1 This is Info file wget.info, produced by Makeinfo version 1.68 from the
2 input file ./wget.texi.
4 INFO-DIR-SECTION Net Utilities
5 INFO-DIR-SECTION World Wide Web
7 * Wget: (wget). The non-interactive network downloader.
10 This file documents the the GNU Wget utility for downloading network
13 Copyright (C) 1996, 1997, 1998, 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
15 Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this
16 manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are
17 preserved on all copies.
19 Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of
20 this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided also
21 that the sections entitled "Copying" and "GNU General Public License"
22 are included exactly as in the original, and provided that the entire
23 resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission
24 notice identical to this one.
27 File: wget.info, Node: Top, Next: Overview, Prev: (dir), Up: (dir)
32 This manual documents version 1.5.3+dev of GNU Wget, the freely
33 available utility for network download.
35 Copyright (C) 1996, 1997, 1998 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
39 * Overview:: Features of Wget.
40 * Invoking:: Wget command-line arguments.
41 * Recursive Retrieval:: Description of recursive retrieval.
42 * Following Links:: The available methods of chasing links.
43 * Time-Stamping:: Mirroring according to time-stamps.
44 * Startup File:: Wget's initialization file.
45 * Examples:: Examples of usage.
46 * Various:: The stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else.
47 * Appendices:: Some useful references.
48 * Copying:: You may give out copies of Wget.
49 * Concept Index:: Topics covered by this manual.
52 File: wget.info, Node: Overview, Next: Invoking, Prev: Top, Up: Top
57 GNU Wget is a freely available network utility to retrieve files from
58 the World Wide Web, using HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) and FTP
59 (File Transfer Protocol), the two most widely used Internet protocols.
60 It has many useful features to make downloading easier, some of them
63 * Wget is non-interactive, meaning that it can work in the
64 background, while the user is not logged on. This allows you to
65 start a retrieval and disconnect from the system, letting Wget
66 finish the work. By contrast, most of the Web browsers require
67 constant user's presence, which can be a great hindrance when
68 transferring a lot of data.
70 * Wget is capable of descending recursively through the structure of
71 HTML documents and FTP directory trees, making a local copy of the
72 directory hierarchy similar to the one on the remote server. This
73 feature can be used to mirror archives and home pages, or traverse
74 the web in search of data, like a WWW robot (*Note Robots::). In
75 that spirit, Wget understands the `norobots' convention.
77 * File name wildcard matching and recursive mirroring of directories
78 are available when retrieving via FTP. Wget can read the
79 time-stamp information given by both HTTP and FTP servers, and
80 store it locally. Thus Wget can see if the remote file has
81 changed since last retrieval, and automatically retrieve the new
82 version if it has. This makes Wget suitable for mirroring of FTP
83 sites, as well as home pages.
85 * Wget works exceedingly well on slow or unstable connections,
86 retrying the document until it is fully retrieved, or until a
87 user-specified retry count is surpassed. It will try to resume the
88 download from the point of interruption, using `REST' with FTP and
89 `Range' with HTTP servers that support them.
91 * By default, Wget supports proxy servers, which can lighten the
92 network load, speed up retrieval and provide access behind
93 firewalls. However, if you are behind a firewall that requires
94 that you use a socks style gateway, you can get the socks library
95 and build wget with support for socks. Wget also supports the
96 passive FTP downloading as an option.
98 * Builtin features offer mechanisms to tune which links you wish to
99 follow (*Note Following Links::).
101 * The retrieval is conveniently traced with printing dots, each dot
102 representing a fixed amount of data received (1KB by default).
103 These representations can be customized to your preferences.
105 * Most of the features are fully configurable, either through
106 command line options, or via the initialization file `.wgetrc'
107 (*Note Startup File::). Wget allows you to define "global"
108 startup files (`/usr/local/etc/wgetrc' by default) for site
111 * Finally, GNU Wget is free software. This means that everyone may
112 use it, redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the
113 GNU General Public License, as published by the Free Software
114 Foundation (*Note Copying::).
117 File: wget.info, Node: Invoking, Next: Recursive Retrieval, Prev: Overview, Up: Top
122 By default, Wget is very simple to invoke. The basic syntax is:
124 wget [OPTION]... [URL]...
126 Wget will simply download all the URLs specified on the command
127 line. URL is a "Uniform Resource Locator", as defined below.
129 However, you may wish to change some of the default parameters of
130 Wget. You can do it two ways: permanently, adding the appropriate
131 command to `.wgetrc' (*Note Startup File::), or specifying it on the
138 * Basic Startup Options::
139 * Logging and Input File Options::
141 * Directory Options::
144 * Recursive Retrieval Options::
145 * Recursive Accept/Reject Options::
148 File: wget.info, Node: URL Format, Next: Option Syntax, Prev: Invoking, Up: Invoking
153 "URL" is an acronym for Uniform Resource Locator. A uniform
154 resource locator is a compact string representation for a resource
155 available via the Internet. Wget recognizes the URL syntax as per
156 RFC1738. This is the most widely used form (square brackets denote
159 http://host[:port]/directory/file
160 ftp://host[:port]/directory/file
162 You can also encode your username and password within a URL:
164 ftp://user:password@host/path
165 http://user:password@host/path
167 Either USER or PASSWORD, or both, may be left out. If you leave out
168 either the HTTP username or password, no authentication will be sent.
