed to include host name and absolute path of the
location they point to.
Example: if the downloaded file /foo/doc.html links to
/bar/img.gif (or to ../bar/img.gif), then the link in
doc.html will be modified to point to
http://hostname/bar/img.gif .
Because of this, local browsing works reliably: if a linked file
was downloaded, the link will refer to its local name; if it was
not downloaded, the link will refer to its full Internet address
rather than presenting a broken link. The fact that the former
links are converted to relative links ensures that you can move
the downloaded hierarchy to another directory.
Note that only at the end of the download can Wget know which
links have been downloaded. Because of that, the work done by -k
will be performed at the end of all the downloads.
--convert-file-only
This option converts only the filename part of the URLs, leaving
the rest of the URLs untouched. This filename part is sometimes
referred to as the "basename", although we avoid that term here
in order not to cause confusion.
It works particularly well in conjunction with
--adjust-extension, although this coupling is not enforced. It
proves useful to populate Internet caches with files downloaded
from different hosts.
Example: if some link points to //foo.com/bar.cgi?xyz with
--adjust-extension asserted and its local destination is intended
to be ./foo.com/bar.cgi?xyz.css, then the link would be converted
to //foo.com/bar.cgi?xyz.css. Note that only the filename part
has been modified. The rest of the URL has been left untouched,
including the net path ("//") which would otherwise be processed
by Wget and converted to the effective scheme (ie. "http://").
-K
--backup-converted
When converting a file, back up the original version with a .orig
suffix. Affects the behavior of -N.
-m
--mirror
Turn on options suitable for mirroring. This option turns on
recursion and time-stamping, sets infinite recursion depth and
keeps FTP directory listings. It is currently equivalent to -r
-N -l inf --no-remove-listing.
-p
--page-requisites
This option causes Wget to download all the files that are
necessary to properly display a given HTML page. This includes
such things as inlined images, sounds, and referenced
stylesheets.
Ordinarily, when downloading a single HTML page, any requisite
documents that may be needed to display it properly are not
downloaded. Using -r together with -l can help, but since Wget
does not ordinarily distinguish between external and inlined
documents, one is generally left with "leaf documents" that are
missing their requisites.
For instance, say document 1.html contains an "<IMG>" tag
referencing 1.gif and an "<A>" tag pointing to external document
2.html. Say that 2.html is similar but that its image is 2.gif
and it links to 3.html. Say this continues up to some
arbitrarily high number.
If one executes the command:
wget -r -l 2 http://<site>/1.html
then 1.html, 1.gif, 2.html, 2.gif, and 3.html will be downloaded.
As you can see, 3.html is without its requisite 3.gif because
Wget is simply counting the number of hops (up to 2) away from
1.html in order to determine where to stop the recursion.
However, with this command:
wget -r -l 2 -p http://<site>/1.html
all the above files and 3.html's requisite 3.gif will be
downloaded. Similarly,
wget -r -l 1 -p http://<site>/1.html
will cause 1.html, 1.gif, 2.html, and 2.gif to be downloaded.
One might think that:
wget -r -l 0 -p http://<site>/1.html
would download just 1.html and 1.gif, but unfortunately this is
not the case, because -l 0 is equivalent to -l inf---that is,
infinite recursion. To download a single HTML page (or a handful
of them, all specified on the command-line or in a -i URL input
file) and its (or their) requisites, simply leave off -r and -l:
wget -p http://<site>/1.html
Note that Wget will behave as if -r had been specified, but only
that single page and its requisites will be downloaded. Links
from that page to external documents will not be followed.
Actually, to download a single page and all its requisites (even
if they exist on separate websites), and make sure the lot
displays properly locally, this author likes to use a few options
in addition to -p:
wget -E -H -k -K -p http://<site>/<document>
To finish off this topic, it's worth knowing that Wget's idea of
an external document link is any URL specified in an "<A>" tag,
an "<AREA>" tag, or a "<LINK>" tag other than "<LINK
REL="stylesheet">".
--strict-comments
Turn on strict parsing of HTML comments. The default is to
terminate comments at the first occurrence of -->.
