wget - Unix, Linux Command

Wget is non-interactive, meaning that it can work in the background,
while the user is not logged on.  This allows you to start a retrieval
and disconnect from the system, letting Wget finish the work.  By
contrast, most of the Web browsers require constant user’s presence,
which can be a great hindrance when transferring a lot of data.


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


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




        wget -r --tries=10 http://fly.srk.fer.hr/ -o log


The space between the option accepting an argument and the argument may
be omitted.  Instead of -o log you can write -olog.


You may put several options that do not require arguments together,
like:




        wget -drc <URL>


This is a complete equivalent of:




        wget -d -r -c <URL>


Since the options can be specified after the arguments, you may
terminate them with --.  So the following will try to download
URL -x, reporting failure to log:




        wget -o log -- -x


The options that accept comma-separated lists all respect the convention
that specifying an empty list clears its value.  This can be useful to
clear the .wgetrc settings.  For instance, if your .wgetrc
sets exclude_directories to /cgi-bin, the following
example will first reset it, and then set it to exclude /~nobody
and /~somebody.  You can also clear the lists in .wgetrc.




        wget -X " -X /~nobody,/~somebody


Most options that do not accept arguments are boolean options,
so named because their state can be captured with a yes-or-no
(boolean) variable.  For example, --follow-ftp tells Wget
to follow FTP links from HTML files and, on the other hand,
--no-glob tells it not to perform file globbing on FTP URLs.  A
boolean option is either affirmative or negative
(beginning with --no).  All such options share several
properties.


Unless stated otherwise, it is assumed that the default behavior is
the opposite of what the option accomplishes.  For example, the
documented existence of --follow-ftp assumes that the default
is to not follow FTP links from HTML pages.


Affirmative options can be negated by prepending the --no- to
the option name; negative options can be negated by omitting the
--no- prefix.  This might seem superfluous---if the default for
an affirmative option is to not do something, then why provide a way
to explicitly turn it off?  But the startup file may in fact change
the default.  For instance, using follow_ftp = off in
.wgetrc makes Wget not follow FTP links by default, and
using --no-follow-ftp is the only way to restore the factory
default from the command line.



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.  The file need not be an HTML document (but no
harm if it is)---it is enough if the URLs are just listed
sequentially.



However, if you specify --force-html, the document will be
regarded as html.  In that case you may have problems with
relative links, which you can solve either by adding <base
href="url"> to the documents or by specifying
--base=url on the command line.



Use of -O is not intended to mean simply "use the name
file instead of the one in the URL;" rather, it is
analogous to shell redirection:
wget -O file http://foo is intended to work like
wget -O - http://foo > file; file will be truncated
immediately, and all downloaded content will be written there.



For this reason, -N (for timestamp-checking) is not supported
in combination with -O: since file is always newly
created, it will always have a very new timestamp. A warning will be
issued if this combination is used.



Similarly, using -r or -p with -O may not work as
you expect: Wget won’t just download the first file to file and
then download the rest to their normal names: all downloaded
content will be placed in file. This was disabled in version
1.11, but has been reinstated (with a warning) in 1.11.2, as there are
some cases where this behavior can actually have some use.



Note that a combination with -k is only permitted when
downloading a single document, as in that case it will just convert
all relative URIs to external ones; -k makes no sense for
multiple URIs when they’re all being downloaded to a single file.



When running Wget without -N, -nc, -r, or p,
downloading the same file in the same directory will result in the
original copy of file being preserved and the second copy being
named file.1.  If that file is downloaded yet again, the
third copy will be named file.2, and so on.  When
-nc is specified, this behavior is suppressed, and Wget will
refuse to download newer copies of file.  Therefore,
"no-clobber" is actually a misnomer in this mode---it’s not
clobbering that’s prevented (as the numeric suffixes were already
preventing clobbering), but rather the multiple version saving that’s
prevented.



When running Wget with -r or -p, but without -N
or -nc, re-downloading a file will result in the new copy
simply overwriting the old.  Adding -nc will prevent this
behavior, instead causing the original version to be preserved and any
newer copies on the server to be ignored.



