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GNU Wget Manual

2.8 FTP Options

`-nr'

`--dont-remove-listing'

Don't remove the temporary `.listing' files generated by FTP retrievals. Normally, these files contain the raw directory listings received from FTP servers. Not removing them can be useful for debugging purposes, or when you want to be able to easily check on the contents of remote server directories (e.g. to verify that a mirror you're running is complete).

Note that even though Wget writes to a known filename for this file, this is not a security hole in the scenario of a user making `.listing' a symbolic link to `/etc/passwd' or something and asking root to run Wget in his or her directory. Depending on the options used, either Wget will refuse to write to `.listing', making the globbing/recursion/time-stamping operation fail, or the symbolic link will be deleted and replaced with the actual `.listing' file, or the listing will be written to a `.listing.number' file.

Even though this situation isn't a problem, though, root should never run Wget in a non-trusted user's directory. A user could do something as simple as linking `index.html' to `/etc/passwd' and asking root to run Wget with `-N' or `-r' so the file will be overwritten.

`-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.srk.fer.hr/*.msg

By default, globbing will be turned on if the URL contains a globbing character. This option may be used to turn globbing on or off permanently.

You may have to quote the URL to protect it from being expanded by your shell. Globbing makes Wget look for a directory listing, which is system-specific. This is why it currently works only with Unix FTP servers (and the ones emulating Unix ls output).

`--passive-ftp'

Use the passive FTP retrieval scheme, in which the client initiates the data connection. This is sometimes required for FTP to work behind firewalls.

`--retr-symlinks'

Usually, when retrieving FTP directories recursively and a symbolic link is encountered, the linked-to file is not downloaded. Instead, a matching symbolic link is created on the local filesystem. The pointed-to file will not be downloaded unless this recursive retrieval would have encountered it separately 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 commandline, rather than because it was recursed to, this option has no effect. Symbolic links are always traversed in this case.