According to specifications, HTML comments are expressed as SGML
declarations. Declaration is special markup that begins with <!
and ends with >, such as <!DOCTYPE ...>, that may contain
comments between a pair of -- delimiters. HTML comments are
"empty declarations", SGML declarations without any non-comment
text. Therefore, <!--foo--> is a valid comment, and so is
<!--one-- --two-->, but <!--1--2--> is not.
On the other hand, most HTML writers don't perceive comments as
anything other than text delimited with <!-- and -->, which is
not quite the same. For example, something like <!------------>
works as a valid comment as long as the number of dashes is a
multiple of four (!). If not, the comment technically lasts
until the next --, which may be at the other end of the document.
Because of this, many popular browsers completely ignore the
specification and implement what users have come to expect:
comments delimited with <!-- and -->.
Until version 1.9, Wget interpreted comments strictly, which
resulted in missing links in many web pages that displayed fine
in browsers, but had the misfortune of containing non-compliant
comments. Beginning with version 1.9, Wget has joined the ranks
of clients that implements "naive" comments, terminating each
comment at the first occurrence of -->.
If, for whatever reason, you want strict comment parsing, use
this option to turn it on.
Recursive Accept/Reject Options
-A acclist --accept acclist
-R rejlist --reject rejlist
Specify comma-separated lists of file name suffixes or patterns
to accept or reject. Note that if any of the wildcard characters,
*, ?, [ or ], appear in an element of acclist or rejlist, it will
be treated as a pattern, rather than a suffix. In this case, you
have to enclose the pattern into quotes to prevent your shell
from expanding it, like in -A "*.mp3" or -A '*.mp3'.
--accept-regex urlregex
--reject-regex urlregex
Specify a regular expression to accept or reject the complete
URL.
--regex-type regextype
Specify the regular expression type. Possible types are posix or
pcre. Note that to be able to use pcre type, wget has to be
compiled with libpcre support.
-D domain-list
--domains=domain-list
Set domains to be followed. domain-list is a comma-separated
list of domains. Note that it does not turn on -H.
--exclude-domains domain-list
Specify the domains that are not to be followed.
--follow-ftp
Follow FTP links from HTML documents. Without this option, Wget
will ignore all the FTP links.
--follow-tags=list
Wget has an internal table of HTML tag / attribute pairs that it
considers when looking for linked documents during a recursive
retrieval. If a user wants only a subset of those tags to be
considered, however, he or she should be specify such tags in a
comma-separated list with this option.
--ignore-tags=list
This is the opposite of the --follow-tags option. To skip
certain HTML tags when recursively looking for documents to
download, specify them in a comma-separated list.
In the past, this option was the best bet for downloading a
single page and its requisites, using a command-line like:
wget --ignore-tags=a,area -H -k -K -r http://<site>/<document>
However, the author of this option came across a page with tags
like "<LINK REL="home" HREF="/">" and came to the realization
that specifying tags to ignore was not enough. One can't just
tell Wget to ignore "<LINK>", because then stylesheets will not
be downloaded. Now the best bet for downloading a single page
and its requisites is the dedicated --page-requisites option.
--ignore-case
Ignore case when matching files and directories. This influences
the behavior of -R, -A, -I, and -X options, as well as globbing
implemented when downloading from FTP sites. For example, with
this option, -A "*.txt" will match file1.txt, but also file2.TXT,
file3.TxT, and so on. The quotes in the example are to prevent
the shell from expanding the pattern.
-H
--span-hosts
Enable spanning across hosts when doing recursive retrieving.
-L
--relative
Follow relative links only. Useful for retrieving a specific
home page without any distractions, not even those from the same
hosts.
-I list
--include-directories=list
Specify a comma-separated list of directories you wish to follow
when downloading. Elements of list may contain wildcards.
-X list
--exclude-directories=list
Specify a comma-separated list of directories you wish to exclude
from download. Elements of list may contain wildcards.
-np
--no-parent
Do not ever ascend to the parent directory when retrieving
recursively. This is a useful option, since it guarantees that
only the files below a certain hierarchy will be downloaded.
