WGET(1) GNU Wget WGET(1)
NAME
Wget - The non-interactive network downloader.
SYNOPSIS
wget [option]... [URL]...
DESCRIPTION
GNU Wget is a free utility for non-interactive download of files from
the Web. It supports HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP protocols, as well as
retrieval through HTTP proxies.
Wget is non-interactive, meaning that it can work in the background,
while the user is not logged on. This allows you to start a retrieval
and disconnect from the system, letting Wget finish the work. By
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.
OPTIONS
Option Syntax
Since Wget uses GNU getopt to process command-line arguments, every
option has a long form along with the short one. Long options are more
convenient to remember, but take time to type. You may freely mix
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.
--xattr
Enable use of file system's extended attributes to save the
original URL and the Referer HTTP header value if used.
Be aware that the URL might contain private information like access
tokens or credentials.
-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 instead of
the default one(s). Use --no-config to disable reading of config
files. If both --config and --no-config are given, --no-config is
ignored.
--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).
--no-netrc
Do not try to obtain credentials from .netrc file. By default
.netrc file is searched for credentials in case none have been
passed on command line and authentication is required.
-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 --output-file 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. The quota is checked only at
the end of each downloaded file, so it will never result in a
partially downloaded file. Thus you may safely type wget -Q2m -i
sites---download will be aborted after the file that exhausts the
quota is completely downloaded.
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.
As of version 1.19.2, Wget will also ensure that any downloaded
files with a "Content-Encoding" of br, compress, deflate or gzip
end in the suffix .br, .Z, .zlib and .gz respectively.
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 appropriate directives (Cache-Control: no-cache and 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.
--compression=type
Choose the type of compression to be used. Legal values are auto,
gzip and none.
If auto or gzip are specified, Wget asks the server to compress the
file using the gzip compression format. If the server compresses
the file and responds with the "Content-Encoding" header field set
appropriately, the file will be decompressed automatically.
If none is specified, wget will not ask the server to compress the
file and will not decompress any server responses. This is the
default.
Compression support is currently experimental. In case it is turned
on, please report any bugs to "bug-wget@gnu.org".
--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-host-error
Consider host errors, such as "Temporary failure in name
resolution", as non-fatal, transient errors.
--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, TLSv1_3 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, TLSv1_2 or TLSv1_3 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. This mode also explicitly excludes non-
PFS key exchange methods, such as RSA.
--https-only
When in recursive mode, only HTTPS links are followed.
--ciphers
Set the cipher list string. Typically this string sets the cipher
suites and other SSL/TLS options that the user wish should be used,
in a set order of preference (GnuTLS calls it 'priority string').
This string will be fed verbatim to the SSL/TLS engine (OpenSSL or
GnuTLS) and hence its format and syntax is dependent on that. Wget
will not process or manipulate it in any way. Refer to the OpenSSL
or GnuTLS documentation for more information.
--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 exits, 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 arose 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 file system. 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
Set the maximum number of subdirectories that Wget will recurse
into to depth. In order to prevent one from accidentally
downloading very large websites when using recursion this is
limited to a depth of 5 by default, i.e., it will traverse at most
5 directories deep starting from the provided URL. Set -l 0 or -l
inf for infinite recursion depth.
wget -r -l 0 http://<site>/1.html
Ideally, one would expect this to download just 1.html. 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), specify them all on the command line
and leave away -r and -l. To download the essential items to view a
single HTML page, see page requisites.
--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.
ENVIRONMENT
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.
EXIT STATUS
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.
FILES
/etc/wgetrc
Default location of the global startup file.
.wgetrc
User startup file.
BUGS
You are welcome to submit bug reports via the GNU Wget bug tracker (see
<https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?func=additem&group=wget>) or to our
mailing list <bug-wget@gnu.org>.
Visit <https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-wget> to get more
info (how to subscribe, list archives, ...).
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
publicly 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.
SEE ALSO
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.
Also see wget2(1), the updated version of GNU Wget with even better
support for recursive downloading and modern protocols like HTTP/2.
AUTHOR
Originally written by Hrvoje Nikšić <hniksic@xemacs.org>. Currently
maintained by Darshit Shah <darnir@gnu.org> and Tim Rühsen
<tim.ruehsen@gmx.de>.
COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 1996--2011, 2015, 2018--2023 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".
GNU Wget 1.21.4 2024-06-19 WGET(1)
Generated by dwww version 1.16 on Tue Dec 16 06:01:29 CET 2025.