169 If you leave out the FTP username, `anonymous' will be used. If you
170 leave out the FTP password, your email address will be supplied as a
173 You can encode unsafe characters in a URL as `%xy', `xy' being the
174 hexadecimal representation of the character's ASCII value. Some common
175 unsafe characters include `%' (quoted as `%25'), `:' (quoted as `%3A'),
176 and `@' (quoted as `%40'). Refer to RFC1738 for a comprehensive list
177 of unsafe characters.
179 Wget also supports the `type' feature for FTP URLs. By default, FTP
180 documents are retrieved in the binary mode (type `i'), which means that
181 they are downloaded unchanged. Another useful mode is the `a'
182 ("ASCII") mode, which converts the line delimiters between the
183 different operating systems, and is thus useful for text files. Here
186 ftp://host/directory/file;type=a
188 Two alternative variants of URL specification are also supported,
189 because of historical (hysterical?) reasons and their widespreaded use.
191 FTP-only syntax (supported by `NcFTP'):
194 HTTP-only syntax (introduced by `Netscape'):
197 These two alternative forms are deprecated, and may cease being
198 supported in the future.
200 If you do not understand the difference between these notations, or
201 do not know which one to use, just use the plain ordinary format you use
202 with your favorite browser, like `Lynx' or `Netscape'.
204 ---------- Footnotes ----------
206 (1) If you have a `.netrc' file in your home directory, password
207 will also be searched for there.
210 File: wget.info, Node: Option Syntax, Next: Basic Startup Options, Prev: URL Format, Up: Invoking
215 Since Wget uses GNU getopts to process its arguments, every option
216 has a short form and a long form. Long options are more convenient to
217 remember, but take time to type. You may freely mix different option
218 styles, or specify options after the command-line arguments. Thus you
221 wget -r --tries=10 http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -o log
223 The space between the option accepting an argument and the argument
224 may be omitted. Instead `-o log' you can write `-olog'.
226 You may put several options that do not require arguments together,
231 This is a complete equivalent of:
235 Since the options can be specified after the arguments, you may
236 terminate them with `--'. So the following will try to download URL
237 `-x', reporting failure to `log':
241 The options that accept comma-separated lists all respect the
242 convention that specifying an empty list clears its value. This can be
243 useful to clear the `.wgetrc' settings. For instance, if your `.wgetrc'
244 sets `exclude_directories' to `/cgi-bin', the following example will
245 first reset it, and then set it to exclude `/~nobody' and `/~somebody'.
246 You can also clear the lists in `.wgetrc' (*Note Wgetrc Syntax::).
248 wget -X '' -X /~nobody,/~somebody
251 File: wget.info, Node: Basic Startup Options, Next: Logging and Input File Options, Prev: Option Syntax, Up: Invoking
253 Basic Startup Options
254 =====================
258 Display the version of Wget.
262 Print a help message describing all of Wget's command-line options.
266 Go to background immediately after startup. If no output file is
267 specified via the `-o', output is redirected to `wget-log'.
271 Execute COMMAND as if it were a part of `.wgetrc' (*Note Startup
272 File::). A command thus invoked will be executed *after* the
273 commands in `.wgetrc', thus taking precedence over them.
276 File: wget.info, Node: Logging and Input File Options, Next: Download Options, Prev: Basic Startup Options, Up: Invoking
278 Logging and Input File Options
279 ==============================
282 `--output-file=LOGFILE'
283 Log all messages to LOGFILE. The messages are normally reported
287 `--append-output=LOGFILE'
288 Append to LOGFILE. This is the same as `-o', only it appends to
289 LOGFILE instead of overwriting the old log file. If LOGFILE does
290 not exist, a new file is created.
294 Turn on debug output, meaning various information important to the
295 developers of Wget if it does not work properly. Your system
296 administrator may have chosen to compile Wget without debug
297 support, in which case `-d' will not work. Please note that
298 compiling with debug support is always safe--Wget compiled with
299 the debug support will *not* print any debug info unless requested
300 with `-d'. *Note Reporting Bugs:: for more information on how to
301 use `-d' for sending bug reports.
305 Turn off Wget's output.
309 Turn on verbose output, with all the available data. The default
314 Non-verbose output--turn off verbose without being completely quiet
315 (use `-q' for that), which means that error messages and basic
316 information still get printed.
320 Read URLs from FILE, in which case no URLs need to be on the
321 command line. If there are URLs both on the command line and in
322 an input file, those on the command lines will be the first ones to
323 be retrieved. The FILE need not be an HTML document (but no harm
324 if it is)--it is enough if the URLs are just listed sequentially.
326 However, if you specify `--force-html', the document will be
327 regarded as `html'. In that case you may have problems with
328 relative links, which you can solve either by adding `<base
329 href="URL">' to the documents or by specifying `--base=URL' on the
334 When input is read from a file, force it to be treated as an HTML
335 file. This enables you to retrieve relative links from existing
336 HTML files on your local disk, by adding `<base href="URL">' to
337 HTML, or using the `--base' command-line option.
341 When used in conjunction with `-F', prepends URL to relative links
342 in the file specified by `-i'.
