Provided by: wget2_1.99.1-2.2_amd64 
Name
Wget2 - a recursive metalink/file/website downloader.
Synopsis
wget2 [options]... [URL]...
Description
GNU Wget2 is a free utility for non-interactive download of files from the Web. It supports HTTP and
HTTPS protocols, as well as retrieval through HTTP(S) proxies.
Wget2 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 Wget2 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.
Wget2 can follow links in HTML, XHTML, CSS, RSS, Atom and sitemap files to create local versions of re‐
mote web sites, fully recreating the directory structure of the original site. This is sometimes re‐
ferred to as recursive downloading. While doing that, Wget2 respects the Robot Exclusion Standard (/ro‐
bots.txt). Wget2 can be instructed to convert the links in downloaded files to point at the local files,
for offline viewing.
Wget2 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 sup‐
ports partial downloads, it may continue the download from where it left off.
Options
Option Syntax
Every option has a long form and sometimes also a short one. Long options are more convenient to remem‐
ber, but take time to type. You may freely mix different option styles. Thus you may write:
wget2 -r --tries=10 https://example.com/ -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:
wget2 -drc <URL>
This is equivalent to:
wget2 -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:
wget2 -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.
wget2 -X '' -X /~nobody,/~somebody
Most options that do not accept arguments are boolean options, so named because their state can be cap‐
tured with a yes-or-no (“boolean”) variable. A boolean option is either affirmative or negative (begin‐
ning with --no-). All such options share several properties.
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 timestamping = on in .wgetrc makes Wget2 download
updated files only. Using --no-timestamping is the only way to restore the factory default from the com‐
mand line.
Basic Startup Options
-V, --version
Display the version of Wget2.
-h, --help
Print a help message describing all of Wget2’s command-line options.
-b, --background
Go to background immediately after startup. If no output file is specified via the -o, output is redi‐
rected to wget-log.
-e, --execute=command
Execute command as if it were a part of .wgetrc. A command thus invoked will be executed after the com‐
mands 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, --output-file=logfile
Log all messages to logfile. The messages are normally reported to standard error.
-a, --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 Wget2 if it does not
work properly. Your system administrator may have chosen to compile Wget2 without debug support, in
which case -d will not work. Please note that compiling with debug support is always safe, Wget2 com‐
piled with the debug support will not print any debug info unless requested with -d.
-q, --quiet
Turn off Wget2’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 values are bytes (which is set by default) and bits. This
option only works if --progress=bar is also set.
-i, --input-file=file
Read URLs from a local or external file. If - is specified as file, URLs are read from the standard in‐
put. (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.
file is expected to contain one URL per line, except one of the –force- options specifies a different
format.
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 “” to the documents or by specifying –base=url
on the command line.
If you specify --force-css, the document will be regarded as CSS.
If you specify --force-sitemap, the document will be regarded as XML sitemap.
If you specify --force-atom, the document will be regarded as Atom Feed.
If you specify --force-rss, the document will be regarded as RSS Feed.
If you specify --force-metalink, the document will be regarded as Metalink description.
If you have problems with relative links, you should use –base=url on the command line.
-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 “” to HTML, or using the –base com‐
mand-line option.
--force-css
Read and parse the input file as CSS. This enables you to retrieve links from existing CSS files on your
local disk. You will need –base to handle relative links correctly.
--force-sitemap
Read and parse the input file as sitemap XML. This enables you to retrieve links from existing sitemap
files on your local disk. You will need –base to handle relative links correctly.
--force-atom
Read and parse the input file as Atom Feed XML. This enables you to retrieve links from existing sitemap
files on your local disk. You will need –base to handle relative links correctly.
--force-rss
Read and parse the input file as RSS Feed XML. This enables you to retrieve links from existing sitemap
files on your local disk. You will need –base to handle relative links correctly.
--force-metalink
Read and parse the input file as Metalink. This enables you to retrieve links from existing Metalink
files on your local disk. You will need –base to handle relative links correctly.
-B, --base=URL
Resolves relative links using URL as the point of reference, when reading links from an HTML file speci‐
fied via the -i/–input-file option (together with a –force... option, or when the input file was fetched
remotely from a server describing it as HTML, CSS, Atom or RSS). 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 https://example.com/bar/a.html for URL, and Wget2 reads ../baz/b.html from
the input file, it would be resolved to https://example.com/baz/b.html.
--config=FILE
Specify the location of configuration files you wish to use. If you specify more than one file, either
by using a comma-separated list or several --config options, these files are read in left-to-right order.
The files given in $SYSTEM_WGET2RC and ($WGET2RC or ~/.wget2rc) are read in that order and then the user-
provided config file(s). If set, $WGET2RC replaces ~/.wget2rc.
--no-config empties the internal list of config files. So if you want to prevent reading any config
files, give –no-config on the command line.
--no-config followed by --config=file just reads file and skips reading the default config files.
Wget will attempt to tilde-expand filenames written in the configuration file on supported platforms. To
use a file that starts with the character literal `~', use “./~” or an absolute path.
--rejected-log=logfile
Logs all URL rejections to logfile as comma separated values. The values include the reason of rejec‐
tion, the URL and the parent URL it was found in.
--local-db
Enables reading/writing to local database files (default: on).
These are the files for --hsts, --hpkp, --ocsp, etc.
With --no-local-db you can switch reading/writing off, e.g. useful for testing.
