Overview

GNU Wget is a freely available network utility to retrieve files from the World Wide Web, using HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) and FTP (File Transfer Protocol), the two most widely used Internet protocols. It has many useful features to make downloading easier, some of them being:

• Wget is non-interactive, which means it can work in the background, while the user is not logged on, so that you may start the program and log off, letting it do its 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 is capable of descending recursively through the structure of HTML documents and FTP directory trees, making a local copy of the directory hierarchy similar to the one on the remote server. This feature can be used to mirror archives and home pages, or traverse the web in search of data, like a WWW robot (See section Robots). In that spirit, Wget understands the norobots convention.

• File name wildcard matching and recursive mirroring of directories are available when retrieving via FTP. Wget can read the time-stamp information given by both HTTP and FTP servers, and store it locally. Thus Wget can see if the remote file has changed since last retrieval, and automatically retrieve the new version if it has. This makes Wget suitable for mirroring of FTP sites, as well as home pages.

• Wget works exceedingly well on slow or unstable connections, keeping getting the document until it is fully retrieved, or until a user-specified retry count is surpassed. It will try to resume the download from the point of interruption, using REST with FTP and Range with HTTP servers that support them.

• By default, Wget supports PROXY servers, which can lighten the network load, speed up retrieval and provide access behind firewalls. However, if you are behind a firewall that requires that you use a socks style gateway, you can get the socks library and build wget with support for socks. Wget also supports the passive FTP downloading as an option.

• Builtin features offer mechanisms to tune which links you wish to follow (See section Following Links).

• The retrieval is conveniently traced with printing dots, each dot representing a fixed amount of data received (1KB by default). These representations can be customized to your preferences.

• Most of the features are fully configurable, either through command line options, or via the initialization file `.wgetrc' (See section Startup File). Wget allows you to define global startup files (`/etc/wgetrc' by default) for site settings.

• Finally, GNU Wget is free software. This means that everyone may use it, redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License, as published by the Free Software Foundation (See section GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE).

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