This is Info file wget.info, produced by Makeinfo version 1.67 from the input file /ade-src/fsf/wget/doc/wget.texi. Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided also that the sections entitled "Copying" and "GNU General Public License" are included exactly as in the original, and provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.  File: wget.info, Node: Top, Next: Copying, Prev: (dir), Up: (dir) Wget/1.4.2 ********** This manual documents version 1.4.2 of Wget [formerly known as Geturl], the freely available utility for network download. Copyright (C) 1996 Hrvoje Niksic * Menu: * Copying:: You may give out copies of Wget. * Overview:: Features of Wget. * Invoking:: Wget command-line arguments. * URL Conventions:: What is considered a URL. * Recursive Retrieval:: Description of recursive retrieval. * Following Links:: The available methods of chasing links. * Startup File:: How to create your very own .wgetrc. * Examples:: Examples of usage. * Various:: The stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else. * Concept Index:: A menu covering topics.  File: wget.info, Node: Copying, Next: Overview, Prev: Top, Up: Top GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE ************************** Version 2, June 1991 Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc. 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed. Preamble ======== The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the software is free for all its users. This General Public License applies to most of the Free Software Foundation's software and to any other program whose authors commit to using it. (Some other Free Software Foundation software is covered by the GNU Library General Public License instead.) You can apply it to your programs, too. When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things. To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it. For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights. We protect your rights with two steps: (1) copyright the software, and (2) offer you this license which gives you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify the software. Also, for each author's protection and ours, we want to make certain that everyone understands that there is no warranty for this free software. If the software is modified by someone else and passed on, we want its recipients to know that what they have is not the original, so that any problems introduced by others will not reflect on the original authors' reputations. Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all. The precise terms and conditions for copying, distribution and modification follow. TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION 1. This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License. The "Program", below, refers to any such program or work, and a "work based on the Program" means either the Program or any derivative work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated into another language. (Hereinafter, translation is included without limitation in the term "modification".) Each licensee is addressed as "you". Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based on the Program (independent of having been made by running the Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does. 2. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this License along with the Program. You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee. 3. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions: a. You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change. b. You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License. c. If the modified program normally reads commands interactively when run, you must cause it, when started running for such interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this License. (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but does not normally print such an announcement, your work based on the Program is not required to print an announcement.) These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it. Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program. In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License. 4. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following: a. Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or, b. Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or, c. Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.) The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable. If distribution of executable or object code is made by offering access to copy from a designated place, then offering equivalent access to copy the source code from the same place counts as distribution of the source code, even though third parties are not compelled to copy the source along with the object code. 5. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance. 6. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it. 7. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License. 8. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program. If any portion of this section is held invalid or unenforceable under any particular circumstance, the balance of the section is intended to apply and the section as a whole is intended to apply in other circumstances. It is not the purpose of this section to induce you to infringe any patents or other property right claims or to contest validity of any such claims; this section has the sole purpose of protecting the integrity of the free software distribution system, which is implemented by public license practices. Many people have made generous contributions to the wide range of software distributed through that system in reliance on consistent application of that system; it is up to the author/donor to decide if he or she is willing to distribute software through any other system and a licensee cannot impose that choice. This section is intended to make thoroughly clear what is believed to be a consequence of the rest of this License. 