wget(1)
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:
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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
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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.
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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
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download. Enables Content-Type:
application/metalink4+xml files download/processing.
--metalink-index=number
Set the Metalink application/metalink4+xml metaurl
ordinal NUMBER. From 1 to the total number of
"application/metalink4+xml" available. Specify 0 or inf
to choose the first good one. Metaurls, such as those
from a --metalink-over-http, may have been sorted by
priority key's value; keep this in mind to choose the
right NUMBER.
--preferred-location
Set preferred location for Metalink resources. This has
effect if multiple resources with same priority are
available.
-F
--force-html
When input is read from a file, force it to be treated
as an HTML file. This enables you to retrieve relative
links from existing HTML files on your local disk, by
adding "<base href="url">" to HTML, or using the --base
command-line option.
-B URL
--base=URL
Resolves relative links using URL as the point of
reference, when reading links from an HTML file
specified via the -i/--input-file option (together with
--force-html, or when the input file was fetched
remotely from a server describing it as HTML). This is
equivalent to the presence of a "BASE" tag in the HTML
input file, with URL as the value for the "href"
attribute.
For instance, if you specify http://foo/bar/a.html for
URL, and Wget reads ../baz/b.html from the input file,
it would be resolved to http://foo/baz/b.html.
--config=FILE
Specify the location of a startup file you wish to use
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.
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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
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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
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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
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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"
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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
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--progress=bar:force:noscroll.
--show-progress
Force wget to display the progress bar in any verbosity.
By default, wget only displays the progress bar in
verbose mode. One may however, want wget to display the
progress bar on screen in conjunction with any other
verbosity modes like --no-verbose or --quiet. This is
often a desired a property when invoking wget to
download several small/large files. In such a case,
wget could simply be invoked with this parameter to get
a much cleaner output on the screen.
This option will also force the progress bar to be
printed to stderr when used alongside the --logfile
option.
-N
--timestamping
Turn on time-stamping.
--no-if-modified-since
Do not send If-Modified-Since header in -N mode. Send
preliminary HEAD request instead. This has only effect
in -N mode.
--no-use-server-timestamps
Don't set the local file's timestamp by the one on the
server.
By default, when a file is downloaded, its timestamps
are set to match those from the remote file. This allows
the use of --timestamping on subsequent invocations of
wget. However, it is sometimes useful to base the local
file's timestamp on when it was actually downloaded; for
that purpose, the --no-use-server-timestamps option has
been provided.
-S
--server-response
Print the headers sent by HTTP servers and responses
sent by FTP servers.
--spider
When invoked with this option, Wget will behave as a Web
spider, which means that it will not download the pages,
just check that they are there. For example, you can
use Wget to check your bookmarks:
wget --spider --force-html -i bookmarks.html
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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.
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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,
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where wait was specified using the --wait option, in
order to mask Wget's presence from such analysis.
A 2001 article in a publication devoted to development
on a popular consumer platform provided code to perform
this analysis on the fly. Its author suggested blocking
at the class C address level to ensure automated
retrieval programs were blocked despite changing DHCP-
supplied addresses.
The --random-wait option was inspired by this ill-
advised recommendation to block many unrelated users
from a web site due to the actions of one.
--no-proxy
Don't use proxies, even if the appropriate *_proxy
environment variable is defined.
-Q quota
--quota=quota
Specify download quota for automatic retrievals. The
value can be specified in bytes (default), kilobytes
(with k suffix), or megabytes (with m suffix).
Note that quota will never affect downloading a single
file. So if you specify wget -Q10k
https://example.com/ls-lR.gz, all of the ls-lR.gz will
be downloaded. The same goes even when several URLs are
specified on the command-line. However, quota is
respected when retrieving either recursively, or from an
input file. Thus you may safely type wget -Q2m -i
sites---download will be aborted when the quota is
exceeded.
Setting quota to 0 or to inf unlimits the download
quota.
--no-dns-cache
Turn off caching of DNS lookups. Normally, Wget
remembers the IP addresses it looked up from DNS so it
doesn't have to repeatedly contact the DNS server for
the same (typically small) set of hosts it retrieves
from. This cache exists in memory only; a new Wget run
will contact DNS again.
However, it has been reported that in some situations it
is not desirable to cache host names, even for the
duration of a short-running application like Wget. With
this option Wget issues a new DNS lookup (more
precisely, a new call to "gethostbyname" or
"getaddrinfo") each time it makes a new connection.
