Linux wget command

Updated: 07/12/2017 by Computer Hope

About wget

wget stands for "web get". It is a command-line utility which downloads files over a network.



wget is non-interactive, meaning that it can work in the background, while the user is not logged on, which allows you to start a retrieval and disconnect from the system, letting wget finish the work. By contrast, most web browsers require constant user interaction, which make transferring a lot of data difficult.

wget can follow links in HTML and XHTML pages and create local versions of remote websites, fully recreating the directory structure of the original site, which is sometimes called "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.



The simplest way to use wget is to provide it with the location of a file to download over HTTP. For example, to download the file, this command:


...would download the file into the working directory.

There are many options that allow you to use wget in different ways, for different purposes. These are outlined below.

Installing wget


sudo apt-get install wget

For other operating systems, see your package manager's documentation for information about how to locate the wget binary package and install it. Or, you can install it from source from the GNU website at

wget syntax


Basic Startup Options

-V, --version Display the version of wget, and exit.
-h, --help Print a help message describing all of wget's command-line options, and exit.
-b, --background Go to background immediately after startup. If no output file is specified via the -o, output is redirected to wget-log.
-e command, --execute command Execute command as if it were a part of the file .wgetrc. A command thus invoked will be executed after the commands in .wgetrc, thus taking precedence over them.

Logging and Input File Options

-o logfile, --output-file=logfile Log all messages to logfile. The messages are normally reported to standard error.
-a logfile, --append-output=logfile Append to logfile. This option is the same as -o, only it appends to logfile instead of overwriting the old log file. If logfile does not exist, a new file is created.
-d, --debug Turn on debug output, meaning various information important to the developers of wget if it does not work properly. Your system administrator may have chosen to compile wget without debug support, in which case -d will not work.

Note that compiling with debug support is always safe; wget compiled with the debug support will not print any debug info unless requested with -d.
-q, --quiet Turn off wget's output.
-v, --verbose Turn on verbose output, with all the available data. The default output is verbose.
-nv, --non-verbose Non-verbose output. Turn off verbose without being completely quiet (use -q for that), which means that error messages and basic information still get printed.
-i file, --input-file=file Read URLs from a local or external file. If "-" is specified as file, URLs are read from the standard input. (Use "./-" to read from a file literally named "-".)


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.

If the file is an external one, the document will be automatically treated as HTML if the Content-Type is "text/html". Furthermore, the file's location will be implicitly used as base href if none was specified.
-F, --force-html When input is read from a file, force it to be treated as an HTML file. This enables you to retrieve relative links from existing HTML files on your local disk, by adding <base href="url"> to HTML, or using the --base command-line option.
Resolves relative links using URL as the point of reference, when reading links from an HTML file specified via the -i/--input-file option (together with --force-html, or when the input file was fetched remotely from a server describing it as HTML). This option is equivalent to the presence of a "BASE" tag in the HTML input file, with URL as the value for the "href" attribute.

For instance, if you specify http://foo/bar/a.html for URL, and wget reads ../baz/b.html from the input file, it would be resolved to http://foo/baz/b.html.
--config=FILE Specify the location of a startup file you want to use.

Download Options

-t number, --tries=number Set number of retries to number. Specify 0 or inf for infinite retrying. The default is to retry 20 times, with the exception of fatal errors like "connection refused'' or "not found'' (404), which are not retried.
-O file, --output-document=file The documents will not be written to the appropriate files, but all will be concatenated together and written to file.

If "-" is used as file, documents will be printed to standard output, disabling link conversion. (Use "./-" to print to a file literally named "-".)

Use of -O is not intended to mean "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.


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.

-nc, --no-clobber If a file is downloaded more than once in the same directory, wget's behavior depends on a few options, including -nc. In certain cases, the local file will be "clobbered" (overwritten), upon repeated download. In other cases it will be preserved.

When running wget without -N, -nc, or -r, 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 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 being turned off.

When running wget with -r, but without -N or -nc, re-downloading a file will result in the new copy 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.


-c, --continue Continue getting a partially-downloaded file. This option is useful when you want to finish up a download started by a previous instance of wget, or by another program. For instance:

wget -c

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, which 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.


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 that 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 hand, 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.


--progress=type Select the progress indicator you want to use. Legal indicators are "dot" and "bar".



