Wget error codes

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, XHTML, and CSS pages, to 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
files to point at 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 regetting, it will
instruct the server to continue the download from where it left off.

OPTIONS¶

Option Syntax¶

Since Wget uses GNU getopt to process command-line arguments, 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 arguments. 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 arguments together, like:

        wget -drc <URL>

This is completely equivalent to:

        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 accomplishes. 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
«follow_ftp = on» in .wgetrc makes Wget 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 command-line options.

-b

—background

Go to background immediately after startup. If no output file is specified
via the -o, output is redirected 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 commands 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 normally 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 compiling with debug support is
always safe—Wget compiled 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.

—report-speed=type

Output bandwidth as type. The only accepted value is
bits.

-i file

—input-file=file

Read URLs from a local or external 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
command lines will be the first ones to be retrieved. If
—force-html is not specified, then file should consist of a
series of URLs, one per line.

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 documents or by specifying
—base= url on the command line.

If the file is an external one, the document will be automatically
treated as html if the Content-Type matches text/html.
Furthermore, the file‘s location will be implicitly used as base
href if none was specified.

-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

Resolves relative links using URL as the point of reference, when
reading links from an HTML file specified via the
-i/—input-file option (together with —force-html,
or when the input file was fetched remotely from a server describing it as
HTML). This is equivalent to the presence of a «BASE» tag in the
HTML input file, with URL as the value for the «href»
attribute.

For instance, if you specify http://foo/bar/a.html for URL,
and Wget reads ../baz/b.html from the input file, it would be
resolved to http://foo/baz/b.html.

—config=FILE

Specify the location of a startup file you wish to use.

Download Options¶

—bind-address=ADDRESS

When making client TCP/IP connections, bind to ADDRESS on the local
machine. ADDRESS may be specified 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 tries to number. Specify 0 or inf for infinite
retrying. The default is to retry 20 times, with the exception of fatal
errors like «connection 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
immediately, 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
combination 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; -k can be used only when the
output is a regular 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,
downloading 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. (This is also
the behavior with -nd, even if -r or -p are in
effect.) 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 clobbering), but rather the multiple version saving
that’s prevented.

When running Wget with -r or -p, but without -N,
-nd, 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 suffixes .html
or .htm will be loaded from the local disk and parsed as if they
had been retrieved from the Web.

—backups=backups

Before (over)writing a file, back up an existing file by adding a
.1 suffix ( _1 on VMS) to the file name. Such backup files
are rotated to .2, .3, and so on, up to backups (and
lost beyond that).

-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 (presumably 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 download
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 especially 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.

—start-pos=OFFSET

Start downloading at zero-based position OFFSET. Offset may be
expressed in bytes, kilobytes with the `k’ suffix, or megabytes with the
`m’ suffix, etc.

—start-pos has higher precedence over —continue. When
—start-pos and —continue are both specified, wget will
emit a warning then proceed as if —continue was absent.

Server support for continued download is required, otherwise
—start-pos cannot help. See -c for details.

—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.

The progress type can also take one or more parameters. The
parameters vary based on the type selected. Parameters to
type are passed by appending them to the type sperated by a colon
(:) like this:
—progress=type:parameter1:
parameter2.

When using the dotted retrieval, you may set the style by specifying
the type as dot:style. Different 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
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). If
«mega» is not enough then you can use the «giga»
style—each dot represents 1M retrieved, there are eight dots in a
cluster, and 32 dots on each line (so each line contains 32M).

With —progress=bar, there are currently two possible parameters,
force and noscroll.

When the output is not a TTY, the progress bar always falls back to
«dot», even if —progress=bar was passed to Wget during
invokation. This behaviour can be overridden and the «bar»
output forced by using the «force» parameter as
—progress=bar:force.

By default, the bar style progress bar scroll the name of the file
from left to right for the file being downloaded if the filename exceeds
the maximum length allotted for its display. In certain cases, such as
with —progress=bar:force, one may not want the scrolling filename
in the progress bar. By passing the «noscroll» parameter, Wget
can be forced to display as much of the filename as possible without
scrolling through it.

