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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 (See section 6.3 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'
(See section 7 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 `<base href>' 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 (See section 6.4 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 (See section 4 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
(See section 6.1 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
(See section 6.2 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. See section 6.5 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
(See section 8.2 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.
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