345 File: wget.info, Node: Download Options, Next: Directory Options, Prev: Logging and Input File Options, Up: Invoking
352 Set number of retries to NUMBER. Specify 0 or `inf' for infinite
356 `--output-document=FILE'
357 The documents will not be written to the appropriate files, but
358 all will be concatenated together and written to FILE. If FILE
359 already exists, it will be overwritten. If the FILE is `-', the
360 documents will be written to standard output. Including this
361 option automatically sets the number of tries to 1.
365 If a file is downloaded more than once in the same directory,
366 wget's behavior depends on a few options, including `-nc'. In
367 certain cases, the local file will be "clobbered", or overwritten,
368 upon repeated download. In other cases it will be preserved.
370 When running wget without `-N', `-nc', or `-r', downloading the
371 same file in the same directory will result in the original copy
372 of `FILE' being preserved and the second copy being named
373 `FILE.1'. If that file is downloaded yet again, the third copy
374 will be named `FILE.2', and so on. When `-nc' is specified, this
375 behavior is suppressed, and wget will refuse to download newer
376 copies of `FILE'. Therefore, "no-clobber" is actually a misnomer
377 in this mode - it's not clobbering that's prevented (as the
378 numeric suffixes were already preventing clobbering), but rather
379 the multiple version saving that's prevented.
381 When running wget with `-r', but without `-N' or `-nc',
382 re-downloading a file will result in the new copy simply
383 overwriting the old. Adding `-nc' will prevent this behavior,
384 instead causing the original version to be preserved and any newer
385 copies on the server to be ignored.
387 When running wget with `-N', with or without `-r', the decision as
388 to whether or not to download a newer copy of a file depends on
389 the local and remote timestamp and size of the file (*Note
390 Time-Stamping::). `-nc' may not be specified at the same time as
393 Note that when `-nc' is specified, files with the suffixes `.html'
394 or (yuck) `.htm' will be loaded from the local disk and parsed as
395 if they had been retrieved from the Web.
399 Continue getting an existing file. This is useful when you want to
400 finish up the download started by another program, or a previous
401 instance of Wget. Thus you can write:
403 wget -c ftp://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/ls-lR.Z
405 If there is a file name `ls-lR.Z' in the current directory, Wget
406 will assume that it is the first portion of the remote file, and
407 will require the server to continue the retrieval from an offset
408 equal to the length of the local file.
410 Note that you need not specify this option if all you want is Wget
411 to continue retrieving where it left off when the connection is
412 lost--Wget does this by default. You need this option only when
413 you want to continue retrieval of a file already halfway
414 retrieved, saved by another FTP client, or left by Wget being
417 Without `-c', the previous example would just begin to download the
418 remote file to `ls-lR.Z.1'. The `-c' option is also applicable
419 for HTTP servers that support the `Range' header.
421 Note that if you use `-c' on a file that's already downloaded
422 completely, `FILE' will not be changed, nor will a second `FILE.1'
426 Set the retrieval style to STYLE. Wget traces the retrieval of
427 each document by printing dots on the screen, each dot
428 representing a fixed amount of retrieved data. Any number of dots
429 may be separated in a "cluster", to make counting easier. This
430 option allows you to choose one of the pre-defined styles,
431 determining the number of bytes represented by a dot, the number
432 of dots in a cluster, and the number of dots on the line.
434 With the `default' style each dot represents 1K, there are ten dots
435 in a cluster and 50 dots in a line. The `binary' style has a more
436 "computer"-like orientation--8K dots, 16-dots clusters and 48 dots
437 per line (which makes for 384K lines). The `mega' style is
438 suitable for downloading very large files--each dot represents 64K
439 retrieved, there are eight dots in a cluster, and 48 dots on each
440 line (so each line contains 3M). The `micro' style is exactly the
441 reverse; it is suitable for downloading small files, with 128-byte
442 dots, 8 dots per cluster, and 48 dots (6K) per line.
446 Turn on time-stamping. *Note Time-Stamping:: for details.
450 Print the headers sent by HTTP servers and responses sent by FTP
454 When invoked with this option, Wget will behave as a Web "spider",
455 which means that it will not download the pages, just check that
456 they are there. You can use it to check your bookmarks, e.g. with:
458 wget --spider --force-html -i bookmarks.html
460 This feature needs much more work for Wget to get close to the
461 functionality of real WWW spiders.
465 Set the read timeout to SECONDS seconds. Whenever a network read
466 is issued, the file descriptor is checked for a timeout, which
467 could otherwise leave a pending connection (uninterrupted read).
468 The default timeout is 900 seconds (fifteen minutes). Setting
469 timeout to 0 will disable checking for timeouts.
471 Please do not lower the default timeout value with this option
472 unless you know what you are doing.
476 Wait the specified number of seconds between the retrievals. Use
477 of this option is recommended, as it lightens the server load by
478 making the requests less frequent. Instead of in seconds, the
479 time can be specified in minutes using the `m' suffix, in hours
480 using `h' suffix, or in days using `d' suffix.