This option does not influence the reading of config files.
--stats-dns[=[FORMAT:]FILE]
Save DNS stats in format FORMAT, in file FILE.
FORMAT can be human or csv. - is shorthand for stdout and h is shorthand for human.
The CSV output format is
Hostname,IP,Port,Duration
`Duration` is given in milliseconds.
--stats-tls[=[FORMAT:]FILE]
Save TLS stats in format FORMAT, in file FILE.
FORMAT can be human or csv. - is shorthand for stdout and h is shorthand for human.
The CSV output format is
Hostname,TLSVersion,FalseStart,TFO,Resumed,ALPN,HTTPVersion,Certificates,Duration
`TLSVersion` can be 1,2,3,4,5 for SSL3, TLS1.0, TLS1.1, TLS1.2 and TLS1.3. -1 means 'None'.
`FalseStart` whether the connection used TLS False Start. -1 if not applicable.
`TFO` whether the connection used TCP Fast Open. -1 is TFO was disabled.
`Resumed` whether the TLS session was resumed or not.
`ALPN` is the ALPN negotiation string.
`HTTPVersion` is 0 for HTTP 1.1 and 1 is for HTTP 2.0.
`Certificates` is the size of the server's certificate chain.
`Duration` is given in milliseconds.
--stats-ocsp[=[FORMAT:]FILE]
Save OCSP stats in format FORMAT, in file FILE.
FORMAT can be human or csv. - is shorthand for stdout and h is shorthand for human.
The CSV output format is
Hostname,Stapling,Valid,Revoked,Ignored
`Stapling` whether an OCSP response was stapled or not.
`Valid` how many server certificates were valid regarding OCSP.
`Revoked` how many server certificates were revoked regarding OCSP.
`Ignored` how many server certificates had been ignored or OCSP responses missing.
--stats-server[=[FORMAT:]FILE]
Save Server stats in format FORMAT, in file FILE.
FORMAT can be human or csv. - is shorthand for stdout and h is shorthand for human.
The CSV output format is
Hostname,IP,Scheme,HPKP,NewHPKP,HSTS,CSP
`Scheme` 0,1,2 mean `None`, `http`, `https`.
`HPKP` values 0,1,2,3 mean 'No HPKP', 'HPKP matched', 'HPKP doesn't match', 'HPKP error'.
`NewHPKP` whether server sent HPKP (Public-Key-Pins) header.
`HSTS` whether server sent HSTS (Strict-Transport-Security) header.
`CSP` whether server sent CSP (Content-Security-Policy) header.
--stats-site[=[FORMAT:]FILE]
Save Site stats in format FORMAT, in file FILE.
FORMAT can be human or csv. - is shorthand for stdout and h is shorthand for human.
The CSV output format is
ID,ParentID,URL,Status,Link,Method,Size,SizeDecompressed,TransferTime,ResponseTime,Encoding,Verification
`ID` unique ID for a stats record.
`ParentID` ID of the parent document, relevant for `--recursive` mode.
`URL` URL of the document.
`Status` HTTP response code or 0 if not applicable.
`Link` 1 means 'direkt link', 0 means 'redirection link'.
`Method` 1,2,3 mean GET, HEAD, POST request type.
`Size` size of downloaded body (theoretical value for HEAD requests).
`SizeDecompressed` size of decompressed body (0 for HEAD requests).
`TransferTime` ms between start of request and completed download.
`ResponseTime` ms between start of request and first response packet.
`Encoding` 0,1,2,3,4,5 mean server side compression was 'identity', 'gzip', 'deflate', 'lzma/xz', 'bzip2', 'brotli'
`Verification` PGP verification status. 0,1,2,3 mean 'none', 'valid', 'invalid', 'bad', 'missing'.
--stats-all[=[FORMAT:]FILE]
Save DNS, TLS, OCSP, Server and Site stats in format FORMAT, in file FILE.
FORMAT can be human or csv. - is shorthand for stdout and h is shorthand for human.
Saving different csv output records into one file might break later parsing.
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, --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, --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 con‐
version. (Use ./- to print to a file literally named -.)
Using -r or -p with -O may not work as you expect: Wget2 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.
A combination with -nc is only accepted if the given output file does not exist.
When used along with the -c option, Wget2 will attempt to continue downloading the file whose name is
passed to the option, irrespective of whether the actual file already exists on disk or not. This allows
users to download a file with a temporary name alongside the actual file.
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.
Compatibility-Note: Wget 1.x used to treat -O as analogous to shell redirection. Wget2 does not handle
the option similarly. Hence, the file will not always be newly created. The file’s timestamps will not
be affected unless it is actually written to. As a result, both -c and -N options are now supported in
conjunction with this option.
-nc, --no-clobber
If a file is downloaded more than once in the same directory, Wget2’s behavior depends on a few options,
including -nc. In certain cases, the local file will be clobbered, or overwritten, upon repeated down‐
load. In other cases it will be preserved.
When running Wget2 without -N, -nc, -r, or -p, downloading the same file in the same directory will re‐
sult 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 Wget2 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 Wget2 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 Wget2 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.
A combination with -O/--output-document is only accepted if the given output file does not exist.
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 Wget2, or by another program. For instance:
wget2 -c https://example.com/tarball.gz
If there is a file named tarball.gz in the current directory, Wget2 will assume that it is the first por‐
tion 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 Wget2 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 Wget2, and whose local files are
still sitting around.