When running Wget with -N, with or without -r or
-p, the decision as to whether or not to download a newer copy
of a file depends on the local and remote timestamp and size of the
file.  -nc may not be specified at the
same time as -N.



Note that when -nc is specified, files with the suffixes
.html or .htm will be loaded from the local disk and
parsed as if they had been retrieved from the Web.





        wget -c ftp://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/ls-lR.Z



If there is a file named ls-lR.Z in the current directory, Wget
will assume that it is the first portion of the remote file, and will
ask the server to continue the retrieval from an offset equal to the
length of the local file.



Note that you don’t need to specify this option if you just want the
current invocation of Wget to retry downloading a file should the
connection be lost midway through.  This is the default behavior.
-c only affects resumption of downloads started prior to
this invocation of Wget, and whose local files are still sitting around.



Without -c, the previous example would just download the remote
file to ls-lR.Z.1, leaving the truncated ls-lR.Z file
alone.



Beginning with Wget 1.7, if you use -c on a non-empty file, and
it turns out that the server does not support continued downloading,
Wget will refuse to start the download from scratch, which would
effectively ruin existing contents.  If you really want the download to
start from scratch, remove the file.



Also beginning with Wget 1.7, if you use -c on a file which is of
equal size as the one on the server, Wget will refuse to download the
file and print an explanatory message.  The same happens when the file
is smaller on the server than locally (presumably because it was changed
on the server since your last download attempt)---because continuing
is not meaningful, no download occurs.



On the other side of the coin, while using -c, any file that’s
bigger on the server than locally will be considered an incomplete
download and only (length(remote) - length(local)) bytes will be
downloaded and tacked onto the end of the local file.  This behavior can
be desirable in certain cases---for instance, you can use wget -c
to download just the new portion that’s been appended to a data
collection or log file.



However, if the file is bigger on the server because it’s been
changed, as opposed to just appended to, you’ll end up
with a garbled file.  Wget has no way of verifying that the local file
is really a valid prefix of the remote file.  You need to be especially
careful of this when using -c in conjunction with -r,
since every file will be considered as an incomplete download candidate.



Another instance where you’ll get a garbled file if you try to use
-c is if you have a lame HTTP proxy that inserts a
transfer interrupted string into the local file.  In the future a
rollback option may be added to deal with this case.



Note that -c only works with FTP servers and with HTTP
servers that support the Range header.



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.



When using the dotted retrieval, you may also set the style by
specifying the type as dot:style.  Different styles assign
different meaning to one dot.  With the default style each dot
represents 1K, there are ten dots in a cluster and 50 dots in a line.
The binary style has a more computer-like orientation---8K
dots, 16-dots clusters and 48 dots per line (which makes for 384K
lines).  The mega style is suitable for downloading 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).



Note that you can set the default style using the progress
command in .wgetrc.  That setting may be overridden from the
command line.  The exception is that, when the output is not a TTY, the
dot progress will be favored over bar.  To force the bar output,
use --progress=bar:force.





        wget --spider --force-html -i bookmarks.html



This feature needs much more work for Wget to get close to the
functionality of real web spiders.



When interacting with the network, Wget can check for timeout and
abort the operation if it takes too long.  This prevents anomalies
like hanging reads and infinite connects.  The only timeout enabled by
default is a 900-second read timeout.  Setting a timeout to 0 disables
it altogether.  Unless you know what you are doing, it is best not to
change the default timeout settings.



All timeout-related options accept decimal values, as well as
subsecond values.  For example, 0.1 seconds is a legal (though
unwise) choice of timeout.  Subsecond timeouts are useful for checking
server response times or for testing network latency.



Of course, the remote server may choose to terminate the connection
sooner than this option requires.  The default read timeout is 900
seconds.



This option allows the use of decimal numbers, usually in conjunction
with power suffixes; for example, --limit-rate=2.5k is a legal
value.