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 1 K, there are ten dots in a cluster and 50 dots in a line. The "binary" style has a more "computer"-like orientation: 8 K dots, 16-dots clusters and 48 dots per line (which makes for 384 K lines). The "mega" style is suitable for downloading very large files; each dot represents 6 4K retrieved, there are eight dots in a cluster, and 48 dots on each line (so each line contains 3 M).

-N, --timestamping Turn on time stamping. Output file will have timestamp matching remote copy; if file already exists locally, and remote file is not newer, no download will occur.
--no-use-server-timestamps Don't set the local file's timestamp by the one on the server.

By default, when a file is downloaded, its timestamps are set to match those from the remote file, which allows the use of --timestamping on subsequent invocations of wget. However, it is sometimes useful to base the local file's timestamp on when it was actually downloaded; for that purpose, the --no-use-server-timestamps option has been provided.
-S, --server-response Print the headers sent by HTTP servers and responses sent by FTP servers.
--spider When invoked with this option, wget will behave as a web spider, which means that it will not download the pages, just check that they are there. For example, you can use wget to check your bookmarks:

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.
-T seconds, --timeout=seconds Set the network timeout to seconds seconds. This option is equivalent to specifying --dns-timeout, --connect-timeout, and --read-timeout, all at the same time.


--dns-timeout=seconds Set the DNS lookup timeout to seconds seconds. DNS lookups that don't complete within the specified time will fail. By default, there is no timeout on DNS lookups, other than that implemented by system libraries.
--connect-timeout=seconds Set the connect timeout to seconds seconds. TCP connections that take longer to establish will be aborted. By default, there is no connect timeout, other than that implemented by system libraries.
--read-timeout=seconds Set the read (and write) timeout to seconds seconds. Reads that take longer will fail. The default value for read timeout is 900 seconds.
--limit-rate=amount Limit the download speed to amount bytes per second. The amount may be expressed in bytes, kilobytes (with the k suffix), or megabytes (with the m suffix). For example, --limit-rate=20k will limit the retrieval rate to 20 KB/s. This option is useful when, for whatever reason, you don't want wget to consume the entire available bandwidth.



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 (see below).
--waitretry=seconds If you don't want wget to wait between every retrieval, but only between retries of failed downloads, you can use this option. wget will use linear backoff, waiting 1 second after the first failure on a given file, then waiting 2 seconds after the second failure on that file, up to the maximum number of seconds you specify. Therefore, a value of 10 will actually make wget wait up to (1 + 2 + ... + 10) = 55 seconds per file.

By default, wget will assume a value of 10 seconds.
--random-wait Some websites may perform log analysis to identify retrieval programs such as wget by looking for statistically significant similarities in the time between requests. This option causes the time between requests to vary between 0 and 2*wait seconds, where wait was specified using the --wait option, to mask wget's presence from such analysis.

--no-proxy Don't use proxies, even if the appropriate *_proxy environment variable is defined.
-Q quota, --quota=quota Specify download quota for automatic retrievals. The value can be specified in bytes (default), kilobytes (with k suffix), or megabytes (with m suffix).


Setting quota to 0 or to inf unlimits the download quota.
--no-dns-cache Turn off caching of DNS lookups. Normally, wget remembers the addresses it looked up from DNS so it doesn't have to repeatedly contact the DNS server for the same (typically small) set of addresses it retrieves. This cache exists in memory only; a new wget 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 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.



When mode is set to unix, wget escapes the character / and the control characters in the ranges 0-31 and 128-159. This option is the default on Unix-like OSes.

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, an URL that would be saved as in Unix mode would be saved as [email protected]=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 filen ames in UTF-8 (some possible byte values used in UTF-8 byte sequences fall in the range of values designated by wget 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 mode can be useful when saving file names whose encoding does not match the one used locally.
-4, --inet4-only; -6, --inet6-only Force connecting to IPv4 or IPv6 addresses. With --inet4-only or -4, wget will only connect to IPv4 hosts, ignoring AAAA records in DNS, and refusing to connect to IPv6 addresses specified in URLs. Conversely, with --inet6-only or -6, wget will only connect to IPv6 hosts and ignore A records and IPv4 addresses.

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.
--prefer-family={none|IPv4|IPv6} When given a choice of several addresses, connect to the addresses with specified address family first. The address order returned by DNS is used without change by default.