482 Specifying a large value for this option is useful if the network
483 or the destination host is down, so that Wget can wait long enough
484 to reasonably expect the network error to be fixed before the
487 `--waitretry=SECONDS'
488 If you don't want Wget to wait between *every* retrieval, but only
489 between retries of failed downloads, you can use this option.
490 Wget will use "linear backoff", waiting 1 second after the first
491 failure on a given file, then waiting 2 seconds after the second
492 failure on that file, up to the maximum number of SECONDS you
493 specify. Therefore, a value of 10 will actually make Wget wait up
494 to (1 + 2 + ... + 10) = 55 seconds per file.
496 Note that this option is turned on by default in the global
501 Turn proxy support on or off. The proxy is on by default if the
502 appropriate environmental variable is defined.
506 Specify download quota for automatic retrievals. The value can be
507 specified in bytes (default), kilobytes (with `k' suffix), or
508 megabytes (with `m' suffix).
510 Note that quota will never affect downloading a single file. So
511 if you specify `wget -Q10k ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/ls-lR.gz',
512 all of the `ls-lR.gz' will be downloaded. The same goes even when
513 several URLs are specified on the command-line. However, quota is
514 respected when retrieving either recursively, or from an input
515 file. Thus you may safely type `wget -Q2m -i sites'--download
516 will be aborted when the quota is exceeded.
518 Setting quota to 0 or to `inf' unlimits the download quota.
521 File: wget.info, Node: Directory Options, Next: HTTP Options, Prev: Download Options, Up: Invoking
528 Do not create a hierarchy of directories when retrieving
529 recursively. With this option turned on, all files will get saved
530 to the current directory, without clobbering (if a name shows up
531 more than once, the filenames will get extensions `.n').
534 `--force-directories'
535 The opposite of `-nd'--create a hierarchy of directories, even if
536 one would not have been created otherwise. E.g. `wget -x
537 http://fly.cc.fer.hr/robots.txt' will save the downloaded file to
538 `fly.cc.fer.hr/robots.txt'.
541 `--no-host-directories'
542 Disable generation of host-prefixed directories. By default,
543 invoking Wget with `-r http://fly.cc.fer.hr/' will create a
544 structure of directories beginning with `fly.cc.fer.hr/'. This
545 option disables such behavior.
548 Ignore NUMBER directory components. This is useful for getting a
549 fine-grained control over the directory where recursive retrieval
552 Take, for example, the directory at
553 `ftp://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/'. If you retrieve it with `-r',
554 it will be saved locally under `ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/'.
555 While the `-nH' option can remove the `ftp.xemacs.org/' part, you
556 are still stuck with `pub/xemacs'. This is where `--cut-dirs'
557 comes in handy; it makes Wget not "see" NUMBER remote directory
558 components. Here are several examples of how `--cut-dirs' option
561 No options -> ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/
563 -nH --cut-dirs=1 -> xemacs/
564 -nH --cut-dirs=2 -> .
566 --cut-dirs=1 -> ftp.xemacs.org/xemacs/
569 If you just want to get rid of the directory structure, this
570 option is similar to a combination of `-nd' and `-P'. However,
571 unlike `-nd', `--cut-dirs' does not lose with subdirectories--for
572 instance, with `-nH --cut-dirs=1', a `beta/' subdirectory will be
573 placed to `xemacs/beta', as one would expect.
576 `--directory-prefix=PREFIX'
577 Set directory prefix to PREFIX. The "directory prefix" is the
578 directory where all other files and subdirectories will be saved
579 to, i.e. the top of the retrieval tree. The default is `.' (the
583 File: wget.info, Node: HTTP Options, Next: FTP Options, Prev: Directory Options, Up: Invoking
590 If a file of type `text/html' is downloaded and the URL does not
591 end with the regexp "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?", this option will cause
592 the suffix `.html' to be appended to the local filename. This is
593 useful, for instance, when you're mirroring a remote site that uses
594 `.asp' pages, but you want the mirrored pages to be viewable on
595 your stock Apache server. Another good use for this is when you're
596 downloading the output of CGIs. A URL like
597 `http://site.com/article.cgi?25' will be saved as
598 `article.cgi?25.html'.
600 Note that filenames changed in this way will be re-downloaded
601 every time you re-mirror a site, because wget can't tell that the
602 local `X.html' file corresponds to remote URL `X' (since it
603 doesn't yet know that the URL produces output of type `text/html'.
604 To prevent this re-downloading, you must use `-k' and `-K' so
605 that the original version of the file will be saved as `X.orig'
606 (*Note Recursive Retrieval Options::).
609 `--http-passwd=PASSWORD'
610 Specify the username USER and password PASSWORD on an HTTP server.
611 According to the type of the challenge, Wget will encode them
612 using either the `basic' (insecure) or the `digest' authentication
615 Another way to specify username and password is in the URL itself
616 (*Note URL Format::). For more information about security issues
617 with Wget, *Note Security Considerations::.
621 When set to off, disable server-side cache. In this case, Wget
622 will send the remote server an appropriate directive (`Pragma:
623 no-cache') to get the file from the remote service, rather than
624 returning the cached version. This is especially useful for
625 retrieving and flushing out-of-date documents on proxy servers.
