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2 Overview

Wget [formerly known as Geturl] 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.

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), unlike most of the Web browsers, which require constant user's presence, which is a great hindrance when transfering a lot of data.

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.

Wget is capable of descending recursively (See section 5 Recursive Retrieval) through the structure of HTML documents and FTP directory trees, making locally 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 9.6 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 supports PROXY servers, to lighten the network load and to speed up retrieval. If you are behind a firewall and have the socks library installed, you can build a socks-aware Wget to reach the net behind the firewall.

The retrieval is conveniently traced with printing dots, each dot by default representing one kilobyte of data received. Builtin features offer mechanisms to tune which links you wish to follow (See section 6 Following Links).

Most of the features are fully configurable, either through command line options (See section 3 Invoking), or via the initialization file `.wgetrc' (See section 7 Startup File). Wget allows you to define global startup files (`/usr/local/lib/wgetrc' by default) for site settings.


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