WGET2(1)

✨ WGET2(1) — GNU Wget2 2.3.0 ✨

okay bestie, gather round, because we're about to talk about GNU Wget2 and honestly? she's iconic. 💅

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🌸 NAME 🌸

Wget2 — a recursive metalink/file/website downloader. she downloads. she recurses. she slays. 💖

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

wget2 [options]... [URL]...

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

GNU Wget2 is a free utility for non-interactive download of files from the Web. no cap. It supports HTTP and HTTPS protocols, and it can also retrieve stuff through HTTP(S) proxies. 🫶

Wget2 is non-interactive, which means she can work in the background while you're literally not even logged on. so you can start a retrieval, disconnect from the system, and let Wget2 finish the whole thing by herself. main character energy fr fr. by contrast, most web browsers need you sitting there the entire time watching them, which is a huge hindrance when you're transferring a lot of data. not us though. 🙈

Wget2 can follow links in HTML, XHTML, CSS, RSS, Atom and sitemap files to create local versions of remote web sites, fully recreating the directory structure of the original site. this is sometimes called recursive downloading. while doing that, Wget2 respects the Robot Exclusion Standard (/robots.txt). and she can be instructed to convert the links in downloaded files to point at the local files, for offline viewing. the way she just does that. 💅

Wget2 has been designed for robustness over slow or unstable network connections; if a download fails due to a network problem, it will keep retrying until the whole file has been retrieved. and if the server supports partial downloads, it may continue the download from where it left off. resilient queen. 👑

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💖 OPTIONS 💖

🎀 Option Syntax 🎀

Every option has a long form and sometimes also a short one. long options are more convenient to remember, but take time to type (typing is a lot, i know 😭). you may freely mix different option styles. so you may write:

wget2 -r --tries=10 https://example.com/ -o log

The space between the option accepting an argument and the argument may be omitted. so instead of -o log you can write -olog. ✨

You may put several options that do not require arguments together, like:

wget2 -drc <URL>

This is equivalent to:

wget2 -d -r -c <URL>

Since the options can be specified after the arguments, you may terminate them with --. so the following will try to download URL -x, reporting failure to log:

wget2 -o log -- -x

The options that accept comma-separated lists all respect the convention that prepending --no- clears its value. this can be useful to clear the .wget2rc settings. for instance, if your .wget2rc sets exclude-directories to /cgi-bin, the following example will first reset it, and then set it to exclude /priv and /trash. you can also clear the lists in .wget2rc.

wget2 --no-exclude-directories -X /priv,/trash

Most options that do not accept arguments are boolean options, so named because their state can be captured with a yes-or-no ("boolean") variable. a boolean option is either affirmative or negative (beginning with --no-). all such options share several properties. 💅

Affirmative options can be negated by prepending the --no- to the option name; negative options can be negated by omitting the --no- prefix. this might seem superfluous — like, if the default for an affirmative option is to not do something, then why provide a way to explicitly turn it off? 🙈 but the startup file may in fact change the default. for instance, using timestamping = on in .wget2rc makes Wget2 download updated files only. using --no-timestamping is the only way to restore the factory default from the command line. iykyk.

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⭐ Basic Startup Options ⭐

• -V, --version — Display the version of Wget2. gotta know which queen you're dealing with. 👑
• -h, --help — Print a help message describing all of Wget2's command-line options.
• -b, --background — Go to background immediately after startup. if no output file is specified via the -o, output is redirected to wget-log. she's going ✨elsewhere✨.
• -e, --execute=command — Execute command as if it were a part of .wget2rc. a command thus invoked will be executed after the commands in .wget2rc, thus taking precedence over them. if you need to specify more than one wget2rc command, use multiple instances of -e.
• --hyperlink — Hyperlink names of downloaded files so that they can be opened from the terminal by clicking on them. only a few terminal emulators currently support hyperlinks. enable this option if you know your terminal supports hyperlinks. 🖱️✨

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🌈 Logging and Input File Options 🌈