Without -c, the previous example would just download the remote file to tarball.gz.1, leaving the trun‐
cated tarball.gz file alone.
If you use -c on a non-empty file, and it turns out that the server does not support continued download‐
ing, Wget2 will refuse to start the download from scratch, which would effectively ruin existing con‐
tents. If you really want the download to start from scratch, remove the file.
If you use -c on a file which is of equal size as the one on the server, Wget2 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 “con‐
tinuing” 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 wget2 -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. Wget2 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 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 them’ suffix, etc.
--start-pos has higher precedence over --continue. When --start-pos and --continue are both specified,
Wget2 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 orienta‐
tion—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 clus‐
ter, 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 Wget2 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, Wget2 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.
--force-progress
Force Wget2 to display the progress bar in any verbosity.
By default, Wget2 only displays the progress bar in verbose mode. One may however, want Wget2 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 Wget2 to download several small/large files. In such a
case, Wget2 could simply be invoked with this parameter to get a much cleaner output on the screen.
This option will also force the progress bar to be printed to stderr when used alongside the –logfile op‐
tion.
-N, --timestamping
Turn on time-stamping.
--no-if-modified-since
Do not send If-Modified-Since header in -N mode. Send preliminary HEAD request instead. This has only
effect in -N mode.
--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 Wget2. 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 response headers sent by HTTP servers.
--spider
When invoked with this option, Wget2 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 Wget2 to check your bookmarks:
wget2 --spider --force-html -i bookmarks.html
This feature needs much more work for Wget2 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, Wget2 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 de‐
fault 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 li‐
braries.
--connect-timeout=seconds
Set the connect timeout to seconds seconds. TCP connections that take longer to establish will be abort‐
ed. 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 Wget2 to consume the entire avail‐
able 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 Wget2 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 Wget2 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 Wget2 to wait between every retrieval, but only between retries of failed downloads,
you can use this option. Wget2 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, Wget2 will assume a value of 10 seconds.
--random-wait
Some web sites may perform log analysis to identify retrieval programs such as Wget2 by looking for sta‐
tistically 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 Wget2’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[=exceptions]
If no argument is given, we try to stay backward compatible with Wget1.x and don’t use proxies, even if
the appropriate *_proxy environment variable is defined.
If a comma-separated list of exceptions (domains/IPs) is given, these exceptions are accessed without
usign a proxy. It overrides the `no_proxy' environment variable.
-Q quota, --quota=quota
Specify download quota for automatic retrievals. The value can be specified in bytes (default), kilo‐
bytes (with k suffix), or megabytes (with m suffix).
Note that quota will never affect downloading a single file. So if you specify
wget2 -Q10k https://example.com/bigfile.gz
all of the bigfile.gz will be downloaded. The same goes even when several URLs are specified on the com‐
mand-line. However, quota is respected when retrieving either recursively, or from an input file. Thus
you may safely type
wget2 -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, Wget2 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 re‐
trieves from. This cache exists in memory only; a new Wget2 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 Wget2. With this option Wget2 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. Char‐
acters that are restricted by this option are escaped, i.e. replaced with %HH, where HH is the hexadeci‐
mal number that corresponds to the restricted character. This option may also be used to force all al‐
phabetical cases to be either lower- or uppercase.
By default, Wget2 escapes the characters that are not valid or safe as part of file names on your operat‐
ing 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, Wget2 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, Wget2 escapes the characters , |, /, :, ?, ", *, <, >, and the control charac‐
ters in the ranges 0–31 and 128–159. In addition to this, Wget2 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?in‐
put=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 Wget2 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, Wget2 will only connect to IPv4
hosts, ignoring AAAA records in DNS, and refusing to connect to IPv6 addresses specified in URLs. Con‐
versely, with –inet6-only or -6, Wget2 will only connect to IPv6 hosts and ignore A records and IPv4 ad‐
dresses.
Neither options should be needed normally. By default, an IPv6-aware Wget2 will use the address family
specified by the host’s DNS record. If the DNS responds with both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, Wget2 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 Wget2 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.
--tcp-fastopen
Enable support for TCP Fast Open (TFO) (default: on).
TFO reduces connection latency by 1 RT on “hot” connections (2nd+ connection to the same host in a cer‐
tain amount of time).
Currently this works on recent Linux and OSX kernels, on HTTP and HTTPS.
--dns-caching
Enable DNS caching (default: on).
Keep results of DNS lookups in memory to speed up connections.
--retry-connrefused
Consider “connection refused” a transient error and try again. Normally Wget2 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 HTTP file retrieval. This overrides the lookup of
credentials in the .netrc file (–netrc is enabled by default). These parameters can be overridden using
the –http-user and –http-password options for HTTP(S) connections.
If neither –http-proxy-user nor –http-proxy-password is given these settings are also taken for proxy au‐
thentication.
--ask-password
Prompt for a password on the command line. Overrides the password set by –password (if any).
--use-askpass=command
Prompt for a user and password using the specified command. Overrides the user and/or password set by
–user/–password (if any).
--no-iri
Turn off internationalized URI (IRI) support. Use –iri to turn it on. IRI support is activated by de‐
fault.
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 Wget2 to use encoding as the default system encoding. That affects how Wget2 converts URLs speci‐
fied as arguments from locale to UTF-8 for IRI support.