627 Caching is allowed by default.
630 Unfortunately, some HTTP servers (CGI programs, to be more
631 precise) send out bogus `Content-Length' headers, which makes Wget
632 go wild, as it thinks not all the document was retrieved. You can
633 spot this syndrome if Wget retries getting the same document again
634 and again, each time claiming that the (otherwise normal)
635 connection has closed on the very same byte.
637 With this option, Wget will ignore the `Content-Length' header--as
640 `--header=ADDITIONAL-HEADER'
641 Define an ADDITIONAL-HEADER to be passed to the HTTP servers.
642 Headers must contain a `:' preceded by one or more non-blank
643 characters, and must not contain newlines.
645 You may define more than one additional header by specifying
646 `--header' more than once.
648 wget --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2' \
649 --header='Accept-Language: hr' \
650 http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
652 Specification of an empty string as the header value will clear all
653 previous user-defined headers.
656 `--proxy-passwd=PASSWORD'
657 Specify the username USER and password PASSWORD for authentication
658 on a proxy server. Wget will encode them using the `basic'
659 authentication scheme.
662 Include `Referer: URL' header in HTTP request. Useful for
663 retrieving documents with server-side processing that assume they
664 are always being retrieved by interactive web browsers and only
665 come out properly when Referer is set to one of the pages that
670 Save the headers sent by the HTTP server to the file, preceding the
671 actual contents, with an empty line as the separator.
674 `--user-agent=AGENT-STRING'
675 Identify as AGENT-STRING to the HTTP server.
677 The HTTP protocol allows the clients to identify themselves using a
678 `User-Agent' header field. This enables distinguishing the WWW
679 software, usually for statistical purposes or for tracing of
680 protocol violations. Wget normally identifies as `Wget/VERSION',
681 VERSION being the current version number of Wget.
683 However, some sites have been known to impose the policy of
684 tailoring the output according to the `User-Agent'-supplied
685 information. While conceptually this is not such a bad idea, it
686 has been abused by servers denying information to clients other
687 than `Mozilla' or Microsoft `Internet Explorer'. This option
688 allows you to change the `User-Agent' line issued by Wget. Use of
689 this option is discouraged, unless you really know what you are
693 File: wget.info, Node: FTP Options, Next: Recursive Retrieval Options, Prev: HTTP Options, Up: Invoking
699 Usually, when retrieving FTP directories recursively and a symbolic
700 link is encountered, the linked-to file is not downloaded.
701 Instead, a matching symbolic link is created on the local
702 filesystem. The pointed-to file will not be downloaded unless
703 this recursive retrieval would have encountered it separately and
704 downloaded it anyway.
706 When `--retr-symlinks' is specified, however, symbolic links are
707 traversed and the pointed-to files are retrieved. At this time,
708 this option does not cause wget to traverse symlinks to
709 directories and recurse through them, but in the future it should
710 be enhanced to do this.
712 Note that when retrieving a file (not a directory) because it was
713 specified on the commandline, rather than because it was recursed
714 to, this option has no effect. Symbolic links are always
715 traversed in this case.
719 Turn FTP globbing on or off. Globbing means you may use the
720 shell-like special characters ("wildcards"), like `*', `?', `['
721 and `]' to retrieve more than one file from the same directory at
724 wget ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/*.msg
726 By default, globbing will be turned on if the URL contains a
727 globbing character. This option may be used to turn globbing on
730 You may have to quote the URL to protect it from being expanded by
731 your shell. Globbing makes Wget look for a directory listing,
732 which is system-specific. This is why it currently works only
733 with Unix FTP servers (and the ones emulating Unix `ls' output).
736 Use the "passive" FTP retrieval scheme, in which the client
737 initiates the data connection. This is sometimes required for FTP
738 to work behind firewalls.
741 File: wget.info, Node: Recursive Retrieval Options, Next: Recursive Accept/Reject Options, Prev: FTP Options, Up: Invoking
743 Recursive Retrieval Options
744 ===========================
748 Turn on recursive retrieving. *Note Recursive Retrieval:: for more
753 Specify recursion maximum depth level DEPTH (*Note Recursive
754 Retrieval::). The default maximum depth is 5.
757 This option tells Wget to delete every single file it downloads,
758 *after* having done so. It is useful for pre-fetching popular
759 pages through a proxy, e.g.:
761 wget -r -nd --delete-after http://whatever.com/~popular/page/
763 The `-r' option is to retrieve recursively, and `-nd' to not
766 Note that `--delete-after' deletes files on the local machine. It
767 does not issue the `DELE' command to remote FTP sites, for
768 instance. Also note that when `--delete-after' is specified,
769 `--convert-links' is ignored, so `.orig' files are simply not
770 created in the first place.
774 Convert the non-relative links to relative ones locally. Only the
775 references to the documents actually downloaded will be converted;
776 the rest will be left unchanged.
778 Note that only at the end of the download can Wget know which
779 links have been downloaded. Because of that, much of the work
780 done by `-k' will be performed at the end of the downloads.