Note that you can set the default style using the «progress»
command in .wgetrc. That setting may be overridden from the command
line. For example, to force the bar output without scrolling, use
—progress=bar:force:noscroll.

—show-progress

Force wget to display the progress bar in any verbosity.

By default, wget only displays the progress bar in verbose mode. One may
however want wget to display the progress bar on screen in conjunction
with any other verbosity modes like —no-verbose or —quiet.
This is often a desired a property when invoking wget to download several
small/large files. In such a case, wget could simply be invoked with this
parameter to get a much cleaner output on the screen.

-N

—timestamping

Turn on time-stamping.

—no-use-server-timestamps

Don’t set the local file’s timestamp by the one on the server.

By default, when a file is downloaded, its timestamps are set to match those
from the remote file. This allows the use of —timestamping on
subsequent invocations of wget. However, it is sometimes useful to base
the local file’s timestamp on when it was actually downloaded; for that
purpose, the —no-use-server-timestamps option has been
provided.

-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, —connect-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 seconds 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, reading 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 example, —limit-rate=20k will limit the
retrieval rate to 20KB/s. This is useful when, for whatever reason, you
don’t want Wget to consume the entire available bandwidth.

This option allows the use of decimal numbers, usually in conjunction with
power suffixes; for example, —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. However, 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 downloads, you can use this option. Wget will
use linear backoff, waiting 1 second after the first failure on a
given file, then waiting 2 seconds after the second failure on that file,
up to the maximum number of seconds you specify.

By default, Wget will assume a value of 10 seconds.

—random-wait

Some web sites may perform log analysis to identify retrieval programs
such as Wget by looking for statistically 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 development on a popular consumer
platform provided code to perform this analysis on the fly. Its author
suggested 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), 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 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 situations 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=modes

Change which characters found in remote URLs must be escaped during
generation of local filenames. 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. This option may also be used to force all
alphabetical cases to be either lower- or uppercase.

By default, Wget escapes the characters that are not valid or safe as part
of file names on your operating system, as well as control characters that
are typically unprintable. This option is useful for changing these
defaults, perhaps because you are downloading to a non-native partition,
or because you want to disable escaping of the control characters, or you
want to further restrict characters to only those in the ASCII range of
values.

The modes are a comma-separated set of text values. The acceptable
values are unix, windows, nocontrol, ascii,
lowercase, and uppercase. The values unix and
windows are mutually exclusive (one will override the other), as
are lowercase and uppercase. Those last are special cases,
as they do not change the set of characters that would be escaped, but
rather force local file paths to be converted either to lower- or
uppercase.

When «unix» is specified, Wget escapes the character / and
the control characters in the ranges 0—31 and 128—159. This is the
default on Unix-like operating systems.

When «windows» is given, Wget escapes the characters ,
|, /, :, ?, «, *,
<, >, and the control 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 specify nocontrol, then the escaping of the control characters
is also switched off. This option may make sense when you are downloading
URLs whose names contain UTF-8 characters, on a system which can save and
display filenames in UTF-8 (some possible byte values used in UTF-8 byte
sequences fall in the range of values designated by Wget as
«controls»).

The ascii mode is used to specify that any bytes whose values are
outside the range of ASCII characters (that is, greater than 127) shall be
escaped. This can be useful when saving filenames whose encoding does not
match the one used locally.

-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.
Conversely, 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=none/IPv4/IPv6

When given a choice of several addresses, connect to the addresses with
specified address family first. The address order returned by DNS is used
without change 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
stable—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.

—ask-password

Prompt for a password for each connection established. Cannot be specified
when —password is being used, because they are mutually
exclusive.

—no-iri

Turn off internationalized URI (IRI) support. Use —iri to turn it
on. IRI support is activated by default.

You can set the default state of IRI support using the «iri»
command in .wgetrc. That setting may be overridden from the command
line.

—local-encoding=encoding

Force Wget to use encoding as the default system encoding. That
affects how Wget converts URLs specified as arguments from locale to UTF-8
for IRI support.