Wget2 use the function “nl_langinfo()” and then the “CHARSET” environment variable to get the locale. If
it fails, ASCII is used.
--remote-encoding=encoding
Force Wget2 to use encoding as the default remote server encoding. That affects how Wget2 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.
--input-encoding=encoding
Use the specified encoding for the URLs read from --input-file. The default is the local encoding.
--unlink
Force Wget2 to unlink file instead of clobbering existing file. This option is useful for downloading to
the directory with hardlinks.
--cut-url-get-vars
Remove HTTP GET Variables from URLs. For example “main.css?v=123” will be changed to “main.css”. Be
aware that this may have unintended side effects, for example “image.php?name=sun” will be changed to
“image.php”. The cutting happens before adding the URL to the download queue.
--cut-file-get-vars
Remove HTTP GET Variables from filenames. For example “main.css?v=123” will be changed to “main.css”.
Be aware that this may have unintended side effects, for example “image.php?name=sun” will be changed to
“image.php”. The cutting happens when saving the file, after downloading.
File names obtained from a “Content-Disposition” header are not affected by this setting (see –content-
disposition), and can be a solution for this problem.
When “–trust-server-names” is used, the redirection URL is affected by this setting.
--chunk-size=size
Download large files in multithreaded chunks. This switch specifies the size of the chunks, given in
bytes if no other byte multiple unit is specified. By default it’s set on 0/off.
--max-threads=number
Specifies the maximum number of concurrent download threads for a resource. The default is 5 but if you
want to allow more or fewer this is the option to use.
-s, --verify-sig
Enable PGP signature verification. When enabled Wget2 will attempt to download and verify PGP signatures
against their corresponding files. When enabled, any file downloaded that has a content type beginning
with application/ will cause Wget2 to request a signature file for that file. The name of the signature
file is computed by appending the extension to the full path of the file that was just downloaded. The
extension used is defined by the --signature-extensions option. If the content type for the signature
request is application/pgp-signature, Wget2 will attempt to verify the signature against the original
file.
--signature-extensions
Specify the file extensions for signature files, without the leading “.”. You may specify multiple ex‐
tensions as a comma separated list. All the provided extensions will be tried simultaneously when look‐
ing for the signature file. The default is “sig”.
--gnupg-homedir
Specifies the gnupg home directory to use when verifying PGP signatures on downloaded files. The default
for this is your system’s default home directory.
--verify-save-failed
Instructs Wget2 to keep files that don’t pass PGP signature validation. The default is to delete files
that fail validation.
--xattr
Saves documents metadata as “user POSIX Extended Attributes” (default: on). This feature only works if
the file system supports it. More info on https://freedesktop.org/wiki/CommonExtendedAttributes.
Wget2 currently sets * user.xdg.origin.url * user.xdg.referrer.url * user.mime_type * user.charset
To display the extended attributes of a file (Linux): getfattr -d <file>
--metalink
Follow/process metalink URLs without saving them (default: on).
Metalink files describe downloads incl. mirrors, files, checksums, signatures. This allows chunked down‐
loads, automatically taking the nearest mirrors, preferring the fastest mirrors and checking the download
for integrity.
--fsync-policy
Enables disk synching after each write (default: off).
--http2-request-window=number
Set max. number of parallel streams per HTTP/2 connection (default: 30).
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. wget2 -x https://example.com/robots.txt will save the downloaded file to example.com/robots.txt.
-nH, --no-host-directories
Disable generation of host-prefixed directories. By default, invoking Wget2 with -r https://example.com/
will create a structure of directories beginning with example.com/. This option disables such behavior.
--protocol-directories
Use the protocol name as a directory component of local file names. For example, with this option, wget2
-r https://example.com will save to https/example.com/... rather than just to example.com/....
--cut-dirs=number
Ignore a number of directory components. This is useful for getting a fine-grained control over the di‐
rectory where recursive retrieval will be saved.
Take, for example, the directory at https://example.com/pub/sub/. If you retrieve it with -r, it will be
saved locally under example.com/pub/sub/. While the -nH option can remove the example.com/ part, you are
still stuck with pub/sub/. This is where --cut-dirs comes in handy; it makes Wget2 not “see” a number of
remote directory components. Here are several examples of how --cut-dirs option works. No options
-> example.com/pub/sub/ --cut-dirs=1 -> example.com/sub/ --cut-dirs=2 -> example.com/
-nH -> pub/sub/ -nH --cut-dirs=1 -> sub/ -nH --cut-dirs=2 -> . If you just
want to get rid of the directory structure, this option is similar to a combination of -nd and -P. How‐
ever, unlike -nd, --cut-dirs does not lose with subdirectories. For instance, with -nH --cut-dirs=1, a
beta/ subdirectory will be placed to sub/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 subdi‐
rectories will be saved to, i.e. the top of the retrieval tree. The default is . (the current directo‐
ry).
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.
--default-http-port=port
Set the default port for HTTP URLs (default: 80).
This is mainly for testing purposes.
--default-https-port=port
Set the default port for HTTPS URLs (default: 443).
This is mainly for testing purposes.
-E, --adjust-extension
If a file of type application/xhtml+xml or text/html is downloaded and the URL does not end with the reg‐
exp \.[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 https://example.com/article.cgi?25 will be saved as ar‐
ticle.cgi?25.html.