784 When converting a file, back up the original version with a `.orig'
785 suffix. Affects the behavior of `-N' (*Note HTTP Time-Stamping
790 Turn on options suitable for mirroring. This option turns on
791 recursion and time-stamping, sets infinite recursion depth and
792 keeps FTP directory listings. It is currently equivalent to `-r
796 `--dont-remove-listing'
797 Don't remove the temporary `.listing' files generated by FTP
798 retrievals. Normally, these files contain the raw directory
799 listings received from FTP servers. Not removing them can be
800 useful to access the full remote file list when running a mirror,
801 or for debugging purposes.
805 This option causes wget to download all the files that are
806 necessary to properly display a given HTML page. This includes
807 such things as inlined images, sounds, and referenced stylesheets.
809 Ordinarily, when downloading a single HTML page, any requisite
810 documents that may be needed to display it properly are not
811 downloaded. Using `-r' together with `-l' can help, but since
812 wget does not ordinarily distinguish between external and inlined
813 documents, one is generally left with "leaf documents" that are
814 missing their requisites.
816 For instance, say document `1.html' contains an `<IMG>' tag
817 referencing `1.gif' and an `<A>' tag pointing to external document
818 `2.html'. Say that `2.html' is the same but that its image is
819 `2.gif' and it links to `3.html'. Say this continues up to some
820 arbitrarily high number.
822 If one executes the command:
824 wget -r -l 2 http://SITE/1.html
826 then `1.html', `1.gif', `2.html', `2.gif', and `3.html' will be
827 downloaded. As you can see, `3.html' is without its requisite
828 `3.gif' because wget is simply counting the number of hops (up to
829 2) away from `1.html' in order to determine where to stop the
830 recursion. However, with this command:
832 wget -r -l 2 -p http://SITE/1.html
834 all the above files *and* `3.html''s requisite `3.gif' will be
835 downloaded. Similarly,
837 wget -r -l 1 -p http://SITE/1.html
839 will cause `1.html', `1.gif', `2.html', and `2.gif' to be
840 downloaded. One might think that:
842 wget -r -l 0 -p http://SITE/1.html
844 would download just `1.html' and `1.gif', but unfortunately this
845 is not the case, because `-l 0' is equivalent to `-l inf' - that
846 is, infinite recursion. To download a single HTML page (or a
847 handful of them, all specified on the commandline or in a `-i' URL
848 input file) and its requisites, simply leave off `-p' and `-l':
850 wget -p http://SITE/1.html
852 Note that wget will behave as if `-r' had been specified, but only
853 that single page and its requisites will be downloaded. Links
854 from that page to external documents will not be followed.
855 Actually, to download a single page and all its requisites (even
856 if they exist on separate websites), and make sure the lot
857 displays properly locally, this author likes to use a few options
860 wget -E -H -k -K -nh -p http://SITE/DOCUMENT
862 To finish off this topic, it's worth knowing that wget's idea of an
863 external document link is any URL specified in an `<A>' tag, an
864 `<AREA>' tag, or a `<LINK>' tag other than `<LINK
868 File: wget.info, Node: Recursive Accept/Reject Options, Prev: Recursive Retrieval Options, Up: Invoking
870 Recursive Accept/Reject Options
871 ===============================
873 `-A ACCLIST --accept ACCLIST'
874 `-R REJLIST --reject REJLIST'
875 Specify comma-separated lists of file name suffixes or patterns to
876 accept or reject (*Note Types of Files:: for more details).
879 `--domains=DOMAIN-LIST'
880 Set domains to be accepted and DNS looked-up, where DOMAIN-LIST is
881 a comma-separated list. Note that it does *not* turn on `-H'.
882 This option speeds things up, even if only one host is spanned
883 (*Note Domain Acceptance::).
885 `--exclude-domains DOMAIN-LIST'
886 Exclude the domains given in a comma-separated DOMAIN-LIST from
887 DNS-lookup (*Note Domain Acceptance::).
890 Follow FTP links from HTML documents. Without this option, Wget
891 will ignore all the FTP links.
894 Wget has an internal table of HTML tag / attribute pairs that it
895 considers when looking for linked documents during a recursive
896 retrieval. If a user wants only a subset of those tags to be
897 considered, however, he or she should be specify such tags in a
898 comma-separated LIST with this option.
902 This is the opposite of the `--follow-tags' option. To skip
903 certain HTML tags when recursively looking for documents to
904 download, specify them in a comma-separated LIST.
906 In the past, the `-G' option was the best bet for downloading a
907 single page and its requisites, using a commandline like:
909 wget -Ga,area -H -k -K -nh -r http://SITE/DOCUMENT
911 However, the author of this option came across a page with tags
912 like `<LINK REL="home" HREF="/">' and came to the realization that
913 `-G' was not enough. One can't just tell wget to ignore `<LINK>',
914 because then stylesheets will not be downloaded. Now the best bet
915 for downloading a single page and its requisites is the dedicated
916 `--page-requisites' option.
920 Enable spanning across hosts when doing recursive retrieving
925 Follow relative links only. Useful for retrieving a specific home
926 page without any distractions, not even those from the same hosts
927 (*Note Relative Links::).
