I searched for some time for a utility that would let me mirror a remote http site to my hard drive with Windows 95. While there are several utilities to do this, I couldn't find any that I liked. Specifically, I wanted to be able to do it from the command line so that I could call it from a script, and I wanted duplicate files on my local drive for subsequent processing by another application. When I found wget for the unix environment, I decided to port it to Windows.

The unix version is available at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/.

The most recent version I compiled is wgetwin-1_5_3_1-binary.zip. Version 1.5.3 of wget compiles cleanly for windows. To compile it yourself, you will also need to get wget-1.5.3.tar.gz. This 1.5.3.1 includes some additional changes to allow downloading of URLs that have '?' or '*' in their name. This compile was created on July 1, 1999.

WGETRC file...
To set up a .wgetrc file under windows, you have two choices

• Set an environment variable called "WGETRC" which points to the full pathname of your wgetrc file
• Set an environment variable called "HOME" (if it doesn't already exist) pointing to a directory. Put your wgetrc file in this directory, and call it 'wgetrc'

Heiko Herold has been diligently providing updated wget binaries for the windows platform as changes to the wget source archive are available. You can almost surely find a newer version of wget than I have available here. See http://www.geocities.com/heiko_herold/.

Darko Budor did some work porting 1.4.5 to windows. His page (including a 1.4.5 binary) is at http://diana.zesoi.fer.hr/~dbudor/wget/.

Lachlan Cranswick has created a compilation of many wget pages, and some good tips for getting wget working well at http://www.dl.ac.uk/CCP/CCP14/mirror/wget.htm . He actually mirrors all the sites there as well, and he's on the European side of the atlantic.

Please don't email me for wget support. Although I've compiled it, I'm only a novice user of it. There is a wget mailing list. It is archived at http://fly.cc.fer.hr/archive/wget. To subscribe to it, send email to [email protected] with the word subscribe as the subject.