9. If the distribution and/or use of the Program is restricted in certain countries either by patents or by copyrighted interfaces, the original copyright holder who places the Program under this License may add an explicit geographical distribution limitation excluding those countries, so that distribution is permitted only in or among countries not thus excluded. In such case, this License incorporates the limitation as if written in the body of this License. 10. The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the General Public License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns. Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the Program specifies a version number of this License which applies to it and "any later version", you have the option of following the terms and conditions either of that version or of any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. If the Program does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published by the Free Software Foundation. 11. If you wish to incorporate parts of the Program into other free programs whose distribution conditions are different, write to the author to ask for permission. For software which is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, write to the Free Software Foundation; we sometimes make exceptions for this. Our decision will be guided by the two goals of preserving the free status of all derivatives of our free software and of promoting the sharing and reuse of software generally. NO WARRANTY 12. BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION. 13. IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN WRITING WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MAY MODIFY AND/OR REDISTRIBUTE THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs ============================================= If you develop a new program, and you want it to be of the greatest possible use to the public, the best way to achieve this is to make it free software which everyone can redistribute and change under these terms. To do so, attach the following notices to the program. It is safest to attach them to the start of each source file to most effectively convey the exclusion of warranty; and each file should have at least the "copyright" line and a pointer to where the full notice is found. ONE LINE TO GIVE THE PROGRAM'S NAME AND AN IDEA OF WHAT IT DOES. Copyright (C) 19YY NAME OF AUTHOR This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. Also add information on how to contact you by electronic and paper mail. If the program is interactive, make it output a short notice like this when it starts in an interactive mode: Gnomovision version 69, Copyright (C) 19YY NAME OF AUTHOR Gnomovision comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `show w'. This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions; type `show c' for details. The hypothetical commands `show w' and `show c' should show the appropriate parts of the General Public License. Of course, the commands you use may be called something other than `show w' and `show c'; they could even be mouse-clicks or menu items--whatever suits your program. You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or your school, if any, to sign a "copyright disclaimer" for the program, if necessary. Here is a sample; alter the names: Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright interest in the program `Gnomovision' (which makes passes at compilers) written by James Hacker. SIGNATURE OF TY COON, 1 April 1989 Ty Coon, President of Vice This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program into proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library, you may consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary applications with the library. If this is what you want to do, use the GNU Library General Public License instead of this License.  File: wget.info, Node: Overview, Next: Invoking, Prev: Copying, Up: Top Overview ******** Wget [formerly known as Geturl] is a freely available network utility to retrieve files from the World Wide Web, using HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) and FTP (File Transfer Protocol), the two most widely used Internet protocols. Wget is non-interactive, which means it can work in the background, while the user is not logged on (so that you may start the program and log off, letting it do its work), unlike most of the Web browsers, which require constant user's presence, which is a great hindrance when transfering a lot of data. Wget works exceedingly well on slow or unstable connections, keeping getting the document until it is fully retrieved, or until a user-specified retry count is surpassed. It will try to resume the download from the point of interruption, using `REST' with FTP and `Range' with HTTP servers that support them. Wget is capable of descending recursively (*Note Recursive Retrieval::) through the structure of HTML documents and FTP directory trees, making locally the directory hierarchy similar to the one on the remote server. This feature can be used to mirror archives and home pages, or traverse the web in search of data, like a WWW robot (*Note Robots::). In that spirit, Wget understands the `norobots' convention. File name wildcard matching and recursive mirroring of directories are available when retrieving via FTP. Wget can read the time-stamp information given by both HTTP and FTP servers, and store it locally. Thus Wget can see if the remote file