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 and XHTML pages and create
local versions of remote web sites, fully recreating the
directory structure of the original site. This is some-
times referred to as "recursive downloading." While
doing that, Wget respects the Robot Exclusion Standard
(/robots.txt). Wget can be instructed to convert the
links in downloaded HTML files to the local files for
offline viewing.
Wget has been designed for robustness over slow or
unstable network connections; if a download fails due to
a network problem, it will keep retrying until the whole
file has been retrieved. If the server supports reget-
ting, it will instruct the server to continue the down-
load from where it left off.
OPTIONS
Option Syntax
Since Wget uses GNU getopt to process command-line argu-
ments, 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 argu-
ments. 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 argu-
ments together, like:
wget -drc <URL>
This is a complete equivalent of:
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 accom-
plishes. 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 "fol-
low_ftp = off" in .wgetrc makes Wget not 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 com-
mand-line options.
-b
--background
Go to background immediately after startup. If no
output file is specified via the -o, output is redi-
rected 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 com-
mands 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 nor-
mally 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 com-
piling with debug support is always safe---Wget com-
piled 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.
-i file
--input-file=file
Read URLs from 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 com-
mand lines will be the first ones to be retrieved.
The file need not be an HTML document (but no harm
if it is)---it is enough if the URLs are just listed
sequentially.
However, if you specify --force-html, the document
will be regarded as html. In that case you may have
problems with relative links, which you can solve
either by adding "<base href="url">" to the docu-
ments or by specifying --base=url on the command
line.
-F
--force-html
When input is read from a file, force it to be
treated as an HTML file. This enables you to
retrieve relative links from existing HTML files on
your local disk, by adding "<base href="url">" to
HTML, or using the --base command-line option.
-B URL
--base=URL
Prepends URL to relative links read from the file
specified with the -i option.
Download Options
--bind-address=ADDRESS
When making client TCP/IP connections, bind to
ADDRESS on the local machine. ADDRESS may be speci-
fied as a hostname or IP address. This option can
be useful if your machine is bound to multiple IPs.
-t number
--tries=number
Set number of retries to number. Specify 0 or inf
for infinite retrying. The default is to retry 20
times, with the exception of fatal errors like "con-
nection 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 immedi-
ately, 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 combina-
tion 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.
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.
-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, down-
loading the same file in the same directory will
result in the original copy of file being preserved
and the second copy being named file.1. If that
file is downloaded yet again, the third copy will be
named file.2, and so on. When -nc is specified,
this behavior is suppressed, and Wget will refuse to
download newer copies of file. Therefore,
""no-clobber"" is actually a misnomer in this
mode---it's not clobbering that's prevented (as the
numeric suffixes were already preventing clobber-
ing), but rather the multiple version saving that's
prevented.
When running Wget with -r or -p, but without -N or
-nc, re-downloading a file will result in the new
copy simply overwriting the old. Adding -nc will
prevent this behavior, instead causing the original
version to be preserved and any newer copies on the
server to be ignored.
When running Wget with -N, with or without -r 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.
Note that when -nc is specified, files with the suf-
fixes .html or .htm will be loaded from the local
disk and parsed as if they had been retrieved from
the Web.
-c
--continue
Continue getting a partially-downloaded file. This
is useful when you want to finish up a download
started by a previous instance of Wget, or by
another program. For instance:
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.
Beginning with Wget 1.7, if you use -c on a non-
empty file, and it turns out that the server does
not support continued downloading, Wget will refuse
to start the download from scratch, which would
effectively ruin existing contents. If you really
want the download to start from scratch, remove the
file.
Also beginning with Wget 1.7, if you use -c on a
file which is of equal size as the one on the
server, Wget will refuse to download the file and
print an explanatory message. The same happens when
the file is smaller on the server than locally (pre-
sumably 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 down-
load 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 espe-
cially careful of this when using -c in conjunction
with -r, since every file will be considered as an
"incomplete download" candidate.
Another instance where you'll get a garbled file if
you try to use -c is if you have a lame HTTP proxy
that inserts a "transfer interrupted" string into
the local file. In the future a "rollback" option
may be added to deal with this case.
Note that -c only works with FTP servers and with
HTTP servers that support the "Range" header.