Wget supports proxies for both HTTP and FTP retrievals. The standard
way to specify proxy location, which Wget recognizes, is using the
following environment variables:
http_proxy
https_proxy
If set, the http_proxy and https_proxy variables should contain
the URLs of the proxies for HTTP and HTTPS connections
respectively.
ftp_proxy
This variable should contain the URL of the proxy for FTP
connections. It is quite common that http_proxy and ftp_proxy
are set to the same URL.
no_proxy
This variable should contain a comma-separated list of domain
extensions proxy should not be used for. For instance, if the
value of no_proxy is .mit.edu, proxy will not be used to retrieve
documents from MIT.
Wget may return one of several error codes if it encounters problems.
0 No problems occurred.
1 Generic error code.
2 Parse error---for instance, when parsing command-line options,
the .wgetrc or .netrc...
3 File I/O error.
4 Network failure.
5 SSL verification failure.
6 Username/password authentication failure.
7 Protocol errors.
8 Server issued an error response.
With the exceptions of 0 and 1, the lower-numbered exit codes take
precedence over higher-numbered ones, when multiple types of errors
are encountered.
In versions of Wget prior to 1.12, Wget's exit status tended to be
unhelpful and inconsistent. Recursive downloads would virtually
always return 0 (success), regardless of any issues encountered, and
non-recursive fetches only returned the status corresponding to the
most recently-attempted download.
/usr/local/etc/wgetrc
Default location of the global startup file.
.wgetrc
User startup file.
You are welcome to submit bug reports via the GNU Wget bug tracker
(see <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?func=additem&group=wget >).
Before actually submitting a bug report, please try to follow a few
simple guidelines.
1. Please try to ascertain that the behavior you see really is a
bug. If Wget crashes, it's a bug. If Wget does not behave as
documented, it's a bug. If things work strange, but you are not
sure about the way they are supposed to work, it might well be a
bug, but you might want to double-check the documentation and the
mailing lists.
2. Try to repeat the bug in as simple circumstances as possible.
E.g. if Wget crashes while downloading wget -rl0 -kKE -t5
--no-proxy http://example.com -o /tmp/log, you should try to see
if the crash is repeatable, and if will occur with a simpler set
of options. You might even try to start the download at the page
where the crash occurred to see if that page somehow triggered
the crash.
Also, while I will probably be interested to know the contents of
your .wgetrc file, just dumping it into the debug message is
probably a bad idea. Instead, you should first try to see if the
bug repeats with .wgetrc moved out of the way. Only if it turns
out that .wgetrc settings affect the bug, mail me the relevant
parts of the file.
3. Please start Wget with -d option and send us the resulting output
(or relevant parts thereof). If Wget was compiled without debug
support, recompile it---it is much easier to trace bugs with
debug support on.
Note: please make sure to remove any potentially sensitive
information from the debug log before sending it to the bug
address. The "-d" won't go out of its way to collect sensitive
information, but the log will contain a fairly complete
transcript of Wget's communication with the server, which may
include passwords and pieces of downloaded data. Since the bug
address is publically archived, you may assume that all bug
reports are visible to the public.
4. If Wget has crashed, try to run it in a debugger, e.g. "gdb
`which wget` core" and type "where" to get the backtrace. This
may not work if the system administrator has disabled core files,
but it is safe to try.
This is not the complete manual for GNU Wget. For more complete
information, including more detailed explanations of some of the
options, and a number of commands available for use with .wgetrc
files and the -e option, see the GNU Info entry for wget.
Originally written by Hrvoje Nikšić <hniksic@xemacs.org>.
Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004,
2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2015 Free Software
Foundation, Inc.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled
"GNU Free Documentation License".
This page is part of the wget (interactive network downloader.)
project. Information about the project can be found at
⟨http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/⟩. If you have a bug report for
this manual page, send it to bug-sed@gnu.org. This page was obtained
from the tarball wget-1.19.1.tar.gz fetched from
⟨https://www.gnu.org/software/wget/⟩ on 2017-07-05. If you discover
any rendering problems in this HTML version of the page, or you
believe there is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or
you have corrections or improvements to the information in this
COLOPHON (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail
to man-pages@man7.org
GNU Wget 1.19.1 2017-07-05 WGET(1)