has changed since last retrieval, and automatically retrieve the new version if it has. This makes Wget suitable for mirroring of FTP sites, as well as home pages. Wget supports PROXY servers, to lighten the network load and to speed up retrieval. If you are behind a firewall and have the `socks' library installed, you can build a socks-aware Wget to reach the net behind the firewall. The retrieval is conveniently traced with printing dots, each dot by default representing one kilobyte of data received. Builtin features offer mechanisms to tune which links you wish to follow (*Note Following Links::). Most of the features are fully configurable, either through command line options (*Note Invoking::), or via the initialization file `.wgetrc' (*Note Startup File::). Wget allows you to define "global" startup files (`/usr/local/lib/wgetrc' by default) for site settings.  File: wget.info, Node: Invoking, Next: URL Conventions, Prev: Overview, Up: Top Invoking ******** By default, Wget is very simple to invoke. The basic syntax is: wget [options] URL1 [URL2 ...] URL is a "Uniform Resource Locator", as defined later (*Note URL Conventions::). Be aware that `ksh' and its descendants (like `zsh') kill off the background processes during logout. To prevent this, use `nohup', as documented in system manuals. However, you may wish to change some of the default parameters of Wget. You can do it two ways: permanently, adding the appropriate command to `.wgetrc' (*Note Startup File::), or specifying it on the command line. * Menu: * Option Syntax:: Syntax of options. * Basic Options:: Basic command line arguments. * Advanced Options:: Advanced command line arguments.  File: wget.info, Node: Option Syntax, Next: Basic Options, Prev: Invoking, Up: Invoking Option Syntax ============= Since Wget uses GNU getopts to parse its arguments, every option has its short and long form. 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.cc.fer.hr/ -o log The space between the option accepting an argument and the argument may be omitted. Instead `-o log' you can write `-olog'. You may put several options that do not require arguments 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 use the convention that, when presented an empty list, it means to clear it. This can be useful to clear the `.wgetrc' settings. So, if your .wgetrc sets the 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' (*Note Wgetrc Syntax::). wget -X '' -X /~nobody,/~somebody  File: wget.info, Node: Basic Options, Next: Advanced Options, Prev: Option Syntax, Up: Invoking Basic Options ============= The command line arguments, sorted alphabetically. `-a logfile' `--append-output=logfile' Append to `logfile' -- the same as -o, but appending to the `logfile' (or creating a new one if the old does not exist) instead of rewriting the old log file. `-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 that case `-d' will not work. Please note that when the program is compiled with debug support, it will *not* print the debug info unless `-d' is turned on explicitly. `-h' `--help' Print a help screen. You will also get help if you do not supply command-line arguments. `-i file' `--input-file=file' Read URLs from `file', in which case no URLs need to be 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. 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 `' to the documents or by specifying `--base=url' on the command line. `-l depth' `--level=depth' Specify recursion depth level(*Note Recursive Retrieval::). The default maximum depth is 5. `-nc' Do not clobber existing files when saving to directory hierarchy within recursive retrieval of several files. This option is *extremely* useful when you wish to continue where you left off with retrieval of many files. If the files are .html or (yuck) .htm, they will be loaded from the local disk, and parsed as if they have been retrieved from the Web. `-o logfile' `--output-file=logfile' Log all messages to `logfile', instead of the default stdout. If you do not wish the log output to be verbose, use `-nv' (non-verbose). `-q' `--quiet' This option is the opposite of verbose, making Wget completely quiet. `-r' `--recursive' Turn on recursive retrieving (*Note Recursive Retrieval::). `-t num' `--tries=num' Set number of retries to `num'. Specify 0 or `inf' for infinite retrying. `-V' `--version' Display the version of Wget. `-v' `--verbose' Turn on verbose output, with all the available data. The default output is verbose.  File: wget.info, Node: Advanced Options, Prev: Basic Options, Up: Invoking Advanced Options ================ The following table contains the alphabetically sorted list of the "advanced" command line arguments, for people familiar with basic operating of Wget, wishing to change its default behaviour. Not for the faint of heart. `-A acclist --accept acclist' `-R rejlist --reject rejlist' Specify comma-separated lists of file name suffices or patterns to accept or reject. E.g., if you wish to download only GIFs or JPEGs, you can use `-A gif,jpg,jpeg'. If you wish to download everything except the cumbersome MPEGs and .AU files, you can use `-R mpg,mpeg,au'. If a string contains wildcards, it will be considered a globbing pattern, and will *not* be matched backwards. Thus you may specify `-A "*bjork*1995*html"' to accept only files containing `bjork' and `1995', ending with `html'. To download all files except the ones beginning with `bjork', use `wget -R "bjork*"'. The quotes are to prevent expansion by the shell. `-c' `--continue' Continue retrieval of FTP documents, from where it was left off by another program or a previous instance of Wget. Thus you can write: wget -c ftp://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/ls-lR.Z If there is a file name `ls-lR.Z' in the current directory, Wget will assume that it is the first portion of the remote file, and will require the server to continue the retrieval from an offset equal to the length of the local file. Note that you need not specify this option if all you want is Wget to continue retrieving where it left off when the connection is lost -- Wget does this by default. You need this option when you want to continue retrieval of a file already halfway retrieved, saved by another FTP client, or left by Wget being killed. Without `-c', the previous example would just begin to download the remote file to `ls-lR.Z.1'. `-c' option is also applicable for HTTP servers that support `Range'. `-D domain-list' `--domains=domain-list' Set domains to be accepted and DNS looked-up, where `domain-list' is a comma-separated list. Note that it does *not* turn on `-H'. This option speeds things up, even if only one host is spanned (*Note Domain Acceptance::). `--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 proxy, e.g.: wget -r -nd --delete-after http://whatever.com/~popular/page/ `--dot-style=style' Set the style of dot-traced retrieval. You can choose between several "styles". With the `default' style each dot represents 1K, there are ten dots in a "cluster" and 50 dots in a line. `binary' style has a more "computer"-like orientation -- 8K dots, 16-dots clusters and 64 dots per line (which makes for 512K lines). `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). `micro' style is exactly the reverse; it is suitable for downloading small files, with 128-byte dots, 8 dots per cluster, and 48 dots (6K) per line. `-e command' `--execute command' Execute `command' as if it were a part of `.wgetrc' (*Note Startup File::). A command thus invoked will take precedence over the same command in `.wgetrc'. `-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 `' to HTML, or using `--base'. `-g on/off' `--glob=on/off' Turn FTP globbing on or off. Globbing means you may use the shell-like special characters ("wildcards"), like `*', `?', `[' and `]' to retrieve more than one file from the same directory at once, like: wget ftp://gnjilux.cc.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). `--retr-symlinks' Retrieve symbolic links on FTP sites as if they were plain files, i.e. don't just create links locally. `-H' `--span-hosts' Enable spanning across hosts when doing recursive retrieving (*Note All Hosts::). `--header=additional-header' Define an `additional-header' to be passed to the HTTP servers. Headers must contain a `:' preceded by one or more non-blank characters, 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.cc.fer.hr/ Specification of an empty string as the header value will clear all the user-defined headers. `--http-user=user' `--http-passwd=password' Specify the username `user' and password `password' on a HTTP server. Wget will "crypt" them using the `basic' (insecure) WWW authentication scheme. You can also encode the username and password to the URL (*Note URL Conventions::). `-I list' `--include-directories=list' Specify a comma-separated list of directories you wish to follow when downloading, the "opposite" of -exclude-directories. The directories are absolute paths. E.g. if you do want Wget to download/follow only things things from `/users' and `/cgi-bin', specify `-I /users,/cgi-bin' on the command line. `-k' `--convert-links' Convert the non-relative links to relative ones locally. `-L --relative' Follow only relative links. Useful for retrieving a specific homepage without any distractions, not even those from the same hosts (*Note Relative Links::). `-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 -l0 -nr'. `-N' `--timestamping' Use the so-called "time-stamps" to determine whether to retrieve a file. If the last-modification date of the remote file is equal to, or older than that of local file, and the sizes of files are equal, the remote file will not be retrieved. This option is useful for weekly mirroring of HTTP or FTP sites, since it will not permit downloading of the same file twice. `-nd' 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'). `-nH' Disable generation of host-prefixed directories. By default, `wget -r http://fly.cc.fer.hr/' will create a structure of directories beginning with `fly.cc.fer.hr/'. This option disables it. `-nh' Disable the time-consuming DNS lookup of almost all hosts (*Note Host Checking::). `-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. *Note No Parent:: for more details. `-nr' Do not remove the `.listing' files generated by FTP. This is useful when running a mirror to see the remote file list. It can also be used for debugging purposes. `-nv' Non-verbose output -- turn off verbose without being completely quiet (use `-q' for that), which means that error messages and basic information still get printed. `-O file' `--output-document=file' The documents will not be written to the appropriate files, but all will be appended to a unique file specified by this option. The number of tries will be set to 1 automatically. If the `file' is `-', the documents will be written to stdout, and `--quiet' will be turned on. This option is useful for making Wget a part of pipelines (*Note Advanced Usage::). Be careful, however, since setting `--quiet' turns off all the useful diagnostics Wget can otherwise give. `-P prefix' `--directory-prefix=prefix' Set directory prefix (`.' by default) to `prefix'. The "directory prefix" is the directory where all other files and subdirectories will be saved to. `-p' `--prefix-files' Set prefix files. By default, Wget will save URLs to appropriate file names (e.g. `http://yoyodine.com/sharon.gif' will be written to `sharon.gif'). With `-p' turned on, all the files will be saved to