--progress=type
Select the type of the progress indicator you wish
to use. Legal indicators are "dot" and "bar".
The "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.
When using the dotted retrieval, you may also set
the style by specifying the type as dot:style. Dif-
ferent styles assign different meaning to one dot.
With the "default" style each dot represents 1K,
there are ten dots in a cluster and 50 dots in a
line. The "binary" style has a more "computer"-like
orientation---8K dots, 16-dots clusters and 48 dots
per line (which makes for 384K lines). The "mega"
style is suitable for downloading very large
files---each dot represents 64K retrieved, there are
eight dots in a cluster, and 48 dots on each line
(so each line contains 3M).
Note that you can set the default style using the
"progress" command in .wgetrc. That setting may be
overridden from the command line. The exception is
that, when the output is not a TTY, the "dot"
progress will be favored over "bar". To force the
bar output, use --progress=bar:force.
-N
--timestamping
Turn on time-stamping.
-S
--server-response
Print the headers sent by HTTP servers and responses
sent by FTP servers.
--spider
When invoked with this option, Wget will behave as a
Web spider, which means that it will not download
the pages, just check that they are there. 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, --con-
nect-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 sec-
onds 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, read-
ing 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 exam-
ple, --limit-rate=20k will limit the retrieval rate
to 20KB/s. This is useful when, for whatever rea-
son, you don't want Wget to consume the entire
available bandwidth.
This option allows the use of decimal numbers, usu-
ally in conjunction with power suffixes; for exam-
ple, --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. How-
ever, 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 down-
loads, you can use this option. Wget will use lin-
ear backoff, waiting 1 second after the first fail-
ure on a given file, then waiting 2 seconds after
the second failure on that file, up to the maximum
number of seconds you specify. Therefore, a value
of 10 will actually make Wget wait up to (1 + 2 +
... + 10) = 55 seconds per file.
Note that this option is turned on by default in the
global wgetrc file.
--random-wait
Some web sites may perform log analysis to identify
retrieval programs such as Wget by looking for sta-
tistically 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 develop-
ment on a popular consumer platform provided code to
perform this analysis on the fly. Its author sug-
gested 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), kilo-
bytes (with k suffix), or megabytes (with m suffix).
Note that quota will never affect downloading a sin-
gle file. So if you specify wget -Q10k
ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/ls-lR.gz, all of the
ls-lR.gz will be downloaded. The same goes even
when several URLs are specified on the command-line.
However, quota is respected when retrieving either
recursively, or from an input file. Thus you may
safely type wget -Q2m -i sites---download will be
aborted when the quota is exceeded.
Setting quota to 0 or to inf unlimits the download
quota.
--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 situa-
tions 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=mode
Change which characters found in remote URLs may
show up in local file names generated from those
URLs. 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.
By default, Wget escapes the characters that are not
valid as part of file names on your operating sys-
tem, as well as control characters that are typi-
cally unprintable. This option is useful for chang-
ing these defaults, either because you are download-
ing to a non-native partition, or because you want
to disable escaping of the control characters.
When mode is set to "unix", Wget escapes the charac-
ter / and the control characters in the ranges 0--31
and 128--159. This is the default on Unix-like
OS'es.
When mode is set to "windows", Wget escapes the
characters \, |, /, :, ?, ", *, <, >, and the con-
trol 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 append ,nocontrol to the mode, as in
unix,nocontrol, escaping of the control characters
is also switched off. You can use
--restrict-file-names=nocontrol to turn off escaping
of control characters without affecting the choice
of the OS to use as file name restriction mode.
-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. Con-
versely, 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=IPv4/IPv6/none
When given a choice of several addresses, connect to
the addresses with specified address family first.
IPv4 addresses are preferred 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 sta-
ble---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.
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 directo-
ries, even if one would not have been created other-
wise. E.g. wget -x http://fly.srk.fer.hr/robots.txt
will save the downloaded file to fly.srk.fer.hr/ro-
bots.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 direc-
tory 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 exam-
ples 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 struc-
ture, 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 pre-
fix is the directory where all other files and sub-
directories will be saved to, i.e. the top of the
retrieval tree. The default is . (the current
directory).