930 `--include-directories=LIST'
931 Specify a comma-separated list of directories you wish to follow
932 when downloading (*Note Directory-Based Limits:: for more
933 details.) Elements of LIST may contain wildcards.
936 `--exclude-directories=LIST'
937 Specify a comma-separated list of directories you wish to exclude
938 from download (*Note Directory-Based Limits:: for more details.)
939 Elements of LIST may contain wildcards.
943 Disable the time-consuming DNS lookup of almost all hosts (*Note
949 Do not ever ascend to the parent directory when retrieving
950 recursively. This is a useful option, since it guarantees that
951 only the files *below* a certain hierarchy will be downloaded.
952 *Note Directory-Based Limits:: for more details.
955 File: wget.info, Node: Recursive Retrieval, Next: Following Links, Prev: Invoking, Up: Top
960 GNU Wget is capable of traversing parts of the Web (or a single HTTP
961 or FTP server), depth-first following links and directory structure.
962 This is called "recursive" retrieving, or "recursion".
964 With HTTP URLs, Wget retrieves and parses the HTML from the given
965 URL, documents, retrieving the files the HTML document was referring
966 to, through markups like `href', or `src'. If the freshly downloaded
967 file is also of type `text/html', it will be parsed and followed
970 The maximum "depth" to which the retrieval may descend is specified
971 with the `-l' option (the default maximum depth is five layers). *Note
972 Recursive Retrieval::.
974 When retrieving an FTP URL recursively, Wget will retrieve all the
975 data from the given directory tree (including the subdirectories up to
976 the specified depth) on the remote server, creating its mirror image
977 locally. FTP retrieval is also limited by the `depth' parameter.
979 By default, Wget will create a local directory tree, corresponding to
980 the one found on the remote server.
982 Recursive retrieving can find a number of applications, the most
983 important of which is mirroring. It is also useful for WWW
984 presentations, and any other opportunities where slow network
985 connections should be bypassed by storing the files locally.
987 You should be warned that invoking recursion may cause grave
988 overloading on your system, because of the fast exchange of data
989 through the network; all of this may hamper other users' work. The
990 same stands for the foreign server you are mirroring--the more requests
991 it gets in a rows, the greater is its load.
993 Careless retrieving can also fill your file system uncontrollably,
994 which can grind the machine to a halt.
996 The load can be minimized by lowering the maximum recursion level
997 (`-l') and/or by lowering the number of retries (`-t'). You may also
998 consider using the `-w' option to slow down your requests to the remote
999 servers, as well as the numerous options to narrow the number of
1000 followed links (*Note Following Links::).
1002 Recursive retrieval is a good thing when used properly. Please take
1003 all precautions not to wreak havoc through carelessness.
1006 File: wget.info, Node: Following Links, Next: Time-Stamping, Prev: Recursive Retrieval, Up: Top
1011 When retrieving recursively, one does not wish to retrieve loads of
1012 unnecessary data. Most of the time the users bear in mind exactly what
1013 they want to download, and want Wget to follow only specific links.
1015 For example, if you wish to download the music archive from
1016 `fly.cc.fer.hr', you will not want to download all the home pages that
1017 happen to be referenced by an obscure part of the archive.
1019 Wget possesses several mechanisms that allows you to fine-tune which
1020 links it will follow.
1024 * Relative Links:: Follow relative links only.
1025 * Host Checking:: Follow links on the same host.
1026 * Domain Acceptance:: Check on a list of domains.
1027 * All Hosts:: No host restrictions.
1028 * Types of Files:: Getting only certain files.
1029 * Directory-Based Limits:: Getting only certain directories.
1030 * FTP Links:: Following FTP links.
1033 File: wget.info, Node: Relative Links, Next: Host Checking, Prev: Following Links, Up: Following Links
1038 When only relative links are followed (option `-L'), recursive
1039 retrieving will never span hosts. No time-expensive DNS-lookups will
1040 be performed, and the process will be very fast, with the minimum
1041 strain of the network. This will suit your needs often, especially when
1042 mirroring the output of various `x2html' converters, since they
1043 generally output relative links.
1046 File: wget.info, Node: Host Checking, Next: Domain Acceptance, Prev: Relative Links, Up: Following Links
1051 The drawback of following the relative links solely is that humans
1052 often tend to mix them with absolute links to the very same host, and
1053 the very same page. In this mode (which is the default mode for
1054 following links) all URLs that refer to the same host will be retrieved.
1056 The problem with this option are the aliases of the hosts and
1057 domains. Thus there is no way for Wget to know that `regoc.srce.hr' and
1058 `www.srce.hr' are the same host, or that `fly.cc.fer.hr' is the same as
1059 `fly.cc.etf.hr'. Whenever an absolute link is encountered, the host is
1060 DNS-looked-up with `gethostbyname' to check whether we are maybe
1061 dealing with the same hosts. Although the results of `gethostbyname'
1062 are cached, it is still a great slowdown, e.g. when dealing with large
1063 indices of home pages on different hosts (because each of the hosts
1064 must be DNS-resolved to see whether it just *might* be an alias of the
1067 To avoid the overhead you may use `-nh', which will turn off
1068 DNS-resolving and make Wget compare hosts literally. This will make
1069 things run much faster, but also much less reliable (e.g. `www.srce.hr'
1070 and `regoc.srce.hr' will be flagged as different hosts).