Wget use the function «nl_langinfo()» and then the
«CHARSET» environment variable to get the locale. If it fails,
ASCII is used.

You can set the default local encoding using the «local_encoding»
command in .wgetrc. That setting may be overridden from the command
line.

—remote-encoding=encoding

Force Wget to use encoding as the default remote server encoding.
That affects how Wget converts URIs found in files from remote encoding to
UTF-8 during a recursive fetch. This options is only useful for IRI
support, for the interpretation of non-ASCII characters.

For HTTP, remote encoding can be found in HTTP «Content-Type»
header and in HTML «Content-Type http-equiv» meta tag.

You can set the default encoding using the «remoteencoding»
command in .wgetrc. That setting may be overridden from the command
line.

—unlink

Force Wget to unlink file instead of clobbering existing file. This option
is useful for downloading to the directory with hardlinks.

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 directories, even if
one would not have been created otherwise. E.g. wget -x
http://fly.srk.fer.hr/robots.txt will save the downloaded file to
fly.srk.fer.hr/robots.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 directory 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 examples 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 structure, 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 prefix is the
directory where all other files and subdirectories will be saved to, i.e.
the top of the retrieval tree. The default is . (the current
directory).

HTTP Options¶

—default-page=name

Use name as the default file name when it isn’t known (i.e., for
URLs that end in a slash), instead of index.html.

-E

—adjust-extension

If a file of type application/xhtml+xml or text/html is
downloaded and the URL does not end with the regexp
.[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 corresponds to remote URL X (since
it doesn’t yet know that the URL produces output of type text/html
or application/xhtml+xml.

As of version 1.12, Wget will also ensure that any downloaded files of type
text/css end in the suffix .css, and the option was renamed
from —html-extension, to better reflect its new behavior. The old
option name is still acceptable, but should now be considered deprecated.

At some point in the future, this option may well be expanded to include
suffixes for other types of content, including content types that are not
parsed by Wget.

—http-user=user

—http-password=password

Specify the username user and password password on an HTTP
server. According to the type of the challenge, 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-http-keep-alive

Turn off the «keep-alive» feature for HTTP downloads. 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 transferred
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, persistent (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.

—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 flushing 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 credentials. 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—simply 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:

        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 (otherwise normal) connection has closed on the very
same byte.

With this option, Wget will ignore the «Content-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 follow 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. Useful for
retrieving documents with server-side processing that assume they are
always being retrieved by interactive web browsers and only come out
properly 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
violations. 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. In particular, they both
expect content of the form «key1=value1&key2=value2», with
percent-encoding for special characters; the only difference is that one
expects its content as a command-line parameter and the other accepts its
content from a file. In particular, —post-file is not for
transmitting files as form attachments: those must appear as
«key=value» data (with appropriate percent-coding) just like
everything else. Wget does not currently support
«multipart/form-data» for transmitting POST data; only
«application/x-www-form-urlencoded». Only one of
—post-data and —post-file should be specified.

Please note that wget does not require the content to be of the form
«key1=value1&key2=value2», and neither does it test for it.
Wget will simply transmit whatever data is provided to it. Most servers
however expect the POST data to be in the above format when processing
HTML Forms.

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
chunked 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: As of version 1.15 if Wget is redirected after the POST request is
completed, its behaviour will depend on the response code returned by the
server. In case of a 301 Moved Permanently, 302 Moved Temporarily or 307
Temporary Redirect, Wget will, in accordance with RFC2616, continue to
send a POST request. In case a server wants the client to change the
Request method upon redirection, it should send a 303 See Other response
code.

This example shows how to log in to a server using POST and then proceed to
download the desired pages, presumably 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.

—method=HTTP-Method

For the purpose of RESTful scripting, Wget allows sending of other HTTP
Methods without the need to explicitly set them using
—header=Header-Line. Wget will use whatever string is passed to it
after —method as the HTTP Method to the server.

—body-data=Data-String

—body-file=Data-File

Must be set when additional data needs to be sent to the server along with
the Method specified using —method. —body-data sends
string as data, whereas —body-file sends the contents of
file. Other than that, they work in exactly the same way.

