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GNU Wget Manual

1. Overview

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.

This chapter is a partial overview of Wget's features.

• 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 pages and create local versions of remote web sites, fully recreating the directory structure of the original site. This is sometimes referred to as "recursive downloading." While doing that, Wget respects the Robot Exclusion Standard (`/robots.txt'). Wget can be instructed to convert the links in downloaded HTML files to the local files for offline viewing.

• 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 has been designed for robustness over slow or unstable network connections; if a download fails due to a network problem, it will keep retrying until the whole file has been retrieved. If the server supports regetting, it will instruct the server to continue the download from where it left off.

• 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 4. 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 6. 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 10. Copying).