GNU wget

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Introduction to GNU wget

GNU Wget is a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, the two most widely-used Internet protocols. It is a non-interactive commandline tool, so it may easily be called from scripts, cron jobs, terminals without Xsupport, etc.

Wget has many features to make retrieving large files or mirroring entire web or FTP sites easy, including:

Can resume aborted downloads, using REST and RANGE
Can use filename wild cards and recursively mirror directories
NLS-based message files for many different languages
Optionally converts absolute links in downloaded documents to relative, so that downloaded documents may link to each other locally
Runs on most UNIX-like operating systems as well as Microsoft Windows
Supports HTTP and SOCKS proxies
Supports HTTP cookies
Supports persistent HTTP connections
Unattended / background operation
Uses local file timestamps to determine whether documents need to be re-downloaded when mirroring
GNU wget is distributed under the GNU General Public License.

News

The latest stable version of Wget is 1.8.2. This release fixes several bugs found in 1.8.1 and, more importantly, changes the license to allow linking Wget with the OpenSSL library. This was important to allow Debian and other distributions to distribute Wget binaries without legal hassle.

Downloading GNU wget

The main distribution point for Wget is the GNU software archive. Please choose a mirror site close to you. The master directory is ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/wget/.

Microsoft Windows binaries are available from SunSITE FTP server at ftp://sunsite.dk/projects/wget/windows/ or http://space.tin.it/computer/hherold/ and have been kindly provided by Heiko Herold. An MS-DOS binary designed to be used under plain DOS with a packet driver has been made available by Doug Kaufman. It is available from http://www.rahul.net/dkaufman/. Antinode.org offers a VMS port of Wget.

The latest development source for Wget is always available via anonymous CVS. The source and binary versions of the current development sources patched for compilation in the MS Windows environment are made available by Heiko Herold as well and are available from the URLs mentioned above.

Documentation

As of this writing, the documentation for Wget 1.5.3 is available in all common formats from www.gnu.org. Hopefully this will be updated to use Wget 1.8's documentation file soon.

Documentation for Wget 1.5.2 in Windows help format is available from SunSITE Denmark's FTP server along with a copy of makeinfo for Win32, which is used to build the Windows help file.

Mailing lists

The Wget mailing lists are kindly hosted at SunSITE Denmark thanks to Karsten Thygesen. They are run using the ezmlm listserver. To subscribe to them, send an email to list_name[email protected]. For instance, to subscribe to the wget-patches list send an empty mail to:

[email protected]

To post to a list, send your email to list_name@sunsite.dk. The lists are open for posting by non-subscribers. If you send a post to the list and you're not subscribed, please include a note that you'd like to be cc'd in replies to your post. Otherwise people will assume you are subscribed and will delete your address when replying so as not to send you two copies of their posts.

For back posts, send an email to list_name-get.first_last@sunsite.dk. The mail server limits the number of returned back posts to 100, so requesting more will actually return you only posts in range first - first+99. For instance, sending an email to the following address will retrieve posts 3500 to 3517:

[email protected]

To unsubscribe to a list, send an email to list_name[email protected]. For more information on list commands, send an email to list_name[email protected].

Following mailing lists that deal with Wget are run at SunSITE:

wget

This is the main Wget discussion list. Currently the Wget bug reporting address, [email protected], simply forwards to this list.

In addition to the above-described ezmlm commands for getting old posts, there are archives of the main Wget list at:

http://fly.cc.fer.hr/archive/wget

http://www.mail-archive.com/wget%40sunsite.dk/

http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/409/

The wget list is bidirectionally gatewayed to sunsite.wget, a local newsgroup on sunsite.dk.

wget-patches

If you're submitting a patch to Wget to fix a bug or add a feature, please send it to this list. For more information, please read the Wget Development section.

wget-cvs

Posts to this list are automatically generated. Each time a developer commits CVS sources, an email is sent to this list with the files, versions, and the comment used when committing. People very interested in the development of Wget can get a detailed play-by-play by subscribing to this list.

wget-website-cvs

This is just like the wget-cvs list, but for the wget-website CVS project rather than the wget project.

Add-ons

Several people have contributed to Wget and maintain their own web pages:

Antonio Rosella has written a Wget Gateway, to allow usage of a socksified Wget behind a firewall.
Lachlan Cranswick has a very nice page with a lot of Wget tips and goodies, especially shell scripts available for setting up Wget and auto mirroring.
A grafical user interface for Wget on MS Windows has been developed by Jens Roesner and is available from http://www.jensroesner.de/wgetgui/.

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Updated: $Id: index.html,v 1.34 2002/05/29 17:46:49 hniksic Exp $