Note that Wget implements the limiting by sleeping the appropriate
amount of time after a network read that took less time than specified
by the rate.  Eventually this strategy causes the TCP transfer to slow
down to approximately the specified rate.  However, it may take some
time for this balance to be achieved, so don’t be surprised if limiting
the rate doesn’t work well with very small files.



Specifying a large value for this option is useful if the network or the
destination host is down, so that Wget can wait long enough to
reasonably expect the network error to be fixed before the retry.  The
waiting interval specified by this function is influenced by
--random-wait, which see.



Note that this option is turned on by default in the global
wgetrc file.



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.



Note that quota will never affect downloading a single file.  So if you
specify wget -Q10k ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/ls-lR.gz, all of the
ls-lR.gz will be downloaded.  The same goes even when several
URLs are specified on the command-line.  However, quota is
respected when retrieving either recursively, or from an input file.
Thus you may safely type wget -Q2m -i sites---download will be
aborted when the quota is exceeded.



Setting quota to 0 or to inf unlimits the download quota.



However, it has been reported that in some situations it is not
desirable to cache host names, even for the duration of a
short-running application like Wget.  With this option Wget issues a
new DNS lookup (more precisely, a new call to gethostbyname or
getaddrinfo) each time it makes a new connection.  Please note
that this option will not affect caching that might be
performed by the resolving library or by an external caching layer,
such as NSCD.



If you don’t understand exactly what this option does, you probably
won’t need it.



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



When mode is set to unix, Wget escapes the character / and
the control characters in the ranges 0--31 and 128--159.  This is the
default on Unix-like OS’es.



When mode is set to windows, Wget escapes the characters \,
|, /, :, ?, ", *, <,
>, and the control characters in the ranges 0--31 and 128--159.
In addition to this, Wget in Windows mode uses + instead of
: to separate host and port in local file names, and uses
@ instead of ? to separate the query portion of the file
name from the rest.  Therefore, a URL that would be saved as
www.xemacs.org:4300/search.pl?input=blah in Unix mode would be
saved as www.xemacs.org+4300/search.pl@input=blah in Windows
mode.  This mode is the default on Windows.



If you append ,nocontrol to the mode, as in
unix,nocontrol, escaping of the control characters is also
switched off.  You can use --restrict-file-names=nocontrol to
turn off escaping of control characters without affecting the choice of
the OS to use as file name restriction mode.



Neither options should be needed normally.  By default, an IPv6-aware
Wget will use the address family specified by the host’s DNS record.
If the DNS responds with both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, Wget will try
them in sequence until it finds one it can connect to.  (Also see
--prefer-family option described below.)



These options can be used to deliberately force the use of IPv4 or
IPv6 address families on dual family systems, usually to aid debugging
or to deal with broken network configuration.  Only one of
--inet6-only and --inet4-only may be specified at the
same time.  Neither option is available in Wget compiled without IPv6
support.



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.



Take, for example, the directory at
ftp://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/.  If you retrieve it with
-r, it will be saved locally under
ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/.  While the -nH option can
remove the ftp.xemacs.org/ part, you are still stuck with
pub/xemacs.  This is where --cut-dirs comes in handy; it
makes Wget not see number remote directory components.  Here
are several examples of how --cut-dirs option works.





        No options        -> ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/
        -nH               -> pub/xemacs/
        -nH --cut-dirs=1  -> xemacs/
        -nH --cut-dirs=2  -> .





        --cut-dirs=1      -> ftp.xemacs.org/xemacs/
        ...



If you just want to get rid of the directory structure, this option is
similar to a combination of -nd and -P.  However, unlike
-nd, --cut-dirs does not lose with subdirectories---for
instance, with -nH --cut-dirs=1, a beta/ subdirectory will
be placed to xemacs/beta, as one would expect.



Note that filenames changed in this way will be re-downloaded every time
you re-mirror a site, because Wget can’t tell that the local
X.html file corresponds to remote URL X (since
it doesn’t yet know that the URL produces output of type
text/html or application/xhtml+xml.  To prevent this
re-downloading, you must use -k and -K so that the original
version of the file will be saved as X.orig.



