Option Syntax

  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 prepending --no- 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 /priv and /trash. You can also clear the lists in .wgetrc.

  wget2 --no-exclude-directories -X /priv,/trash

    

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. A boolean option is either affirmative or negative (beginning 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 command line.

Basic Startup Options

-V, --version

-h, --help

-b, --background

-e, --execute=command

--hyperlink

Logging and Input File Options

-o, --output-file=logfile

-a, --append-output=logfile

-d, --debug

-q, --quiet

-v, --verbose

-nv, --no-verbose

--report-speed=type

-i, --input-file=file

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 <base href="url"> 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

--force-css

--force-sitemap

--force-atom

--force-rss

--force-metalink

-B, --base=URL

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

--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 [Not implemented yet]

--local-db

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

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

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

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

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

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', 'zstd', 'lzip'
`Verification` PGP verification status. 0,1,2,3 mean 'none',  'valid', 'invalid', 'bad', 'missing'.

    

Download Options

--bind-address=ADDRESS

--bind-interface=INTERFACE

-t, --tries=number

--retry-on-http-error=list

  wget2 --retry-on-http-error=*,\!404 https://example.com/

    

Please keep in mind that “200” is the only forbidden code. If it is included on the status list Wget2 will ignore it. The max. number of download attempts is given by the --tries option.

-O, --output-document=file

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

When running Wget2 without -N, -nc, -r, or -p, downloading the same file in the same directory will result in the original copy of file being preserved and the second copy being named file.1. If that file is downloaded yet again, the third copy will be named file.2, and so on. (This is also the behavior with -nd, even if -r or -p are in effect.) Use --keep-extension to use an alternative file naming pattern.

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

-c, --continue

  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 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 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 truncated tarball.gz file alone.

If you use -c on a non-empty file, and it turns out that the server does not support continued downloading, Wget2 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.

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 “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 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-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

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 separated by a colon (:) like this: --progress=type:parameter1:parameter2.

When using the dotted retrieval, you may set the style by specifying the type as dot:style. Different styles assign different meaning to one dot. With the “default” style each dot represents 1K, there are ten dots in a cluster and 50 dots in a line. The “binary” style has a more “computer”-like orientation: 8K dots, 16-dots clusters and 48 dots per line (which makes for 384K lines). The “mega” style is suitable for downloading large files, each dot represents 64K retrieved, there are eight dots in a cluster, and 48 dots on each line (so each line contains 3M). If “mega” is not enough then you can use the “giga” style. Each dot represents 1M retrieved, there are eight dots in a cluster, and 32 dots on each line (so each line contains 32M).

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

When the output is not a TTY, the progress bar always falls back to “dot”, even if --progress=bar was passed to Wget2 during invocation. 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

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 --output-file option.

-N, --timestamping

--no-if-modified-since

--no-use-server-timestamps

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

--spider

  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

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 default is a 900-second read timeout. Setting a timeout to 0 disables it altogether. Unless you know what you are doing, it is best not to change the default timeout settings.

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

--dns-timeout=seconds

--connect-timeout=seconds

--read-timeout=seconds

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

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

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

By default, Wget2 will assume a value of 10 seconds.

--random-wait

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 a comma-separated list of exceptions (domains/IPs) is given, these exceptions are accessed without using a proxy. It overrides the `no_proxy' environment variable.

-Q quota, --quota=quota

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 command-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.

--restrict-file-names=modes

By default, Wget2 escapes the characters that are not valid or safe as part of file names on your operating system, as well as control characters that are typically unprintable. This option is useful for changing these defaults, perhaps because you are downloading to a non-native partition, or because you want to disable escaping of the control characters, or you want to further restrict characters to only those in the ASCII range of values.

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

When “unix” is specified, 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 characters 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?input=blah in Unix mode would be saved as www.xemacs.org+4300/search.pl@input=blah in Windows mode. This mode is the default on Windows.

If you specify nocontrol, then the escaping of the control characters is also switched off. This option may make sense when you are downloading URLs whose names contain UTF-8 characters, on a system which can save and display filenames in UTF-8 (some possible byte values used in UTF-8 byte sequences fall in the range of values designated by 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

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

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

TFO reduces connection latency by 1 RT on “hot” connections (2nd+ connection to the same host in a certain amount of time).

Currently this works on recent Linux and OSX kernels, on HTTP and HTTPS.

--dns-cache-preload=file

The format of file is like /etc/hosts: IP-address whitespace Name

This allows to save domain name lookup time, which is a bottleneck in some use cases. Also, the use of HOSTALIASES (which is not portable) can be mimiced by this option.

--dns-cache

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 retrieves 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 --no-dns-cache 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.

--retry-connrefused

--user=user, --password=password

If neither –http-proxy-user nor –http-proxy-password is given these settings are also taken for proxy authentication.