HTTP Options
-E
--html-extension
If a file of type application/xhtml+xml or text/html
is downloaded and the URL does not end with the reg-
exp \.[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 corre-
sponds to remote URL X (since it doesn't yet know
that the URL produces output of type text/html or
application/xhtml+xml. To prevent this re-download-
ing, you must use -k and -K so that the original
version of the file will be saved as X.orig.
--http-user=user
--http-password=password
Specify the username user and password password on
an HTTP server. According to the type of the chal-
lenge, 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, 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-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 flush-
ing 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 creden-
tials. 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---sim-
ply 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:
@asis<Netscape 4.x.>
The cookies are in ~/.netscape/cookies.txt.
@asis<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 usu-
ally ends up looking somewhat like
~/.mozilla/default/some-weird-string/cook-
ies.txt.
@asis<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.
@asis<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 (other-
wise normal) connection has closed on the very same
byte.
With this option, Wget will ignore the "Con-
tent-Length" header---as if it never existed.
--header=header-line
Send header-line along with the rest of the headers
in each HTTP request. The supplied header is sent
as-is, which means it must contain name and value
separated by colon, and must not contain newlines.
You may define more than one additional header by
specifying --header more than once.
wget --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2' \
--header='Accept-Language: hr' \
http://fly.srk.fer.hr/
Specification of an empty string as the header value
will clear all previous user-defined headers.
As of Wget 1.10, this option can be used to override
headers otherwise generated automatically. This
example instructs Wget to connect to localhost, but
to specify foo.bar in the "Host" header:
wget --header="Host: foo.bar" http://localhost/
In versions of Wget prior to 1.10 such use of
--header caused sending of duplicate headers.
--max-redirect=number
Specifies the maximum number of redirections to fol-
low 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. Use-
ful for retrieving documents with server-side pro-
cessing that assume they are always being retrieved
by interactive web browsers and only come out prop-
erly 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 vio-
lations. 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.
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 chun-
ked 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: if Wget is redirected after the POST request
is completed, it will not send the POST data to the
redirected URL. This is because URLs that process
POST often respond with a redirection to a regular
page, which does not desire or accept POST. It is
not completely clear that this behavior is optimal;
if it doesn't work out, it might be changed in the
future.
This example shows how to log to a server using POST
and then proceed to download the desired pages, pre-
sumably 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://server.com/auth.php
# Now grab the page or pages we care about.
wget --load-cookies cookies.txt \
-p http://server.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.
--content-disposition
If this is set to on, experimental (not fully-func-
tional) 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.
--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.
HTTPS (SSL/TLS) Options
To support encrypted HTTP (HTTPS) downloads, Wget must
be compiled with an external SSL library, currently
OpenSSL. 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, and TLSv1. If auto is used,
the SSL library is given the liberty of choosing the
appropriate protocol automatically, which is
achieved by sending an SSLv2 greeting and announcing
support for SSLv3 and TLSv1. This is the default.
Specifying SSLv2, SSLv3, or TLSv1 forces the use of
the corresponding protocol. This is useful when
talking to old and buggy SSL server implementations
that make it hard for OpenSSL to choose the correct
protocol version. Fortunately, such servers are
quite rare.
--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 certifi-
cate 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 "inse-
cure" 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 down-
load. 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 certifi-
cate. It is almost always a bad idea not to check
the certificates when transmitting confidential or
important data.
--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 val-
ues 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 cer-
tificates 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 process-
ing 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.
--random-file=file
Use file as the source of random data for seeding
the pseudo-random number generator on systems with-
out /dev/random.
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 none of those are available, it is
likely that SSL encryption will not be usable.
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
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 crypto-
graphically 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 con-
tacted. EGD is not needed on modern Unix systems
that support /dev/random.
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 debug-
ging 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 com-
plete).
Note that even though Wget writes to a known file-
name 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/recur-
sion/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 over-
written.
--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-spe-
cific. 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 configu-
rations 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.
--retr-symlinks
Usually, when retrieving FTP directories recursively
and a symbolic link is encountered, the linked-to
file is not downloaded. Instead, a matching sym-
bolic link is created on the local filesystem. The
pointed-to file will not be downloaded unless this
recursive retrieval would have encountered it sepa-
rately and downloaded it anyway.