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.
--retry-connrefused Consider "connection refused" a transient error and try again. Normally wget gives up on a URL when it is unable to connect to the site because failure to connect is taken as a sign that the server is not running at all and that retries would not help. This option is for mirroring unreliable sites whose servers tend to disappear for short periods of time.
--user=user, --password=password Specify the username user and password for both FTP and HTTP file retrieval. These parameters can be overridden using the --ftp-user and --ftp-password options for FTP connections and the --http-user and --http-password options for HTTP connections.
--ask-password Prompt for a password for each connection established. Cannot be specified when --password is being used, because they are mutually exclusive.
--no-iri Turn off internationalized URI (IRI) support. Use --iri to turn it on. IRI support is activated by default.

--local-encoding=encoding Force wget to use encoding as the default system encoding. That affects how wget converts URLs specified as arguments from locale to UTF-8 for IRI support.


--remote-encoding=encoding Force wget to use encoding as the default remote server encoding. That affects how wget converts URIs found in files from remote encoding to UTF-8 during a recursive fetch. This options is only useful for IRI support, for the interpretation of non-ASCII characters.


--unlink Force wget to unlink file instead of clobbering existing file. This option is useful for downloading to the directory with hardlinks.

Directory Options

-nd, --no-directories Do not create a hierarchy of directories when retrieving recursively. With this option turned on, all files will get saved to the current directory, without clobbering (if a name shows up more than once, the file names will get extensions .n).
-x, --force-directories The opposite of -nd; create a hierarchy of directories, even if one would not have been created otherwise. E.g. wget -x will save the downloaded file to
-nH, --no-host-directories Disable generation of host-prefixed directories. By default, invoking wget with -r will create a structure of directories beginning with This option disables such behavior.
--cut-dirs=number Ignore number directory components. This option is useful for getting a fine-grained control over the directory where recursive retrieval will be saved.

Take, for example, the directory at If you retrieve it with -r, it will be saved locally under While the -nH option can remove the part, you are still stuck with pub/xemacs, which 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)
-nH pub/xemacs/
-nH --cut-dirs=1 xemacs/
-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 xemacs/beta, as one would expect.
-P prefix, --directory-prefix=prefix Set directory prefix to prefix. The directory prefix is the directory where all other files and subdirectories will be saved to, i.e. the top of the retrieval tree. The default is "." (the current directory).

HTTP Options

-E, --html-extension If a file of type application/xhtml+xml or text/html is downloaded and the URL does not end with the regexp "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?", this option will cause the suffix .html to be appended to the local file name. This option is useful, for instance, when you're mirroring a remote site that uses .asp pages, but you want the mirrored pages to be viewable on your stock Apache server. Another good use for this is when you're downloading CGI-generated materials. An URL like will be saved as article.cgi?25.html.

Note that file names 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).


--http-user=user, --http-passwd=password Specify the username user and password on an HTTP server. According to the challenge, wget will encode them using either the "basic" (insecure) or the "digest" authentication scheme.

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 important, do not leave them lying in those files either; edit the files and delete them after wget has started the download.
--no-cache Disable server-side cache. In this case, wget will send the remote server an appropriate directive (Pragma: no-cache) to get the file from the remote service, rather than returning the cached version. This option is especially useful for retrieving and flushing out-of-date documents on proxy servers.

Caching is allowed by default.
--load-cookies file Load cookies from file before the first HTTP retrieval. file is a text file in the format originally used by Netscape's cookies.txt file.


Mirroring such a site requires wget to send the same cookies your browser sends when communicating with the site. To do this use --load-cookies; 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 text cookie files in different locations:

Netscape 4.x The cookies are in ~/.netscape/cookies.txt.
Internet Explorer You can produce a cookie file wget can use by using the File menu, Import and Export, Export Cookies. Tested with Internet Explorer 5 (wow. that's old), but it is not guaranteed to work with earlier versions.

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:

--save-cookies file Save cookies to file before exiting. This will not save cookies that have expired or that have no expiry time (so-called "session cookies"), but also see --keep-session-cookies.
--keep-session-cookies When specified, causes --save-cookies to also save session cookies. Session cookies are normally not saved because they are meant to be kept in memory and forgotten when you exit the browser. Saving them is useful on sites that require you to log in or to visit the homepage before you can access some pages. With this option, multiple wget runs are considered a single browser session as far as the site is concerned.

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.
--ignore-length Unfortunately, some HTTP servers (CGI programs, to be more precise) send out bogus "Content-Length" headers, which makes wget start to bray like a stuck pig, as it thinks not all the document was retrieved. You can spot this syndrome if wget retries getting the same document again and again, each time claiming that the (otherwise normal) connection has closed on the very same byte.