Note that filenames changed in this way will be re-downloaded every time you re-mirror a site, because
Wget2 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.
Wget2 will also ensure that any downloaded files of type text/css end in the suffix .css.
At some point in the future, this option may well be expanded to include suffixes for other types of con‐
tent, including content types that are not parsed by Wget.
--http-user=user, --http-password=password
Specify the user and password for HTTP authentication. According to the type of the challenge, Wget will
encode them using either the “basic” (insecure), the “digest”, or the Windows “NTLM” authentication
scheme.
If possible, put your credentials into ~/.netrc (see also --netrc and --netrc-file options) or into
~/.wgetrc. This is far more secure than using the command line which can be seen by any other user. If
the passwords are really important, do not leave them lying in those files either. Edit the files and
delete them after Wget2 has started the download.
Also see --use-askpass and --ask-password for an interactive method to provide your password.
--http-proxy-user=user, --http-proxy-password=password
Specify the user and password for HTTP proxy authentication. See --http-user for details.
--http-proxy=proxies
Set comma-separated list of HTTP proxies. The environment variable `http_proxy' will be overridden.
Exceptions can be set via the environment variable `no_proxy' or via --no-proxy.
--https-proxy=proxies
Set comma-separated list of HTTPS proxies. The environment variable `https_proxy' will be overridden.
Exceptions can be set via the environment variable `no_proxy' or via --no-proxy.
--no-http-keep-alive
Turn off the “keep-alive” feature for HTTP(S) downloads. Normally, Wget2 asks the server to keep the
connection open so that, when you download more than one document from the same server, they get trans‐
ferred over the same TCP connection. This saves time and at the same time reduces the load on the serv‐
er.
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, Wget2 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 fur‐
ther 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, stor‐
ing cookies is not on by default.
--load-cookies file
Load cookies from file before the first HTTP(S) retrieval. file is a textual file in the format origi‐
nally 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 Wget2 to send the same cookies your browser sends when communicating with
the site. This is achieved by –load-cookies—simply point Wget2 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:
“Netscape 4.x.” The cookies are in ~/.netscape/cookies.txt.
“Mozilla and Netscape 6.x.” Mozilla’s cookie file is also named cookies.txt, located somewhere under
~/.mozilla, in the directory of your profile. The full path usually ends up looking somewhat like
~/.mozilla/default/some-weird- string/cookies.txt.
“Internet Explorer.” You can produce a cookie file Wget2 can use by using the File menu, Import and Ex‐
port, Export Cookies. This has been tested with Internet Explorer 5; it is not guaranteed to work with
earlier versions.
“Other browsers.” If you are using a different browser to create your cookies, –load-cookies will only
work if you can locate or produce a cookie file in the Netscape format that Wget2 expects.
If you cannot use --load-cookies, there might still be an alternative. If your browser supports a “cook‐
ie manager”, you can use it to view the cookies used when accessing the site you’re mirroring. Write
down the name and value of the cookie, and manually instruct Wget2 to send those cookies, bypassing the
“official” cookie support:
wget2 --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 Wget2 runs are considered a single browser session as far as the site is con‐
cerned.
Since the cookie file format does not normally carry session cookies, Wget2 marks them with an expiry
timestamp of 0. Wget2’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.
--cookie-suffixes=file
Load the public suffixes used for cookie checking from the given file.
Normally, the underlying libpsl loads this data from a system file or it has the data built in. In some
cases you might want to load an updated PSL, e.g. from https://publicsuffix.org/list/public_suf‐
fix_list.dat.
The PSL allows to prevent setting of “super-cookies” that lead to cookie privacy leakage. More details
can be found on https://publicsuffix.org/.
--ignore-length
Unfortunately, some HTTP servers (CGI programs, to be more precise) send out bogus “Content-Length” head‐
ers, which makes Wget2 go wild, as it thinks not all the document was retrieved. You can spot this syn‐
drome 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, Wget2 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.
wget2 --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2' \
--header='Accept-Language: hr' \
https://example.com/
Specification of an empty string as the header value will clear all previous user-defined headers.
This option can be used to override headers otherwise generated automatically. This example instructs
Wget2 to connect to localhost, but to specify example.com in the “Host” header:
wget2 --header="Host: example.com" http://localhost/
--max-redirect=number
Specifies the maximum number of redirections to follow for a resource. The default is 20, which is usu‐
ally 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. Wget2 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 process‐
ing 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 en‐
ables distinguishing the WWW software, usually for statistical purposes or for tracing of protocol viola‐
tions. 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 Wget2 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 ex‐
actly 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 com‐
mand-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. Wget2 does not currently support “multipart/form-data” for transmit‐
ting POST data; only “application/x-www-form-urlencoded”. Only one of –post-data and –post-file should
be specified.
Please note that wget2 does not require the content to be of the form “key1=value1&key2=value2”, and nei‐
ther does it test for it. Wget2 will simply transmit whatever data is provided to it. Most servers how‐
ever expect the POST data to be in the above format when processing HTML Forms.
When sending a POST request using the --post-file option, Wget2 treats the file as a binary file and will
send every character in the POST request without stripping trailing newline or formfeed characters. Any
other control characters in the text will also be sent as-is in the POST request.
Please be aware that Wget2 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 chun‐
ked transfer that doesn’t require knowing the request length in advance, a client can’t use chunked un‐
less 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.