Currently, —body-file is not for transmitting files as a
whole. Wget does not currently support «multipart/form-data» for
transmitting data; only «application/x-www-form-urlencoded». In
the future, this may be changed so that wget sends the —body-file
as a complete file instead of sending its contents to the server. Please
be aware that Wget needs to know the contents of BODY Data in advance, and
hence the argument to —body-file should be a regular file. See
—post-file for a more detailed explanation. Only one of
—body-data and —body-file should be specified.

If Wget is redirected after the request is completed, Wget will suspend the
current method and send a GET request till the redirection is completed.
This is true for all redirection response codes except 307 Temporary
Redirect which is used to explicitly specify that the request method
should not change. Another exception is when the method is set to
«POST», in which case the redirection rules specified under
—post-data are followed.

—content-disposition

If this is set to on, experimental (not fully-functional) 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.

—content-on-error

If this is set to on, wget will not skip the content when the server
responds with a http status code that indicates error.

—trust-server-names

If this is set to on, on a redirect the last component of the redirection
URL will be used as the local file name. By default it is used the last
component in the original URL.

—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, TLSv1, TLSv1_1, TLSv1_2
and PFS. If auto is used, the SSL library is given the
liberty of choosing the appropriate protocol automatically, which is
achieved by sending a TLSv1 greeting. This is the default.

Specifying SSLv2, SSLv3, TLSv1, TLSv1_1 or
TLSv1_2 forces the use of the corresponding protocol. This is
useful when talking to old and buggy SSL server implementations that make
it hard for the underlying SSL library to choose the correct protocol
version. Fortunately, such servers are quite rare.

Specifying PFS enforces the use of the so-called Perfect Forward
Security cipher suites. In short, PFS adds security by creating a one-time
key for each SSL connection. It has a bit more CPU impact on client and
server. We use known to be secure ciphers (e.g. no MD4) and the TLS
protocol.

—https-only

When in recursive mode, only HTTPS links are followed.

—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 certificate 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
«insecure» 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 download.
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 certificate. 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 values 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 certificates 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 processing 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 without /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 cryptographically 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 contacted. EGD is not needed on modern Unix systems
that support /dev/random.

—warc-file=file

Use file as the destination WARC file.

—warc-header=string

Use string into as the warcinfo record.

—warc-max-size=size

Set the maximum size of the WARC files to size.

—warc-cdx

Write CDX index files.

—warc-dedup=file

Do not store records listed in this CDX file.

—no-warc-compression

Do not compress WARC files with GZIP.

—no-warc-digests

Do not calculate SHA1 digests.

—no-warc-keep-log

Do not store the log file in a WARC record.

—warc-tempdir=dir

Specify the location for temporary files created by the WARC writer.

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 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.

—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-specific. 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
configurations 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.

—preserve-permissions

Preserve remote file permissions instead of permissions set by umask.

—retr-symlinks

By default, when retrieving FTP directories recursively and a symbolic
link is encountered, the symbolic link is traversed and the pointed-to
files are retrieved. Currently, Wget does not traverse symbolic links to
directories to download them recursively, though this feature may be added
in the future.

When —retr-symlinks=no is specified, 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 retrieved unless this
recursive retrieval would have encountered it separately and downloaded it
anyway. This option poses a security risk where a malicious FTP Server may
cause Wget to write to files outside of the intended directories through a
specially crafted .LISTING file.

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.

Recursive Retrieval Options¶

-r

—recursive

Turn on recursive retrieving. The default maximum depth is 5.

-l depth

—level=depth

Specify recursion maximum depth level depth.

—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 viewing. 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:

-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 distinguish 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 unfortunately this
is not the case, because -l 0 is equivalent 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 specified, but only that
single page and its requisites will be downloaded. Links from that page to
external 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 occurrence of —>.

According to specifications, HTML comments are expressed as SGML
declarations. Declaration is special 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
technically 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: comments
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. In
this case, you have to enclose the pattern into quotes to prevent your
shell from expanding it, like in -A «*.mp3» or -A
‘*.mp3’.