1072 Note that modern HTTP servers allow one IP address to host several
1073 "virtual servers", each having its own directory hierarchy. Such
1074 "servers" are distinguished by their hostnames (all of which point to
1075 the same IP address); for this to work, a client must send a `Host'
1076 header, which is what Wget does. However, in that case Wget *must not*
1077 try to divine a host's "real" address, nor try to use the same hostname
1078 for each access, i.e. `-nh' must be turned on.
1080 In other words, the `-nh' option must be used to enable the
1081 retrieval from virtual servers distinguished by their hostnames. As the
1082 number of such server setups grow, the behavior of `-nh' may become the
1083 default in the future.
1086 File: wget.info, Node: Domain Acceptance, Next: All Hosts, Prev: Host Checking, Up: Following Links
1091 With the `-D' option you may specify the domains that will be
1092 followed. The hosts the domain of which is not in this list will not be
1093 DNS-resolved. Thus you can specify `-Dmit.edu' just to make sure that
1094 *nothing outside of MIT gets looked up*. This is very important and
1095 useful. It also means that `-D' does *not* imply `-H' (span all
1096 hosts), which must be specified explicitly. Feel free to use this
1097 options since it will speed things up, with almost all the reliability
1098 of checking for all hosts. Thus you could invoke
1100 wget -r -D.hr http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
1102 to make sure that only the hosts in `.hr' domain get DNS-looked-up
1103 for being equal to `fly.cc.fer.hr'. So `fly.cc.etf.hr' will be checked
1104 (only once!) and found equal, but `www.gnu.ai.mit.edu' will not even be
1107 Of course, domain acceptance can be used to limit the retrieval to
1108 particular domains with spanning of hosts in them, but then you must
1109 specify `-H' explicitly. E.g.:
1111 wget -r -H -Dmit.edu,stanford.edu http://www.mit.edu/
1113 will start with `http://www.mit.edu/', following links across MIT
1116 If there are domains you want to exclude specifically, you can do it
1117 with `--exclude-domains', which accepts the same type of arguments of
1118 `-D', but will *exclude* all the listed domains. For example, if you
1119 want to download all the hosts from `foo.edu' domain, with the
1120 exception of `sunsite.foo.edu', you can do it like this:
1122 wget -rH -Dfoo.edu --exclude-domains sunsite.foo.edu http://www.foo.edu/
1125 File: wget.info, Node: All Hosts, Next: Types of Files, Prev: Domain Acceptance, Up: Following Links
1130 When `-H' is specified without `-D', all hosts are freely spanned.
1131 There are no restrictions whatsoever as to what part of the net Wget
1132 will go to fetch documents, other than maximum retrieval depth. If a
1133 page references `www.yahoo.com', so be it. Such an option is rarely
1137 File: wget.info, Node: Types of Files, Next: Directory-Based Limits, Prev: All Hosts, Up: Following Links
1142 When downloading material from the web, you will often want to
1143 restrict the retrieval to only certain file types. For example, if you
1144 are interested in downloading GIFs, you will not be overjoyed to get
1145 loads of PostScript documents, and vice versa.
1147 Wget offers two options to deal with this problem. Each option
1148 description lists a short name, a long name, and the equivalent command
1154 The argument to `--accept' option is a list of file suffixes or
1155 patterns that Wget will download during recursive retrieval. A
1156 suffix is the ending part of a file, and consists of "normal"
1157 letters, e.g. `gif' or `.jpg'. A matching pattern contains
1158 shell-like wildcards, e.g. `books*' or `zelazny*196[0-9]*'.
1160 So, specifying `wget -A gif,jpg' will make Wget download only the
1161 files ending with `gif' or `jpg', i.e. GIFs and JPEGs. On the
1162 other hand, `wget -A "zelazny*196[0-9]*"' will download only files
1163 beginning with `zelazny' and containing numbers from 1960 to 1969
1164 anywhere within. Look up the manual of your shell for a
1165 description of how pattern matching works.
1167 Of course, any number of suffixes and patterns can be combined
1168 into a comma-separated list, and given as an argument to `-A'.
1173 The `--reject' option works the same way as `--accept', only its
1174 logic is the reverse; Wget will download all files *except* the
1175 ones matching the suffixes (or patterns) in the list.
1177 So, if you want to download a whole page except for the cumbersome
1178 MPEGs and .AU files, you can use `wget -R mpg,mpeg,au'.
1179 Analogously, to download all files except the ones beginning with
1180 `bjork', use `wget -R "bjork*"'. The quotes are to prevent
1181 expansion by the shell.
1183 The `-A' and `-R' options may be combined to achieve even better
1184 fine-tuning of which files to retrieve. E.g. `wget -A "*zelazny*" -R
1185 .ps' will download all the files having `zelazny' as a part of their
1186 name, but *not* the PostScript files.
1188 Note that these two options do not affect the downloading of HTML
1189 files; Wget must load all the HTMLs to know where to go at
1190 all--recursive retrieval would make no sense otherwise.