If Wget2 is redirected after the POST request is completed, its behaviour depends on the response code
returned by the server. In case of a 301 Moved Permanently, 302 Moved Temporarily or 307 Temporary Redi‐
rect, Wget2 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.
wget2 --save-cookies cookies.txt \
--post-data 'user=foo&password=bar' \
http://example.com/auth.php
# Now grab the page or pages we care about.
wget2 --load-cookies cookies.txt \
-p http://example.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, Wget2 allows sending of other HTTP Methods without the need to ex‐
plicitly set them using –header=Header-Line. Wget2 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. Wget2 does not currently support “mul‐
tipart/form-data” for transmitting data; only “application/x-www-form-urlencoded”. In the future, this
may be changed so that wget2 sends the –body-file as a complete file instead of sending its contents to
the server. Please be aware that Wget2 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 Wget2 is redirected after the request is completed, Wget2 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 un‐
der --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, wget2 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, Wget2 will send Basic HTTP authentication information (plaintext username and
password) for all requests.
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.
--compression=TYPE
If this TYPE(identity, gzip, deflate, xz, lzma, br, bzip2 or any combination of it) is given, Wget2 will
set “Accept-Encoding” header accordingly. --no-compression means no “Accept-Encoding” header at all. To
set “Accept-Encoding” to a custom value, use --no-compression in combination with --header="Accept-Encod‐
ing: xxx".
Compatibility-Note: none type in Wget 1.X has the same meaning as identity type in Wget2.
HTTPS (SSL/TLS) Options
To support encrypted HTTP (HTTPS) downloads, Wget2 must be compiled with an external SSL library. The
current default is GnuTLS. In addition, Wget2 also supports HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security). If
Wget2 is compiled without SSL support, none of these options are available.
--secure-protocol=protocol
Choose the secure protocol to be used (default: auto).
Legal values are auto, SSLv3, TLSv1 and PFS. If auto is used, the TLS library’s default is used.
Specifying SSLv3, TLSv1 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 TLS library to choose the cor‐
rect protocol version.
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 TLS 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.
Any other protocol string is directly given to the TLS library, currently GnuTLS, as a “priority” or “ci‐
pher” string. This is for users who know what they are doing.
--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.
The default is to verify the server’s certificate against the recognized certificate authorities, break‐
ing 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 re‐
quested 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. For self-signed/internal certificates, you should
download the certificate and verify against that instead of forcing this insecure mode. If you are real‐
ly sure of not desiring any certificate verification, you can specify –check-certificate=quiet to tell
Wget2 to not print any warning about invalid certificates, albeit in most cases this is the wrong thing
to do.
--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 certifi‐
cates must be in PEM format.
Without this option Wget2 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 Wget2 to fetch
certificates on demand.
Without this option Wget2 looks for CA certificates at the system-specified locations, chosen at OpenSSL
installation time.
--crl-file=file
Specifies a CRL file in file. This is needed for certificates that have been revocated by the CAs.
--random-file=file
[OpenSSL and LibreSSL only] Use file as the source of random data for seeding the pseudo-random number
generator on systems without /dev/urandom.
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 op‐
tion is not specified, Wget2 looks for random data in $RANDFILE or, if that is unset, in $HOME/.rnd.
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
[OpenSSL only] 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 random‐
ness 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/urandom.
--hsts
Wget2 supports HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security, RFC 6797) by default. Use --no-hsts to make Wget2
act as a non-HSTS-compliant UA. As a consequence, Wget2 would ignore all the “Strict-Transport-Security”
headers, and would not enforce any existing HSTS policy.
--hsts-file=file
By default, Wget2 stores its HSTS database in ~/.wget-hsts. You can use –hsts-file to override this.
Wget2 will use the supplied file as the HSTS database. Such file must conform to the correct HSTS data‐
base format used by Wget. If Wget2 cannot parse the provided file, the behaviour is unspecified.
The Wget2’s HSTS database is a plain text file. Each line contains an HSTS entry (ie. a site that has
issued a “Strict-Transport-Security” header and that therefore has specified a concrete HSTS policy to be
applied). Lines starting with a dash (“#”) are ignored by Wget. Please note that in spite of this con‐
venient human-readability hand-hacking the HSTS database is generally not a good idea.
An HSTS entry line consists of several fields separated by one or more whitespace:
<hostname> SP [<port>] SP <include subdomains> SP <created> SP <max-age>
The hostname and port fields indicate the hostname and port to which the given HSTS policy applies. The
port field may be zero, and it will, in most of the cases. That means that the port number will not be
taken into account when deciding whether such HSTS policy should be applied on a given request (only the
hostname will be evaluated). When port is different to zero, both the target hostname and the port will
be evaluated and the HSTS policy will only be applied if both of them match. This feature has been in‐
cluded for testing/development purposes only. The Wget2 testsuite (in testenv/) creates HSTS databases
with explicit ports with the purpose of ensuring Wget2’s correct behaviour. Applying HSTS policies to
ports other than the default ones is discouraged by RFC 6797 (see Appendix B “Differences between HSTS
Policy and Same-Origin Policy”). Thus, this functionality should not be used in production environments
and port will typically be zero. The last three fields do what they are expected to. The field in‐
clude_subdomains can either be 1 or 0 and it signals whether the subdomains of the target domain should
be part of the given HSTS policy as well. The created and max-age fields hold the timestamp values of
when such entry was created (first seen by Wget) and the HSTS-defined value `max-age', which states how
long should that HSTS policy remain active, measured in seconds elapsed since the timestamp stored in
created. Once that time has passed, that HSTS policy will no longer be valid and will eventually be re‐
moved from the database.