a single file. If a file with the same name already exists, the file name will be appended `.1'. `-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 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 `inf' unlimits the download quota. `-S' `--server-response' Print the headers sent by HTTP servers and responses sent by FTP servers. `-s' `--save-headers' Save the headers sent by the HTTP server to the file, before the actual contents. `--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. You can use it to check your bookmarks, e.g. with: (1) wget --spider --force-html -i bookmarks.html wget --spider -Fi **/*.html `-T seconds' `--timeout=seconds' Set the read timeout to `seconds' seconds. Whenever a read is issued, the file descriptor is checked for a timeout, which could otherwise leave a pending connection (uninterrupted read). The default timeout is 900 seconds (fifteen minutes). Setting timeout to 0 will disable checking for timeouts. `-X list' `--exclude-directories=list' Specify a comma-separated list of directories you wish to exclude from download. The directories are absolute paths. E.g. if you do not want Wget to download things from `/cgi-bin' directory, specify `-X /cgi-bin' on the command line. If you want to load all the files from `/pub' hierarchy except `/pub/emacs', specify `-I/pub -X/pub/emacs'. `-x' The opposite of `-nd' -- create a hierarchy of directories, even if one would not have been created otherwise. `-Y on/off' `--proxy=on/off' Turn PROXY support on or off. The proxy is on by default if the appropriate environmental variable is defined. ---------- Footnotes ---------- (1) `**/*.html' is a zsh construct that yields all the html files in all subdirectories. The same could have been achieved with ``find . -name '*.html' -print`'.  File: wget.info, Node: URL Conventions, Next: Recursive Retrieval, Prev: Invoking, Up: Top URL Conventions *************** "URL" is an acronym for Uniform Resource Locator. Wget recognizes the URL syntax as per RFC1738. This is the most widely used form (square brackets denote optional parts): http://host[:port]/path ftp://host[:port]/path You can also encode your username and password within a URL: ftp://user:password@host/path http://user:password@host/path Either `user' or `password', or both may be left out (e.g. `ftp://user@host' is valid). If you do not specify either the HTTP username or password, they will be ignored. If you leave out FTP username, `anonymous' will be used. If you leave out FTP password, your email address will be used for password. You can encode the non-printing character in any URL by coding it as `%xy', where `x' and `y' are hexadecimal digits. Of course, you must quote the `%' itself with `%25'. You can encode `:' and `@' in passwords with `%3A' and `%40' respectively. Two alternative variants are also supported, because of historical (hysterical?) reasons and their wide-spreadedness. FTP-only syntax (supported by `NcFTP'): host:/dir/file HTTP-only syntax (supported by `Netscape' and `Lynx'): host[:port]/dir/file These two alternative forms are deprecated, and may cease being supported in the future. If you do not understand the difference between these notations, or do not know which one to use, just use the plain ordinary format you use with your favourite browser, like `Lynx' or `Netscape'.  File: wget.info, Node: Recursive Retrieval, Next: Following Links, Prev: URL Conventions, Up: Top Recursive Retrieval ******************* Wget is capable of traversing parts of the Web (or a single HTTP or FTP server), following links and directory structure. This is called "recusive" retrieving, or "recursion". With HTTP URLs, Wget retrieves and parses the HTML from the given URL, documents, retrieving the files the HTML document was refering to, through markups like HREF, or SRC. If a downloaded document is also an HTML file, it will be parsed and followed further. The maximum depth of retrieval is specified with `-l' option (default 5). *Note Basic Options::. Wget will create a local hierarchy of files, corresponding to the one found on the remote server. Recursion is an ideal possibility for various presentations, where slow connections should be bypassed. When retrieving an FTP URL recursively, Wget will retrieve all the data from the given directory and subdirectories, also creating a local hierarchy. You should be warned that invoking recursion may cause grave overloading on your system, both on client and server side, and your system administrator may choose not to enable it. The load can be minimized by lowering the maximum recursion level (`-l') and/or by lowering the number of retries (`-t'). Recursion is a good thing when used properly. Use it with utmost care.  File: wget.info, Node: Following Links, Next: Startup File, Prev: Recursive Retrieval, Up: Top Following Links *************** When retrieving recursively, one does not wish to retrieve the loads of unnecessary data. Most of the time the users bear in mind exactly what they want to download, and want Wget to follow only specific links. For example, if you wish to download the music archive from `fly.cc.fer.hr', you will not want to download all the homepages that happen to be referenced by an obscure part of the archive. Wget possesses mechanisms that allows you to fine-tune which links it will follow. * Menu: * Relative Links:: Follow relative links only. * Host Checking:: Follow links on the same host. * Domain Acceptance:: Check on a list of domains. * All Hosts:: No restrictions. * No Parent:: Not ascending to parent directory. * FTP Links:: Following FTP links.  