Another way to specify username and password is in the URL itself.  Either method reveals your password to anyone who
bothers to run ps.  To prevent the passwords from being seen,
store them in .wgetrc or .netrc, and make sure to protect
those files from other users with chmod.  If the passwords are
really important, do not leave them lying in those files either---edit
the files and delete them after Wget has started the download.



Caching is allowed by default.



You will typically use this option when mirroring sites that require
that you be logged in to access some or all of their content.  The login
process typically works by the web server issuing an HTTP cookie
upon receiving and verifying your credentials.  The cookie is then
resent by the browser when accessing that part of the site, and so
proves your identity.



Mirroring such a site requires Wget to send the same cookies your
browser sends when communicating with the site.  This is achieved by
--load-cookies---simply point Wget to the location of the
cookies.txt file, and it will send the same cookies your browser
would send in the same situation.  Different browsers keep textual
cookie files in different locations:



If you cannot use --load-cookies, there might still be an
alternative.  If your browser supports a cookie 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 Wget
to send those cookies, bypassing the official cookie support:





        wget --no-cookies --header "Cookie: <name>=<value>"



Since the cookie file format does not normally carry session cookies,
Wget marks them with an expiry timestamp of 0.  Wget’s
--load-cookies recognizes those as session cookies, but it might
confuse other browsers.  Also note that cookies so loaded will be
treated as other session cookies, which means that if you want
--save-cookies to preserve them again, you must use
--keep-session-cookies again.



With this option, Wget will ignore the Content-Length header---as
if it never existed.



You may define more than one additional header by specifying
--header more than once.





        wget --header=\(aqAccept-Charset: iso-8859-2\(aq \
             --header=\(aqAccept-Language: hr\(aq        \
               http://fly.srk.fer.hr/



Specification of an empty string as the header value will clear all
previous user-defined headers.



As of Wget 1.10, this option can be used to override headers otherwise
generated automatically.  This example instructs Wget to connect to
localhost, but to specify foo.bar in the Host header:





        wget --header="Host: foo.bar" http://localhost/



In versions of Wget prior to 1.10 such use of --header caused
sending of duplicate headers.



Security considerations similar to those with --http-password
pertain here as well.



The HTTP protocol allows the clients to identify themselves using a
User-Agent header field.  This enables distinguishing the
WWW software, usually for statistical purposes or for tracing of
protocol violations.  Wget normally identifies as
Wget/version, version being the current version
number of Wget.



However, some sites have been known to impose the policy of tailoring
the output according to the User-Agent-supplied information.
While this is not such a bad idea in theory, it has been abused by
servers denying information to clients other than (historically)
Netscape or, more frequently, Microsoft Internet Explorer.  This
option allows you to change the User-Agent line issued by Wget.
Use of this option is discouraged, unless you really know what you are
doing.



Specifying empty user agent with --user-agent="" instructs Wget
not to send the User-Agent header in HTTP requests.



Please be aware that Wget needs to know the size of the POST data in
advance.  Therefore the argument to --post-file must be a regular
file; specifying a FIFO or something like /dev/stdin won’t work.
It’s not quite clear how to work around this limitation inherent in
HTTP/1.0.  Although HTTP/1.1 introduces chunked transfer that
doesn’t require knowing the request length in advance, a client can’t
use chunked unless it knows it’s talking to an HTTP/1.1 server.  And it
can’t know that until it receives a response, which in turn requires the
request to have been completed — a chicken-and-egg problem.



Note: if Wget is redirected after the POST request is completed, it
will not send the POST data to the redirected URL.  This is because
URLs that process POST often respond with a redirection to a regular
page, which does not desire or accept POST.  It is not completely
clear that this behavior is optimal; if it doesn’t work out, it might
be changed in the future.



This example shows how to log to a server using POST and then proceed to
download the desired pages, presumably only accessible to authorized
users:





        # Log in to the server.  This can be done only once.
        wget --save-cookies cookies.txt \
             --post-data \(aquser=foo&password=bar\(aq \
             http://server.com/auth.php





        # Now grab the page or pages we care about.
        wget --load-cookies cookies.txt \
             -p http://server.com/interesting/article.php



If the server is using session cookies to track user authentication,
the above will not work because --save-cookies will not save
them (and neither will browsers) and the cookies.txt file will
be empty.  In that case use --keep-session-cookies along with
--save-cookies to force saving of session cookies.