If you supply your own HSTS database via –hsts-file, be aware that Wget2 may modify the provided file if
any change occurs between the HSTS policies requested by the remote servers and those in the file. When
Wget2 exists, it effectively updates the HSTS database by rewriting the database file with the new en‐
tries.
If the supplied file does not exist, Wget2 will create one. This file will contain the new HSTS entries.
If no HSTS entries were generated (no “Strict-Transport-Security” headers were sent by any of the
servers) then no file will be created, not even an empty one. This behaviour applies to the default
database file (~/.wget-hsts) as well: it will not be created until some server enforces an HSTS policy.
Care is taken not to override possible changes made by other Wget2 processes at the same time over the
HSTS database. Before dumping the updated HSTS entries on the file, Wget2 will re-read it and merge the
changes.
Using a custom HSTS database and/or modifying an existing one is discouraged. For more information about
the potential security threats arised from such practice, see section 14 “Security Considerations” of RFC
6797, specially section 14.9 “Creative Manipulation of HSTS Policy Store”.
--hpkp
Enable HTTP Public Key Pinning (HPKP) (default: on).
This is a Trust On First Use (TOFU) mechanism to add another security layer to HTTPS (RFC 7469). It per‐
sistently stores the data into ~/.wget-hpkp which can be changed via the --hpkp-fileoption.
--hpkp-file=file
For HPKP (--hpkp) you need the certificate key data of a previously established TLS session. Wget2 per‐
sistently stores this data in the given file (default: ~/.wget-hpkp).
To disable persistent storage use --no-hpkp-file.
--tls-resume
Enable TLS Session Resumption which is disabled as default.
There are several security flaws related to TLS 1.2 session resumption which are explained in detail at:
https://web.archive.org/web/20171103231804/https://blog.filippo.io/we-need-to-talk-about-session-tickets/
--tls-session-file=file
For TLS Session Resumption (--tls-resume) you need the session data of a previously established TLS ses‐
sion. Wget2 persistently stores this data in the given file (default: ~/.wget-session).
To disable persistent storage use --no-tls-session-file.
--tls-false-start
Enable TLS False start (default: on).
This reduces TLS negotiation by one RT and thus speeds up HTTPS connections.
More details at https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7918.
--check-hostname
Enable TLS SNI verification (default: on).
--ocsp
Enable OCSP server access to check the possible revocation the HTTPS server certificate(s) (default: on).
This procedure is pretty slow (connect to server, HTTP request, response) and thus we support OSCP sta‐
pling (server sends OCSP response within TLS handshake) and persistent OCSP caching.
--ocsp-stapling
Enable support for OCSP stapling (default: on).
--ocsp-file=file
Set the file for persistent OCSP response caching (default: ~/.wget-ocsp).
To disable persistent OCSP caching use --no-ocsp-file.
--http2
Enable HTTP/2 protocol (default: on).
Wget2 requests HTTP/2 via ALPN. If available it is preferred over HTTP/1.1. Up to 30 streams are used
in parallel within a single connection.
--gnutls-options=options
Sets the GnuTLS “priority” string (see https://gnutls.org/manual/html_node/Priority-Strings.html).
This is for experts only. Normally you would use --secure-protocol to set predefined priority strings.
--https-enforce=mode
Sets how to deal with URLs that are not explicitly HTTPS (where scheme isn’t https://) (default: none)
mode=none
Use HTTP for URLs without scheme. In recursive operation the scheme of the parent document is taken as
default.
mode=soft
Try HTTPS first when the scheme is HTTP or not given. On failure fall back to HTTP.
mode=hard
Only use HTTPS, no matter if a HTTP scheme is given or not. Do not fall back to HTTP.
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 Wget2 to delete every single file it downloads, after having done so. It is useful for
pre- fetching popular pages through a proxy, e.g.:
wget2 -r -nd --delete-after https://example.com/~popular/page/
The -r option is to retrieve recursively, and -nd to not create directories.
Note that when –delete-after is specified, –convert-links is ignored, so .orig files are simply not cre‐
ated in the first place.
-k, --convert-links
After the download is complete, convert the links in the document to make them suitable for local view‐
ing. 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:
1. The links to files that have been downloaded by Wget2 will be changed to refer to the file they point
to as a relative link.
Example: if the downloaded file /foo/doc.html links to /bar/img.gif, also downloaded, then the link
in doc.html will be modified to point to ../bar/img.gif. This kind of transformation works reliably
for arbitrary combinations of directories.
2. The links to files that have not been downloaded by Wget2 will be changed to include host name and ab‐
solute path of the location they point to.
Example: if the downloaded file /foo/doc.html links to /bar/img.gif (or to ../bar/img.gif), then the
link in doc.html will be modified to point to https://example.com/bar/img.gif.
Because of this, local browsing works reliably: if a linked file was downloaded, the link will refer to
its local name; if it was not downloaded, the link will refer to its full Internet address rather than
presenting a broken link. The fact that the former links are converted to relative links ensures that
you can move the downloaded hierarchy to another directory.
Note that only at the end of the download can Wget2 know which links have been downloaded. Because of
that, the work done by -k will be performed at the end of all the downloads.