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


     --header='Accept-Language: hr'

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 in the "Host" header:

In versions of wget prior to 1.10 such use of --header caused sending of duplicate headers.
--proxy-user=user, --proxy-password=password Specify the username user and password for authentication on a proxy server. wget will encode them using the "basic" authentication scheme.

--referer=url Include "Referer: url" header in HTTP request. Useful for retrieving documents with server-side processing that assume they are always being retrieved by interactive web browsers and only come out properly when Referer is set to one of the pages that point to them.
--save-headers Save the headers sent by the HTTP server to the file, preceding the actual contents, with an empty line as the separator.
-U agent-string, --user-agent=agent-string Identify as agent-string to the HTTP server.

The HTTP protocol allows the clients to identify themselves using a "User-Agent" header field. This 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.


Specifying empty user agent with --user-agent="" instructs wget not to send the "User-Agent" header in HTTP requests.
--post-data=string, --post-file=file Use POST as the method for all HTTP requests and send the specified data in the request body. --post-data sends string as data, whereas --post-file sends the contents of file. Other than that, they work in exactly the same way. In particular, they both expect content of the form "key1=value1&key2=value2", with percent-encoding for special characters; the only difference is that one expects its content as a command-line parameter and the other accepts its content from a file. In particular, --post-file is not for transmitting files as form attachments: those must appear as "key=value" data (with appropriate percent-coding) just like everything else. wget does not currently support "multipart/form-data" for transmitting POST data; only "application/x-www-form-urlencoded". Only one of --post-data and --post-file should be specified.


Note that if wget is redirected after the POST request is completed, it will not send the POST data to the redirected URL. 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. First, we log in to the server, which can be done only once.

wget --save-cookies cookies.txt --post-data 
And then we grab the page (or pages) we care about:

wget --load-cookies cookies.txt 
--content-disposition If this is set, experimental (not fully-functional) support for "Content-Disposition" headers is enabled. This option can currently result in extra round-trips to the server for a "HEAD" request, and is known to suffer from a few bugs, which is why it is not currently enabled by default.

--trust-server-names If this is set, on a redirect the last component of the redirection URL will be used as the local file name. By default, it is used the last component in the original URL.
--auth-no-challenge If this option is given, wget will send Basic HTTP authentication information (plaintext username and password) for all requests, just like wget 1.10.2 and prior did by default.



To support encrypted HTTP (HTTPS) downloads, wget must be compiled with an external SSL library, currently OpenSSL. If wget is compiled without SSL support, none of these options are available.

--secure-protocol=protocol Choose the secure protocol to be used. Legal values are auto, SSLv2, SSLv3, and TLSv1. If auto is used, the SSL library is given the liberty of choosing the appropriate protocol automatically, which is achieved by sending an SSLv2 greeting and announcing support for SSLv3 and TLSv1, which the default.

Specifying SSLv2, SSLv3, or TLSv1 forces the use of the corresponding protocol. This option 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.
--no-check-certificate Don't check the server certificate against the available certificate authorities. Also, don't require the URL host name to match the common name presented by the certificate.

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.

--certificate=file Use the client certificate stored in file. This information is needed for servers that are configured to require certificates from the clients that connect to them. Normally a certificate is not required and this switch is optional.
--certificate-type=type Specify the type of the client certificate. Legal values are PEM (assumed by default) and DER, also known as ASN1.
--private-key=file Read the private key from file. This option allows you to provide the private key in a file separate from the certificate.
--private-key-type=type Specify the type of the private key. Accepted values are PEM (the default) and DER.
--ca-certificate=file Use file as the file with the bundle of certificate authorities ("CA") to verify the peers. The certificates must be in PEM format.

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

--random-file=file Use file as the source of random data for seeding the pseudo-random number generator on systems without /dev/random.





FTP Options

--ftp-user=user, --ftp-password=password Specify the username user and password on an FTP server. Without this, or the corresponding startup option, the password defaults to -wget@, normally used for anonymous FTP.


Note that even though wget writes to a known file name 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.


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).
--no-passive-ftp Disable the use of the passive FTP transfer mode. Passive FTP mandates that the client connect to the server to establish the data connection rather than the other way around.


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.