—accept-regex urlregex

—reject-regex urlregex

Specify a regular expression to accept or reject the complete URL.

—regex-type regextype

Specify the regular expression type. Possible types are posix or
pcre. Note that to be able to use pcre type, wget has to be
compiled with libpcre support.

-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 documents 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 downloading 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 downloading from FTP sites. For example, with this option, -A
«*.txt» will match file1.txt, but also
file2.TXT, file3.TxT, and so on. The quotes in the example
are to prevent the shell from expanding the pattern.

-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 certain hierarchy will be downloaded.

ENVIRONMENT¶

Wget supports proxies for both HTTP and FTP retrievals. The standard way to
specify proxy location, which Wget recognizes, is using the following
environment variables:

http_proxy

https_proxy

If set, the http_proxy and https_proxy variables should
contain the URLs of the proxies for HTTP and HTTPS connections
respectively.

ftp_proxy

This variable should contain the URL of the proxy for FTP connections. It
is quite common that http_proxy and ftp_proxy are set to the
same URL.

no_proxy

This variable should contain a comma-separated list of domain extensions
proxy should not be used for. For instance, if the value of
no_proxy is .mit.edu, proxy will not be used to retrieve
documents from MIT.

EXIT STATUS¶

Wget may return one of several error codes if it encounters problems.

0

No problems occurred.

1

Generic error code.

2

Parse error—for instance, when parsing command-line options, the
.wgetrc or .netrc…

3

File I/O error.

4

Network failure.

5

SSL verification failure.

6

Username/password authentication failure.

7

Protocol errors.

8

Server issued an error response.

With the exceptions of 0 and 1, the lower-numbered exit codes take precedence
over higher-numbered ones, when multiple types of errors are encountered.

In versions of Wget prior to 1.12, Wget’s exit status tended to be unhelpful and
inconsistent. Recursive downloads would virtually always return 0 (success),
regardless of any issues encountered, and non-recursive fetches only returned
the status corresponding to the most recently-attempted download.

FILES¶

/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/BugTracker>).

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
documentation 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 support
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 explanations 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.

Originally written by Hrvoje Niksic <hniksic@xemacs.org>.

COPYRIGHT¶

Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006,
2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the
terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version
published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no
Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is
included in the section entitled «GNU Free Documentation
License».

View http headers with wget to see things like Apache server response codes and more.

There are many tools that will allow you to see HTTP headers, such as: curl, fiddler, httpwatch, postman, tcpdump, snoop, and wireshark to name a few. If you don’t have the option to install these, wget can also help you see the HTTP headers and is available in cygwin for windows and most linux installs.

If wget isn’t installed you can use either apt, yum to install it:

Installing Wget on Debian, Ubuntu

Installing Wget on RHEL, CentOS

Installing Wget on Windows

There is a windows binary for wget, but we’ve found that Cygwin works much better and provides other useful tools as well.

Why Check HTTP Headers?

Knowing what your server is returning is useful when you need to see more than what your browser is showing you. Most browsers do not provide specific details, error codes, or other header information such as x-header info.

Here are a few troubleshooting reasons you may want to look at HTTP headers:

• Verify redirects happening as you expect, especially when troubleshooting mod_rewrite
• See if you have a permissions error, server error, or other http response code
• See if you have x-headers providing proper information back to the browser
• XFF headers will tell you if certain proxy types are forwarding/handling your request
• Verify character sets, encoding, compression or other header settings
• Viewing cookie data
• Fixing and Troubleshooting Redirect Loops
• View caching parameters in your HTTP headers, if they exist
• Why the same page or parts of the page are unreachable from different networks

There are also security implications and reconnaissance reasons to view headers:

• Verify redirects location on unknown shortened links
• View current X-XSS-Protection settings related to XSS attacks
• View X-Frame-Options (click jacking)
• View X-Content-Type-Options to harden against MIME-sniffing attacks

As you can see there are at least a few good reasons for troubleshooting and investigation that you might want to look at HTTP headers. Another big advantage of viewing HTTP headers is being able to do this from the client side. Server folks may be in a different timezone and getting a meeting together to have them look at headers and logs on the server could take weeks sometimes. You can do your own client side tests though and then email the server team what parts they should investigate based on your findings.

