Go to the first, previous, next, last section, table of contents.
@dircategory Net Utilities
@dircategory World Wide Web
@direntry
* Wget: (wget). The non-interactive network downloader.
Copyright (C) 1996, 1997, 1998 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
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.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual
into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions,
except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation
approved by the Free Software Foundation.
GNU Wget 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. It has many useful features to make downloading easier, some
of them being:
-
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 is capable of descending recursively through the structure of
HTML documents and FTP directory trees, making a local copy of
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 (See section 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 works exceedingly well on slow or unstable connections,
retrying 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.
-
By default, Wget supports proxy servers, which can lighten the network
load, speed up retrieval and provide access behind firewalls. However,
if you are behind a firewall that requires that you use a socks style
gateway, you can get the socks library and build wget with support for
socks. Wget also supports the passive FTP downloading as an
option.
-
Builtin features offer mechanisms to tune which links you wish to follow
(See section Following Links).
-
The retrieval is conveniently traced with printing dots, each dot
representing a fixed amount of data received (1KB by default). These
representations can be customized to your preferences.
-
Most of the features are fully configurable, either through command line
options, or via the initialization file `.wgetrc' (See section Startup File). Wget allows you to define global startup files
(`/usr/local/etc/wgetrc' by default) for site settings.
-
Finally, GNU Wget is free software. This means that everyone may use
it, redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General
Public License, as published by the Free Software Foundation
(See section GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE).
Go to the first, previous, next, last section, table of contents.