Please note that this option will not affect caching
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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
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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
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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.
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--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
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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
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(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
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store them in .wgetrc or .netrc, and make sure to
protect those files from other users with "chmod". If
the passwords are really important, do not leave them
lying in those files either---edit the files and delete
them after Wget has started the download.
--no-http-keep-alive
Turn off the "keep-alive" feature for HTTP downloads.
Normally, Wget asks the server to keep the connection
open so that, when you download more than one document
from the same server, they get transferred over the same
TCP connection. This saves time and at the same time
reduces the load on the server.
This option is useful when, for some reason, persistent
(keep-alive) connections don't work for you, for example
due to a server bug or due to the inability of server-
side scripts to cope with the connections.
--no-cache
Disable server-side cache. In this case, Wget will send
the remote server an appropriate directive (Pragma: no-
cache) to get the file from the remote service, rather
than returning the cached version. This is especially
useful for retrieving and flushing out-of-date documents
on proxy servers.
Caching is allowed by default.
--no-cookies
Disable the use of cookies. Cookies are a mechanism for
maintaining server-side state. The server sends the
client a cookie using the "Set-Cookie" header, and the
client responds with the same cookie upon further
requests. Since cookies allow the server owners to keep
track of visitors and for sites to exchange this
information, some consider them a breach of privacy.
The default is to use cookies; however, storing cookies
is not on by default.
--load-cookies file
Load cookies from file before the first HTTP retrieval.
file is a textual file in the format originally used by
Netscape's cookies.txt file.
You will typically use this option when mirroring sites
that require that you be logged in to access some or all
of their content. The login process typically works by
the web server issuing an HTTP cookie upon receiving and
verifying your credentials. The cookie is then resent
by the browser when accessing that part of the site, and
so proves your identity.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 dependant 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
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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
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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
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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
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ensuring Wget's correct behaviour. Applying HSTS
policies to ports other than the default ones is
discouraged by RFC 6797 (see Appendix B "Differences
between HSTS Policy and Same-Origin Policy"). Thus, this
functionality should not be used in production
environments and port will typically be zero. The last
three fields do what they are expected to. The field
include_subdomains can either be 1 or 0 and it signals
whether the subdomains of the target domain should be
part of the given HSTS policy as well. The created and
max-age fields hold the timestamp values of when such
entry was created (first seen by Wget) and the HSTS-
defined value 'max-age', which states how long should
that HSTS policy remain active, measured in seconds
elapsed since the timestamp stored in created. Once that
time has passed, that HSTS policy will no longer be
valid and will eventually be removed from the database.
If you supply your own HSTS database via --hsts-file, be
aware that Wget may modify the provided file if any
change occurs between the HSTS policies requested by the
remote servers and those in the file. When Wget exists,
it effectively updates the HSTS database by rewriting
the database file with the new entries.
If the supplied file does not exist, Wget will create
one. This file will contain the new HSTS entries. If no
HSTS entries were generated (no
"Strict-Transport-Security" headers were sent by any of
the servers) then no file will be created, not even an
empty one. This behaviour applies to the default
database file (~/.wget-hsts) as well: it will not be
created until some server enforces an HSTS policy.
Care is taken not to override possible changes made by
other Wget processes at the same time over the HSTS
database. Before dumping the updated HSTS entries on the
file, Wget will re-read it and merge the changes.
Using a custom HSTS database and/or modifying an
existing one is discouraged. For more information about
the potential security threats arised from such
practice, see section 14 "Security Considerations" of
RFC 6797, specially section 14.9 "Creative Manipulation
of HSTS Policy Store".
--warc-file=file
Use file as the destination WARC file.
--warc-header=string
Use string into as the warcinfo record.
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--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
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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.
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--retr-symlinks
By default, when retrieving FTP directories recursively
and a symbolic link is encountered, the symbolic link is
traversed and the pointed-to files are retrieved.
Currently, Wget does not traverse symbolic links to
directories to download them recursively, though this
feature may be added in the future.
When --retr-symlinks=no is specified, the linked-to file
is not downloaded. Instead, a matching symbolic link is
created on the local filesystem. The pointed-to file
will not be retrieved unless this recursive retrieval
would have encountered it separately and downloaded it
anyway. This option poses a security risk where a
malicious FTP Server may cause Wget to write to files
outside of the intended directories through a specially
crafted .LISTING file.