Wget Syntax

So how do you get on with checking those headers anyway? First look at the basic syntax of wget:

Check HTTP Headers With Wget

Looking at the help file for wget will show several pages of commands. The ones we are most interested in for looking at headers is the –server-reponse (S) and –output-document flags (O). We’ll combine them as -SO and then add the – to make sure it goes to stdout. This allows us to parse it or simply view it. You can also specify the file name if you like for later viewing.

The –timeout (T) and –tries (t) options are optional, but I usually include them by habit. We pipe it to more because it’s going to show the entire request, in addition to headers.

Here is a sample header output:

You can combine this with things like egrep to parse out something you might be looking for. For example if we wanted to see the http status code, we could do this:

HTTP Status Codes

There are various “sub” codes, but the main categories are as follows:

• 1XX (Informational)
• 2XX (Success)
• 3XX (Redirection)
• 4XX (Client Error)
• 5XX (Server Error)

wget flags for troubleshooting

While troubleshooting your http headers, you can use several of the flags to save cookies, set a user, force certain types of SSL and more:

• keep-session-cookies
• save-cookies file.txt
• load-cookies file.txt
• http-user=user
• http-password=password
• no-cache
• user-agent=
• no-check-certificate
• secure-protocol=SSLv3|TLSv1

Wget Error Codes:

• 0 No problems occurred.
• 1 Generic error code.
• 2 Parse error—for instance, when parsing command-line options, the .wgetrc or .netrc…
• 3 File I/O error.
• 4 Network failure.
• 5 SSL verification failure.
• 6 Username/password authentication failure.
• 7 Protocol errors.
• 8 Server issued an error response.

Exit codes that are lower numbered, take precedence over higher-numbered ones when multiple types of errors are encountered.

Specific HTTP Error Messages

Sometimes, a load balancer will make your connection fail. Here are some of the common load balancer related messages we’ve seen:

HTTP 400: BAD_REQUEST

The client sent a bad request. The client either isn’t speaking proper HTTP or is using a type of connect method that the load balancer doesn’t support.

HTTP 405: METHOD_NOT_ALLOWED

In AWS, the load balancer only allows a length of 127 characters in the method. You will get this error if your method has a longer length

HTTP 408: Request Timeout

The client cancelled the request or failed to send a full request. Troubleshoot things that would normally cause network issues such as an overloaded switch or firewall or congested network. It is also possible the client is simply requesting something the server won’t listen to such as a wrong port, but this is usually only the case if the server is configured to tell you it’s the wrong port and that is not standard methodology.

HTTP 502: Bad Gateway

This is likely a parsing issue on the load balancer. Confirm that your application is sending proper HTTP requests.

HTTP 503: Service Unavailable

This most likely related to overload, but could also be misconfiguration. If everything seems to be operating normally without severe load and the issue persists, it’s probably a misconfiguration.

HTTP 504: Gateway Timeout

The load balancer closed the connection because the application took too long to respond. This is most likely related to your keep-alive settings.

In most cases, simply looking at the header while on a network directly connected to the server and comparing it against the headers sent from the load balancer or other intervening device will give you a clue as to what is wrong.

Related RFCs to HTTP Troubleshooting

There is actually a “right way” to handle the HTTP protocol, regardless of what your developer says! The “right way” is documented in various RFCs and it is worth reading through them, especially if you are troubleshooting HTTP header issues:

• RFC7230 – HTTP/1.1: Message Syntax and Routing
• RFC7231 – HTTP/1.1: Semantics and Content
• RFC7232 – HTTP/1.1: Conditional Requests
• RFC7233 – HTTP/1.1: Range Requests
• RFC7234 – HTTP/1.1: Caching
• RFC7235 – HTTP/1.1: Authentication

Want Help Troubleshooting Your HTTP App?

Contact us for help with your network troubleshooting. We’d be happy to help you get things up and running again (or for the first time).