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.



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.



Specifying SSLv2, SSLv3, or 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 OpenSSL to
choose the correct protocol version.  Fortunately, such servers are
quite rare.



As of Wget 1.10, the default is to verify the server’s certificate
against the recognized certificate authorities, breaking the SSL
handshake and aborting the download if the verification fails.
Although this provides more secure downloads, it does break
interoperability with some sites that worked with previous Wget
versions, particularly those using self-signed, expired, or otherwise
invalid certificates.  This option forces an insecure mode of
operation that turns the certificate verification errors into warnings
and allows you to proceed.



If you encounter certificate verification errors or ones saying
that common name doesn’t match requested host name, you can use
this option to bypass the verification and proceed with the download.
Only use this option if you are otherwise convinced of the
site’s authenticity, or if you really don’t care about the validity of
its certificate.  It is almost always a bad idea not to check the
certificates when transmitting confidential or important data.



Without this option Wget looks for CA certificates at the
system-specified locations, chosen at OpenSSL installation time.



Without this option Wget looks for CA certificates at the
system-specified locations, chosen at OpenSSL installation time.



On such systems the SSL library needs an external source of randomness
to initialize.  Randomness may be provided by EGD (see
--egd-file below) or read from an external source specified by
the user.  If this option is not specified, Wget looks for random data
in $RANDFILE or, if that is unset, in $HOME/.rnd.  If
none of those are available, it is likely that SSL encryption will not
be usable.



If you’re getting the Could not seed OpenSSL PRNG; disabling SSL.
error, you should provide random data using some of the methods
described above.



OpenSSL allows the user to specify his own source of entropy using the
RAND_FILE environment variable.  If this variable is unset, or
if the specified file does not produce enough randomness, OpenSSL will
read random data from EGD socket specified using this option.



If this option is not specified (and the equivalent startup command is
not used), EGD is never contacted.  EGD is not needed on modern Unix
systems that support /dev/random.



Another way to specify username and password is in the URL itself.  Either method reveals your password to anyone who
bothers to run ps.  To prevent the passwords from being seen,
store them in .wgetrc or .netrc, and make sure to protect
those files from other users with chmod.  If the passwords are
really important, do not leave them lying in those files either---edit
the files and delete them after Wget has started the download.



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



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





        wget ftp://gnjilux.srk.fer.hr/*.msg



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



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



If the machine is connected to the Internet directly, both passive and
active FTP should work equally well.  Behind most firewall and NAT
configurations passive FTP has a better chance of working.  However,
in some rare firewall configurations, active FTP actually works when
passive FTP doesn’t.  If you suspect this to be the case, use this
option, or set passive_ftp=off in your init file.



When --retr-symlinks is specified, however, symbolic links are
traversed and the pointed-to files are retrieved.  At this time, this
option does not cause Wget to traverse symlinks to directories and
recurse through them, but in the future it should be enhanced to do
this.



Note that when retrieving a file (not a directory) because it was
specified on the command-line, rather than because it was recursed to,
this option has no effect.  Symbolic links are always traversed in this
case.



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.





        wget -r -nd --delete-after http://whatever.com/~popular/page/



The -r option is to retrieve recursively, and -nd to not
create directories. 



Note that --delete-after deletes files on the local machine.  It
does not issue the DELE command to remote FTP sites, for
instance.  Also note that when --delete-after is specified,
--convert-links is ignored, so .orig files are simply not
created in the first place.



Each link will be changed in one of the two ways:



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.



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
http://hostname/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 Wget know which links have
been downloaded.  Because of that, the work done by -k will be
performed at the end of all the downloads.



Ordinarily, when downloading a single HTML page, any requisite documents
that may be needed to display it properly are not downloaded.  Using
-r together with -l can help, but since Wget does not
ordinarily distinguish between external and inlined documents, one is
generally left with leaf documents that are missing their
requisites.