Note that when retrieving a file (not a directory)
because it was specified on the command-line, rather
than because it was recursed to, this option has no
effect. Symbolic links are always traversed in this
case.
FTPS Options
--ftps-implicit
This option tells Wget to use FTPS implicitly. Implicit
FTPS consists of initializing SSL/TLS from the very
beginning of the control connection. This option does
not send an "AUTH TLS" command: it assumes the server
speaks FTPS and directly starts an SSL/TLS connection.
If the attempt is successful, the session continues just
like regular FTPS ("PBSZ" and "PROT" are sent, etc.).
Implicit FTPS is no longer a requirement for FTPS
implementations, and thus many servers may not support
it. If --ftps-implicit is passed and no explicit port
number specified, the default port for implicit FTPS,
990, will be used, instead of the default port for the
"normal" (explicit) FTPS which is the same as that of
FTP, 21.
--no-ftps-resume-ssl
Do not resume the SSL/TLS session in the data channel.
When starting a data connection, Wget tries to resume
the SSL/TLS session previously started in the control
connection. SSL/TLS session resumption avoids
performing an entirely new handshake by reusing the
SSL/TLS parameters of a previous session. Typically, the
FTPS servers want it that way, so Wget does this by
default. Under rare circumstances however, one might
want to start an entirely new SSL/TLS session in every
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data connection. This is what --no-ftps-resume-ssl is
for.
--ftps-clear-data-connection
All the data connections will be in plain text. Only the
control connection will be under SSL/TLS. Wget will send
a "PROT C" command to achieve this, which must be
approved by the server.
--ftps-fallback-to-ftp
Fall back to FTP if FTPS is not supported by the target
server. For security reasons, this option is not
asserted by default. The default behaviour is to exit
with an error. If a server does not successfully reply
to the initial "AUTH TLS" command, or in the case of
implicit FTPS, if the initial SSL/TLS connection attempt
is rejected, it is considered that such server does not
support FTPS.
Recursive Retrieval Options
-r
--recursive
Turn on recursive retrieving. The default maximum
depth is 5.
-l depth
--level=depth
Specify recursion maximum depth level depth.
--delete-after
This option tells Wget to delete every single file it
downloads, after having done so. It is useful for pre-
fetching popular pages through a proxy, e.g.:
wget -r -nd --delete-after http://whatever.com/~popular/page/
The -r option is to retrieve recursively, and -nd to not
create directories.
Note that --delete-after deletes files on the local
machine. It does not issue the DELE command to remote
FTP sites, for instance. Also note that when
--delete-after is specified, --convert-links is ignored,
so .orig files are simply not created in the first
place.
-k
--convert-links
After the download is complete, convert the links in the
document to make them suitable for local viewing. This
affects not only the visible hyperlinks, but any part of
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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
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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:
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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 <!--
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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
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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
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--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.
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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
/usr/local/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
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will occur with a simpler set of options. You might
even try to start the download at the page where the
crash occurred to see if that page somehow triggered the
crash.
Also, while I will probably be interested to know the
contents of your .wgetrc file, just dumping it into the
debug message is probably a bad idea. Instead, you
should first try to see if the bug repeats with .wgetrc
moved out of the way. Only if it turns out that .wgetrc
settings affect the bug, mail me the relevant parts of
the file.
3. Please start Wget with -d option and send us the
resulting output (or relevant parts thereof). If Wget
was compiled without debug support, recompile it---it is
much easier to trace bugs with debug support on.
Note: please make sure to remove any potentially
sensitive information from the debug log before sending
it to the bug address. The "-d" won't go out of its way
to collect sensitive information, but the log will
contain a fairly complete transcript of Wget's
communication with the server, which may include
passwords and pieces of downloaded data. Since the bug
address is publically archived, you may assume that all
bug reports are visible to the public.
4. If Wget has crashed, try to run it in a debugger, e.g.
"gdb `which wget` core" and type "where" to get the
backtrace. This may not work if the system
administrator has disabled core files, but it is safe to
try.
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.
AUTHOR
Originally written by Hrvoje NikE!iD <hniksic@xemacs.org>.
COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 1996-2011, 2015, 2018 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
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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".
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