File: wget.info, Node: Relative Links, Next: Host Checking, Prev: Following Links, Up: Following Links Relative Links ============== When only relative links are followed (option `-L'), recursive retrieving will never span hosts. `gethostbyname' will never be called, and the process will be very fast, with the minimum strain of the network. This will suit your needs most of the times, especially when mirroring the output of various `x2html' converters, since they generally output relative links.  File: wget.info, Node: Host Checking, Next: Domain Acceptance, Prev: Relative Links, Up: Following Links Host Checking ============= The drawback of following the relative links solely is that humans often tend to mix them with absolute links to the very same host, and the very same page. In this mode (which is the default mode for following links) all URLs that refer to the same host will be retrieved. The problem with this option are the aliases of the hosts and domains. Thus there is no way for Wget to know that `regoc.srce.hr' and `www.srce.hr' are the same host, or that `fly.cc.fer.hr' is the same as `fly.cc.etf.hr'. Whenever an absolute link is encountered, the host is DNS-looked-up with `gethostbyname' to check whether we are maybe dealing with the same hosts. Although the results of `gethostbyname' are hashed, it is still a great slowdown, e.g. when dealing with large indices of homepages on different hosts (because each of the hosts must be looked-up and DNS-resolved to see whether it might be the starting host). To avoid the overhead you may use `-nh', which will turn off DNS-resolving and make Wget compare hosts litterally. This will make things run much faster, but also much less reliable.  File: wget.info, Node: Domain Acceptance, Next: All Hosts, Prev: Host Checking, Up: Following Links Domain Acceptance ================= With the `-D' option you may specify domains that will be followed. The hosts the domain of which is not in this list will not be DNS-resolved. Thus you map specify `-Dmit.edu' just to make sure that *nothing outside of MIT gets looked up*. This is very important and useful. It also means that `-D' does *not* imply `-H' (it must be specified explicitly). Feel free to use this options since it will speed things up, with almost all the reliability of checking for all hosts. Thus you could invoke wget -r -D.hr http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ to make sure that only the hosts in `.hr' domain get DNS-looked-up for being equal to `fly.cc.fer.hr'. So `fly.cc.etf.hr' will be checked (ony once!) and found equal, but `www.gnu.ai.mit.edu' will not even be checked. Of course, domain acceptance can be used to limit the retrieval to particular domains with spanning of hosts in them, but then you must specify `-H' explicitly. E.g. wget -r -H -Dmit.edu,stanford.edu http://www.mit.edu/ will start with `http://www.mit.edu/', following links across MIT and Stanford.  File: wget.info, Node: All Hosts, Next: No Parent, Prev: Domain Acceptance, Up: Following Links All Hosts ========= When `-H' is specified without `-D', all hosts are freely spanned. There are no restrictions whatsoever as to what part of the net Wget will go to fetch documents. Such an option is rarely useful.  File: wget.info, Node: No Parent, Next: FTP Links, Prev: All Hosts, Up: Following Links No Parent ========= Regardless of other link-following facilities, you may wish to ban following of all links that refer to the hierarchy "upper" than the beginning directory. The `--no-parent' option (short `-np') is useful in this case. Using it guarantees that you will never leave the existing hierarchy. So, supposing you issue Wget with: wget -r --no-parent http://somehost/~luzer/my-archive/ You may rest assured that none of the references to `/~his-girls-homepage/' or `/our-page.html' will be followed. Only the archive you are interested in will be downloaded. It is much better than simply using `-L' for the same purpose, since it will handle absolute paths correctly. However, it will not go into additional trouble in preventing DNS lookups.  File: wget.info, Node: FTP Links, Prev: No Parent, Up: Following Links Following FTP Links =================== The rules for FTP are somewhat specific, as it is necessary for them to be. To have FTP links followed from HTML documents, you *must* specify `-f' (`--follow-ftp'). If you do that, FTP links will span hosts even if `-H' is not set. Option `--relative-only' (`-L') has no effect on FTP whatsoever. However, domain acceptance (`-D') and suffix rules (`-A'/`-R') apply normally.  File: wget.info, Node: Startup File, Next: Examples, Prev: Following Links, Up: Top Startup File ************ Once you know how to change default settings of Wget through command line arguments, you may wish to make some of those settings permanent. You can do that in a convenient way by creating the Wget startup file -- `.wgetrc'. Wget recognizes a limited set of wgetrc commands and reads them upon startup. * Menu: * Wgetrc Location:: Location of various wgetrc files. * Wgetrc Syntax:: Syntax of wgetrc. * Wgetrc Commands:: List of available commands. * Sample Wgetrc:: A wgetrc example.  File: wget.info, Node: Wgetrc Location, Next: Wgetrc Syntax, Prev: Startup File, Up: Startup File Wgetrc Location =============== When initializing, Wget will look for a "global" startup file, `/usr/local/lib/wgetrc' by default (or some prefix other than `/usr/local', if Wget was not installed there) and read commands from there, if it exists. Then it will look for the user's file. If the environmental variable WGETRC is set, Wget will try to load that file. Failing that, no further attempts will be made. If WGETRC is not set, Wget will try to load `$HOME/.wgetrc'. The fact that user's settings are loaded after the system-wide ones means that in case of collision user's wgetrc *overrides* the system-wide wgetrc (in `/usr/local/lib/wgetrc' by default).