For instance, say document 1.html contains an <IMG> tag
referencing 1.gif and an <A> tag pointing to external
document 2.html.  Say that 2.html is similar but that its
image is 2.gif and it links to 3.html.  Say this
continues up to some arbitrarily high number.



If one executes the command:





        wget -r -l 2 http://<site>/1.html



then 1.html, 1.gif, 2.html, 2.gif, and
3.html will be downloaded.  As you can see, 3.html is
without its requisite 3.gif because Wget is simply counting the
number of hops (up to 2) away from 1.html in order to determine
where to stop the recursion.  However, with this command:





        wget -r -l 2 -p http://<site>/1.html



all the above files and 3.html’s requisite 3.gif
will be downloaded.  Similarly,





        wget -r -l 1 -p http://<site>/1.html



will cause 1.html, 1.gif, 2.html, and 2.gif
to be downloaded.  One might think that:





        wget -r -l 0 -p http://<site>/1.html



would download just 1.html and 1.gif, but unfortunately
this is not the case, because -l 0 is equivalent to
-l inf---that is, infinite recursion.  To download a single HTML
page (or a handful of them, all specified on the command-line or in a
-i URL input file) and its (or their) requisites, simply leave off
-r and -l:





        wget -p http://<site>/1.html



Note that Wget will behave as if -r had been specified, but only
that single page and its requisites will be downloaded.  Links from that
page to external documents will not be followed.  Actually, to download
a single page and all its requisites (even if they exist on separate
websites), and make sure the lot displays properly locally, this author
likes to use a few options in addition to -p:





        wget -E -H -k -K -p http://<site>/<document>



To finish off this topic, it’s worth knowing that Wget’s idea of an
external document link is any URL specified in an <A> tag, an
<AREA> tag, or a <LINK> tag other than <LINK
REL="stylesheet">.



According to specifications, HTML comments are expressed as SGML
declarations.  Declaration is special markup that begins with
<! and ends with >, such as <!DOCTYPE ...>, that
may contain comments between a pair of -- delimiters.  HTML
comments are empty declarations, SGML declarations without any
non-comment text.  Therefore, <!--foo—> is a valid comment, and
so is <!--one— --two—>, but <!--1--2--> is not.



On the other hand, most HTML writers don’t perceive comments as anything
other than text delimited with <!-- and -->, which is not
quite the same.  For example, something like <!------------>
works as a valid comment as long as the number of dashes is a multiple
of four (!).  If not, the comment technically lasts until the next
--, which may be at the other end of the document.  Because of
this, many popular browsers completely ignore the specification and
implement what users have come to expect: comments delimited with
<!-- and -->.



Until version 1.9, Wget interpreted comments strictly, which resulted in
missing links in many web pages that displayed fine in browsers, but had
the misfortune of containing non-compliant comments.  Beginning with
version 1.9, Wget has joined the ranks of clients that implements
naive comments, terminating each comment at the first occurrence of
-->.



If, for whatever reason, you want strict comment parsing, use this
option to turn it on.



In the past, this option was the best bet for downloading a single page
and its requisites, using a command-line like:





        wget --ignore-tags=a,area -H -k -K -r http://<site>/<document>



However, the author of this option came across a page with tags like
<LINK REL="home" HREF="/"> and came to the realization that
specifying tags to ignore was not enough.  One can’t just tell Wget to
ignore <LINK>, because then stylesheets will not be downloaded.
Now the best bet for downloading a single page and its requisites is the
dedicated --page-requisites option.


Before actually submitting a bug report, please try to follow a few
simple guidelines.



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.



Note: please make sure to remove any potentially sensitive information
from the debug log before sending it to the bug address.  The
-d won’t go out of its way to collect sensitive information,
but the log will contain a fairly complete transcript of Wget’s
communication with the server, which may include passwords and pieces
of downloaded data.  Since the bug address is publically archived, you
may assume that all bug reports are visible to the public.


Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.  A
copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free
Documentation License.











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