Recursive Retrieval Options

-r, --recursive Turn on recursive retrieving.
-l depth, --level=depth Specify recursion maximum depth level depth. The default maximum depth is 5.
--delete-after This option tells wget to delete every single file it downloads, after having done so. It is useful for pre-fetching popular pages through a proxy, e.g.:

wget -r -nd --delete-after

Note that --delete-after deletes files on the local machine. It does not issue the DELE FTP command to remote FTP sites, for instance. Also, note that when --delete-after is specified, --convert-links is ignored, so .orig files are not created in the first place.
-k, --convert-links After the download is complete, convert the links in the document to make them suitable for local viewing. This affects not only the visible hyperlinks, but any part of the document that links to external content, such as embedded images, links to style sheets, hyperlinks to non-HTML content, etc. Note that when --output-document is specified, --convert-links is ignored. Each link will be changed in one of the two ways:

1. The links to files that have been downloaded by wget will be changed to refer to the file they point to as a relative link. Example: if the downloaded file /foo/doc.html links to /bar/img.gif, also downloaded, then the link in doc.html will be modified to point to ../bar/img.gif. This kind of transformation works reliably for arbitrary combinations of directories.

2. The links to files that have not been downloaded by wget will be changed to include host name and absolute path of the location they point to. Example: if the downloaded file /foo/doc.html links to /bar/img.gif (or to ../bar/img.gif), then the link in doc.html will be modified to point to http://hostname/bar/img.gif.


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.
-K, --backup-converted When converting a file, backup the original version with an .orig suffix. Affects the behavior of -N.
-p, --page-requisites This option causes wget to download all the files that are necessary to properly display a given HTML page. Including such things as inlined images, sounds, and referenced stylesheets. Ordinarily, when downloading a single HTML page, any requisite documents that may be needed to display it properly are not downloaded. Using -r together with -l can help, but since wget does not ordinarily distinguish between external and inlined documents, one is generally left with "leaf documents'' that are missing their requisites.


If one executes the command:

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 counting the number of hops (up to 2) away from 1.html to determine where to stop the recursion. However, with this command:



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, leave off -r and -l:


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">".
--strict-comments Turn on strict parsing of HTML comments. The default is to terminate comments at the first occurrence of -->.

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.


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 "naïve'' comments, terminating each comment at the first occurrence of -->.


Recursive Accept/Reject Options

-A acclist, --accept acclist; -R rejlist, --reject rejlist Specify comma-separated lists of file name suffixes or patterns to accept or reject. Note that if any of the wildcard characters, *, ?, [ or ], appear in an element of acclist or rejlist, it will be treated as a pattern, rather than a suffix.
-D domain-list, --domains=domain-list Set domains to be followed. domain-list is a comma-separated list of domains. Note that it does not turn on -H.
--exclude-domains domain-list Specify the domains that are not to be followed.
--follow-ftp Follow FTP links from HTML documents. Without this option, wget will ignore all the FTP links.
--ignore-tags=list This option is the opposite of the --follow-tags option. To skip certain HTML tags when recursively looking for documents to download, specify them in a comma-separated list.


--ignore-case Ignore case when matching files and directories. This influences the behavior of -R, -A, -I, and -X options, as well as globbing implemented when downloading from FTP sites. For example, with this option, -A *.txt will match file1.txt, but also file2.TXT, file3.TxT, and so on.
-H--span-hosts Enable spanning across hosts when doing recursive retrieving.
-L--relative Follow relative links only. Useful for retrieving a specific homepage without any distractions, not even those from the same hosts.
-I list, --include-directories=list Specify a comma-separated list of directories you want to follow when downloading. Elements of list may contain wildcards.
-X list, --exclude-directories=list Specify a comma-separated list of directories you want to exclude from download. Elements of list may contain wildcards.
-np, --no-parent Do not ever ascend to the parent directory when retrieving recursively. This option is a useful option, since it guarantees that only the files below a certain hierarchy will be downloaded.


/etc/wgetrc Default location of the global startup file.
.wgetrc User startup file.

wget examples


Download the default homepage file (index.htm) from The file will be saved to the working directory.

wget --limit-rate=200k

Download the file from, and limit bandwidth usage of the download to 200k/s.

wget -c


wget -b

Download in the background, returning you to the command prompt in the interim.

wget --spider

Uses "web spider" mode to check if a remote file exists. Output will resemble the following:

Spider mode enabled. Check if remote file exists.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 1206 (1.2K) [application/zip]
Remote file exists.
wget --mirror -p --convert-links -P ./example-mirror

Download a complete mirror of the website to the folder ./example-mirror for local viewing.

wget -Q5m

Stop downloading once five megabytes have been successfully transferred. This transfer can then later be resumed using the -c option.

curl — Transfer data to or from a server.