When --retr-symlinks is specified, however, symbolic
links are traversed and the pointed-to files are
retrieved. At this time, this option does not cause
Wget to traverse symlinks to directories and recurse
through them, but in the future it should be
enhanced to do this.
Note that when retrieving a file (not a directory)
because it was specified on the command-line, rather
than because it was recursed to, this option has no
effect. Symbolic links are always traversed in this
case.
--no-http-keep-alive
Turn off the "keep-alive" feature for HTTP down-
loads. 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 trans-
ferred 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, persis-
tent (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.
Recursive Retrieval Options
-r
--recursive
Turn on recursive retrieving.
-l depth
--level=depth
Specify recursion maximum depth level depth. The
default maximum depth is 5.
--delete-after
This option tells Wget to delete every single file
it downloads, after having done so. It is useful
for pre-fetching popular pages through a proxy,
e.g.:
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 view-
ing. This affects not only the visible hyperlinks,
but any part of the document that links to external
content, such as embedded images, links to style
sheets, hyperlinks to non-HTML content, etc.
Each link will be changed in one of the two ways:
* The links to files that have been downloaded by
Wget will be changed to refer to the file they
point to as a relative link.
Example: if the downloaded file /foo/doc.html
links to /bar/img.gif, also downloaded, then the
link in doc.html will be modified to point to
../bar/img.gif. This kind of transformation
works reliably for arbitrary combinations of
directories.
* The links to files that have not been downloaded
by Wget will be changed to include host name and
absolute path of the location they point to.
Example: if the downloaded file /foo/doc.html
links to /bar/img.gif (or to ../bar/img.gif),
then the link in doc.html will be modified to
point to http://hostname/bar/img.gif.
Because of this, local browsing works reliably: if a
linked file was downloaded, the link will refer to
its local name; if it was not downloaded, the link
will refer to its full Internet address rather than
presenting a broken link. The fact that the former
links are converted to relative links ensures that
you can move the downloaded hierarchy to another
directory.
Note that only at the end of the download can Wget
know which links have been downloaded. Because of
that, the work done by -k will be performed at the
end of all the downloads.
-K
--backup-converted
When converting a file, back up the original version
with a .orig suffix. Affects the behavior of -N.
-m
--mirror
Turn on options suitable for mirroring. This option
turns on recursion and time-stamping, sets infinite
recursion depth and keeps FTP directory listings.
It is currently equivalent to -r -N -l inf
--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 dis-
tinguish 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 unfortu-
nately this is not the case, because -l 0 is equiva-
lent 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 speci-
fied, but only that single page and its requisites
will be downloaded. Links from that page to exter-
nal 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 occur-
rence of -->.
According to specifications, HTML comments are
expressed as SGML declarations. Declaration is spe-
cial 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 techni-
cally 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: com-
ments 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.
-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 doc-
uments 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 down-
loading 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 down-
loading from FTP sites. For example, with this
option, -A *.txt will match file1.txt, but also
file2.TXT, file3.TxT, and so on.
-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 cer-
tain hierarchy will be downloaded.
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 <http://wget.addictivecode.org/Bug-
Tracker>).
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 documen-
tation 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://yoyodyne.com -o
/tmp/log, you should try to see if the crash is
repeatable, and if will occur with a simpler set of
options. You might even try to start the download
at the page where the crash occurred to see if that
page somehow triggered the crash.
Also, while I will probably be interested to know
the contents of your .wgetrc file, just dumping it
into the debug message is probably a bad idea.
Instead, you should first try to see if the bug
repeats with .wgetrc moved out of the way. Only if
it turns out that .wgetrc settings affect the bug,
mail me the relevant parts of the file.
3. Please start Wget with -d option and send 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 sup-
port 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 explana-
tions 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 Niksic
<[email protected]>. Currently maintained by Micah
Cowan <[email protected]>.
COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002,
2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 Free Software Founda-
tion, Inc.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify
this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documenta-
tion License, Version 1.2 or any later version published
by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sec-
tions, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A
copy of the license is included in the section entitled
"GNU Free Documentation License".
