Advanced Usage

• You would like to read the list of URLs from a file? Not a problem with that:

  wget -i file
  

  If you specify `-' as file name, the URLs will be read from standard input.
• Create a mirror image of GNU WWW site (with the same directory structure the original has) with only one try per document, saving the log of the activities to `gnulog':

  wget -r -t1 http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/ -o gnulog
  

• Retrieve the first layer of yahoo links:

  wget -r -l1 http://www.yahoo.com/
  

• Retrieve the index.html of `www.lycos.com', showing the original server headers:

  wget -S http://www.lycos.com/
  

• Save the server headers with the file:

  wget -s http://www.lycos.com/
  more index.html
  

• Retrieve the first two levels of `wuarchive.wustl.edu', saving them to /tmp.

  wget -P/tmp -l2 ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/
  

• You want to download all the GIFs from an HTTP directory. `wget http://host/dir/*.gif' doesn't work, since HTTP retrieval does not support globbing. In that case, use:

  wget -r -l1 --no-parent -A.gif http://host/dir/
  

  It is a bit of a kludge, but it works. `-r -l1' means to retrieve recursively (See section Recursive Retrieval), with maximum depth of 1. `--no-parent' means that references to the parent directory are ignored (See section Directory-Based Limits), and `-A.gif' means to download only the GIF files. `-A "*.gif"' would have worked too.
• Suppose you were in the middle of downloading, when Wget was interrupted. Now you do not want to clobber the files already present. It would be:

  wget -nc -r http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/
  

• If you want to encode your own username and password to HTTP or FTP, use the appropriate URL syntax (See section URL Format).

  wget ftp://hniksic:[email protected]/.emacs
  

• If you do not like the default retrieval visualization (1K dots with 10 dots per cluster and 50 dots per line), you can customize it through dot settings (See section Wgetrc Commands). For example, many people like the "binary" style of retrieval, with 8K dots and 512K lines:

  wget --dot-style=binary ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/README
  

  You can experiment with other styles, like:

  wget --dot-style=mega ftp://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/xemacs-20.4/xemacs-20.4.tar.gz
  wget --dot-style=micro http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
  

  To make these settings permanent, put them in your `.wgetrc', as described before (See section Sample Wgetrc).

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