--convert-file-only
This option converts only the filename part of the URLs, leaving the rest of the URLs untouched. This
filename part is sometimes referred to as the “basename”, although we avoid that term here in order not
to cause confusion.
It works particularly well in conjunction with --adjust-extension, although this coupling is not en‐
forced. It proves useful to populate Internet caches with files downloaded from different hosts.
Example: if some link points to //foo.com/bar.cgi?xyz with –adjust-extension asserted and its local des‐
tination is intended to be ./foo.com/bar.cgi?xyz.css, then the link would be converted to
//foo.com/bar.cgi?xyz.css. Note that only the filename part has been modified. The rest of the URL has
been left untouched, including the net path (“//”) which would otherwise be processed by Wget2 and con‐
verted to the effective scheme (ie. “https://”).
-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. It is currently equivalent to -r -N -l inf.
-p, --page-requisites
This option causes Wget2 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 Wget2 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 ex‐
ternal 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:
wget2 -r -l 2 https://<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 Wget2 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:
wget2 -r -l 2 -p https://<site>/1.html
all the above files and 3.html’s requisite 3.gif will be downloaded. Similarly,
wget2 -r -l 1 -p https://<site>/1.html
will cause 1.html, 1.gif, 2.html, and 2.gif to be downloaded. One might think that:
wget2 -r -l 0 -p https://<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 speci‐
fied on the command-line or in a -i URL input file) and its (or their) requisites, simply leave off -r
and -l:
wget2 -p https://<site>/1.html
Note that Wget2 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 down‐
load 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:
wget2 -E -H -k -K -p https://<site>/<document>
To finish off this topic, it’s worth knowing that Wget2’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
Obsolete option for compatibility with Wget1.x. Wget2 always terminates comments at the first occurrence
of -->, as popular browsers do.
--robots
Enable the Robots Exclusion Standard (default: on).
For each visited domain, download /robots.txt first and follow it’s rules. You should respect the domain
owner’s rules and turn this off only for very good reasons.
When enabled, the robots.txt file is also scanned for sitemaps. These are lists of pages / files avail‐
able for download that not necessarily are available via recursive scanning.
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, *, ?, [, ], 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 file names.
--regex-type=regextype
Specify the regular expression type. Possible types are posix or pcre. Note that to be able to use pcre
type, wget2 has to be compiled with libpcre support.
--filter-urls
Apply the accept and reject filters on the URL before starting a download.
-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-tags=list
Wget2 has an internal table of HTML tag / attribute pairs that it considers when looking for linked docu‐
ments during a recursive retrieval. If a user wants only a subset of those tags to be considered, howev‐
er, 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 com‐
mand-line like:
wget2 --ignore-tags=a,area -H -k -K -r https://<site>/<document>
However, the author of this option came across a page with tags like “” and came to the realization that
specifying tags to ignore was not enough. One can’t just tell Wget2 to ignore “”, 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 op‐
tions. 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.
--filter-mime-type=list
Specify a comma-separated list of MIME types that will be downloaded. Elements of list may contain wild‐
cards. If a MIME type starts with the character `!' it won’t be downloaded, this is useful when trying
to download something with exceptions. For example, download everything except images:
wget2 https://<site>/<document> --filter-mime-type=*,\!image/*
It is also useful to download files that are compatible with an application of your system. For in‐
stance, download every file that is compatible with LibreOffice Writer from a website using the recursive
mode:
wget2 -r https://<site>/<document> --filter-mime-type=$(sed -r '/^MimeType=/!d;s/^MimeType=//;s/;/,/g' /usr/share/applications/libreoffice-writer.desktop)
Plugin Options
--list-plugins
Print a list all available plugins and exit.
--local-plugin=file
Load file as plugin.
--plugin=name
Load a plugin with a given name from the configured plugin directories.
--plugin-dirs=directories
Set plugin directories. directories is a comma-separated list of directories.
--plugin-help
Print the help messages from all loaded plugins.
--plugin-opt=option
Set a plugin specific command line option.
option is in the format <plugin_name>.<option>[=value].
Environment
Wget2 supports proxies for both HTTP and HTTPS 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.
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 .example.com, proxy will not be used to retrieve documents from
*.example.com.
Exit Status
Wget2 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.
9 Public key missing from keyring.
10 A Signature verification failed.
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.
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 Wget2 bug tracker (https://gitlab.com/gnuwget/wget2/is‐
sues).
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 Wget2 crashes, it’s a bug. If
Wget2 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 doc‐
umentation and the mailing lists.
2. Try to repeat the bug in as simple circumstances as possible. E.g. if Wget2 crashes while download‐
ing wget2 -rl0 -kKE -t5 --no-proxy https://example.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 Wget2 with -d option and send us the resulting output (or relevant parts thereof). If
Wget2 was compiled without debug support, recompile it—it is much easier to trace bugs with debug sup‐
port 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 Wget2’s communication with the server, which may include pass‐
words 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 Wget2 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 ex‐
planations 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.
Author
Wget2 written by Tim Rühsen <tim.ruehsen@gmx.de>
Wget 1.x originally written by Hrvoje Nikšić <hniksic@xemacs.org>
Copyright
Copyright (C) 2012-2015 Tim Rühsen
Copyright (C) 2015-2018 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”.
GNU Wget2 User Manual WGET2(1)