--ask-password

--use-askpass=command

--no-iri

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

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

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

--input-encoding=encoding

--unlink

--cut-url-get-vars

--cut-file-get-vars

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

--max-threads=number

-s, --verify-sig[=fail|no-fail]

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. By default, if a signature file cannot be found (I.E. the request for it gets a 404 status code) Wget2 will exit with an error code.

This behavior can be tuned using the following arguments: * fail: This is the default, meaning that this is the value when you supply the flag without an argument. Indicates that missing signature files will cause Wget2 to exit with an error code. * no-fail: This value allows missing signature files. A 404 message will still be issued, but the program will exit normally (assuming no unrelated errors).

Additionally, --no-verify-sig disables signature checking altogether --no-verify-sig does not allow any arguments.

--signature-extensions

--gnupg-homedir

--verify-save-failed

--xattr

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

Metalink files describe downloads incl. mirrors, files, checksums, signatures. This allows chunked downloads, automatically taking the nearest mirrors, preferring the fastest mirrors and checking the download for integrity.

--fsync-policy

--http2-request-window=number

--keep-extension

The standard (default) pattern for file names is <filename>.<N>, the new pattern is <basename>_<N>.<ext>.

The idea is to use such files without renaming when the use depends on the extension, like on Windows.

This option doesn not change the behavior of --backups.

Directory Options

-nd, --no-directories

-x, --force-directories

-nH, --no-host-directories

--protocol-directories

--cut-dirs=number

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. However, 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

HTTP Options

--default-page=name

--default-http-port=port

This is mainly for testing purposes.

--default-https-port=port

This is mainly for testing purposes.

-E, --adjust-extension

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 content, including content types that are not parsed by Wget.

--http-user=user, --http-password=password

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

--http-proxy=proxies

Exceptions can be set via the environment variable `no_proxy' or via --no-proxy.

--https-proxy=proxies

Exceptions can be set via the environment variable `no_proxy' or via --no-proxy.

--no-http-keep-alive

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

Caching is allowed by default.

--no-cookies

--load-cookies 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 Export, 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 “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 Wget2 to send those cookies, bypassing the “official” cookie support:

  wget2 --no-cookies --header "Cookie: <name>=<value>"

    

--save-cookies file

--keep-session-cookies

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

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_suffix_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

With this option, Wget2 will ignore the “Content-Length” header as if it never existed.

--header=header-line

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

--proxy-user=user, --proxy-password=password [Not implemented, use --http-proxy-password]

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

--referer=url

--save-headers

-U agent-string, --user-agent=agent-string

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 Wget2 not to send the “User-Agent” header in HTTP requests.

--post-data=string, --post-file=file

Please note that wget2 does not require the content to be of the form “key1=value1&key2=value2”, and neither does it test for it. Wget2 will simply transmit whatever data is provided to it. Most servers however expect the POST data to be in the above format when processing HTML Forms.

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 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.

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 Redirect, 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

--body-data=Data-String, --body-file=Data-File

Currently, --body-file is not for transmitting files as a whole. Wget2 does not currently support “multipart/form-data” for transmitting data; only “application/x-www-form-urlencoded”. In the future, this may be changed so that 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 under --post-data are followed.

--content-disposition

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

--save-content-on

You can use ’*’ for ANY. An exclamation mark (!) in front of a code means `exception'.

Example 1: --save-content-on="*,!404" would save the content on any HTTP status, except for 404.

Example 2: --save-content-on=404 would save the content only on HTTP status 404.

The older --content-on-error behaves like --save-content-on=*.

--trust-server-names

--auth-no-challenge

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

Compatibility-Note: none type in Wget 1.X has the same meaning as identity type in Wget2.

--download-attr=[strippath|usepath]

The value `usepath' takes the file name as as including the directory. This is very dangerous and we can’t stress enough not to use it on untrusted input or servers ! Only use this if you really trust the input or the server.

HTTPS (SSL/TLS) Options

--secure-protocol=protocol

Legal values are auto, SSLv3, TLSv1, TLSv1_1, TLSv1_2, TLSv1_3 and PFS.

If auto is used, the TLS library’s default is used.

Specifying SSLv3 forces the use of the SSL3. This is useful when talking to old and buggy SSL server implementations that make it hard for the underlying TLS library to choose the correct 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.

TLSv1 enables TLS1.0 or higher. TLSv1_1 enables TLS1.1 or higher. TLSv1_2 enables TLS1.2 or higher. TLSv1_3 enables TLS1.3 or higher.

Any other protocol string is directly given to the TLS library, currently GnuTLS, as a “priority” or “cipher” string. This is for users who know what they are doing.

--https-only

--no-check-certificate

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. For self-signed/internal certificates, you should download the certificate and verify against that instead of forcing this insecure mode. If you are really 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

--certificate-type=type

--private-key=file

--private-key-type=type

--ca-certificate=file

Without this option Wget2 looks for CA certificates at the system-specified locations, chosen at OpenSSL installation time.

--ca-directory=directory

Without this option Wget2 looks for CA certificates at the system-specified locations, chosen at OpenSSL installation time.

--crl-file=file

--random-file=file

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, 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 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

--hsts-file=file

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 convenient 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 included 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 include_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 removed 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 exits, it effectively updates the HSTS database by rewriting the database file with the new entries.

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 arose from such practice, see section 14 “Security Considerations” of RFC 6797, specially section 14.9 “Creative Manipulation of HSTS Policy Store”.

--hsts-preload

--hsts-preload-file=file

The data file must be in DAFSA format as generated by libhsts’ tool hsts-make-dafsa.

--hpkp

This is a Trust On First Use (TOFU) mechanism to add another security layer to HTTPS (RFC 7469). It persistently stores the data into ~/.wget-hpkp which can be changed via the --hpkp-fileoption.

--hpkp-file=file

To disable persistent storage use --no-hpkp-file.

--tls-resume

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

To disable persistent storage use --no-tls-session-file.

--tls-false-start

This reduces TLS negotiation by one RT and thus speeds up HTTPS connections.

More details at https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7918.

--check-hostname

--ocsp

This procedure is pretty slow (connect to server, HTTP request, response) and thus we support OSCP stapling (server sends OCSP response within TLS handshake) and persistent OCSP caching.

--ocsp-date

--ocsp-nonce

--ocsp-server

--ocsp-stapling

--ocsp-file=file

To disable persistent OCSP caching use --no-ocsp-file.

--http2

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.

--http2-only

--https-enforce=mode

mode=none

mode=soft

mode=hard

Recursive Retrieval Options

-r, --recursive

-l depth, --level=depth

--delete-after

  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 created in the first place.

-k, --convert-links

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.

2.

The links to files that have not been downloaded by Wget2 will be changed to include host name and absolute path of the location they point to.

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

It works particularly well in conjunction with --adjust-extension, although this coupling is not enforced. 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 destination 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 converted to the effective scheme (ie. “https://”).

-K, --backup-converted

-m, --mirror

-p, --page-requisites

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 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:

  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 specified 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 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:

  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

--robots

For each visited domain, follow rules specified in /robots.txt. You should respect the domain owner’s rules and turn this off only for very good reasons.

Whether enabled or disabled, the robots.txt file is downloaded and scanned for sitemaps. These are lists of pages / files available for download that not necessarily are available via recursive scanning.

Recursive Accept/Reject Options

-A acclist, --accept=acclist, -R rejlist, --reject=rejlist

--accept-regex=urlregex, --reject-regex=urlregex

--regex-type=regextype

--filter-urls

-D domain-list, --domains=domain-list

--exclude-domains=domain-list

--follow-tags=list

--ignore-tags=list

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

-H, --span-hosts

-L, --relative [Not implemented yet]

-I list, --include-directories=list

  wget2 -r https://webpage.domain --include-directories=*/pub/*/

    

Please keep in mind that */pub/*/ is the same as /*/pub/*/ and that it matches directories, not strings. This means that */pub doesn’t affect files contained at e.g. /directory/something/pub but /pub/* matches every subdir of /pub.

-X list, --exclude-directories=list

  wget2 -r https://gnu.org --exclude-directories=/software

    

-I / -X combinations

If -I is given first, the default is `exclude all'. If -X is given first, the default is `include all'.

Multiple -I/-X options are processed `first to last'. The last match is relevant.

  Example: -I /pub -X /pub/trash would download all from /pub/ except from /pub/trash.
  Example: -X /pub -I /pub/important would download all except from /pub where only /pub/important would be downloaded.

    

To reset the list (e.g. to ignore -I/-X from .wgetrc files) use --no-include-directories or --no-exclude-directories.

-np, --no-parent

--filter-mime-type=list

  wget2 -r https://<site>/<document> --filter-mime-type=*,\!image/*

    

It is also useful to download files that are compatible with an application of your system. For instance, 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

--local-plugin=file

--plugin=name

--plugin-dirs=directories

--plugin-help

--plugin-opt=option

option is in the format <plugin_name>.<option>[=value].

Wget2rc Location

Then, Wget2 will look for the user’s initialization file. If the user has passed the --config command line option, Wget2 will try to load the file that it points to. If file does not exist, or if it cannot be read, Wget2 will make no further attempts to read any initialization files.

If the environment variable WGET2RC is set, Wget2 will try to load the file at this location. If the file does not exist, or if it cannot be read, Wget2 will make no further attempts to read an initialization file.

If, --config is not passed and WGET2RC is not set, Wget2 will attempt to load the user’s initialization file from a location as defined by the XDG Base Directory Specification. It will read the first, and only the first file it finds from the following locations:

1.

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/wget/wget2rc

2.

$HOME/.config/wget/wget2rc

3.

$HOME/.wget2rc

Having an initialization file at $HOME/.wget2rc is deprecated. If a file is found there, Wget2 will print a warning about it. Support for reading from this file will be removed in the future.

The fact that the user’s settings are loaded after the system-wide ones means that in case of a collision, the user’s wget2rc overrides the global wget2rc.