• -o, --output-file=logfile — Log all messages to logfile. the messages are normally reported to standard error.
• -a, --append-output=logfile — Append to logfile. this 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 Wget2 if it does not work properly. your system administrator may have chosen to compile Wget2 without debug support, in which case -d will not work. please note that compiling with debug support is always safe — Wget2 compiled with the debug support will not print any debug info unless requested with -d.
• -q, --quiet — Turn off Wget2's output. 🤫
• -v, --verbose — Turn on verbose output, with all the available data. the default output is verbose. (she's a talker by default, and honestly? same.)
• -nv, --no-verbose — Turn off verbose without being completely quiet (use -q for that), which means that error messages and basic information still get printed.
• --report-speed=type — Output bandwidth as type. the only accepted values are bytes (which is set by default) and bits. this option only works if --progress=bar is also set.
• -i, --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 -.

If this function is used, no URLs need be present on the command line. if there are URLs both on the command line and in an input file, those on the command lines will be the first ones to be retrieved. file is expected to contain one URL per line, except one of the --force- options specifies a different format.

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 you specify --force-css, the document will be regarded as CSS.

If you specify --force-sitemap, the document will be regarded as XML sitemap.

If you specify --force-atom, the document will be regarded as Atom Feed.

If you specify --force-rss, the document will be regarded as RSS Feed.

If you specify --force-metalink, the document will be regarded as Metalink description.

If you have problems with relative links, you should use --base=url on the command line.

• -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.
• --force-css — Read and parse the input file as CSS. this enables you to retrieve links from existing CSS files on your local disk. you will need --base to handle relative links correctly.
• --force-sitemap — Read and parse the input file as sitemap XML. this enables you to retrieve links from existing sitemap files on your local disk. you will need --base to handle relative links correctly.
• --force-atom — Read and parse the input file as Atom Feed XML. this enables you to retrieve links from existing Atom Feed files on your local disk. you will need --base to handle relative links correctly.
• --force-rss — Read and parse the input file as RSS Feed XML. this enables you to retrieve links from existing RSS Feed files on your local disk. you will need --base to handle relative links correctly.
• --force-metalink — Read and parse the input file as Metalink. this enables you to retrieve links from existing Metalink files on your local disk. you will need --base to handle relative links correctly.
• -B, --base=URL — 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 a --force... option, or when the input file was fetched remotely from a server describing it as HTML, CSS, Atom or RSS). this 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 https://example.com/bar/a.html for URL, and Wget2 reads ../baz/b.html from the input file, it would be resolved to https://example.com/baz/b.html. ✨ math? no, resolution. 🧚

• --config=FILE — Specify the location of configuration files you wish to use. if you specify more than one file, either by using a comma-separated list or several --config options, these files are read in left-to-right order. the files given in $SYSTEM_WGET2RC and ($WGET2RC or ~/.wget2rc) are read in that order and then the user-provided config file(s). if set, $WGET2RC replaces ~/.wget2rc.

--no-config empties the internal list of config files. so if you want to prevent reading any config files, give --no-config on the command line.

--no-config followed by --config=file just reads file and skips reading the default config files.

Wget will attempt to tilde-expand filenames written in the configuration file on supported platforms. to use a file that starts with the character literal ~, use "./~" or an absolute path.

• --rejected-log=logfile [Not implemented yet] — Logs all URL rejections to logfile as comma separated values. the values include the reason of rejection, the URL and the parent URL it was found in.
• --local-db — Enables reading/writing to local database files (default: on).

These are the files for --hsts, --hpkp, --ocsp, etc.

With --no-local-db you can switch reading/writing off, e.g. useful for testing.

This option does not influence the reading of config files.

• --stats-dns=[FORMAT:]FILE — Save DNS stats in format FORMAT, in file FILE.

FORMAT can be human or csv. - is shorthand for stdout and h is shorthand for human.

The CSV output format is

Hostname,IP,Port,Duration

Duration is given in milliseconds.

• --stats-tls=[FORMAT:]FILE — Save TLS stats in format FORMAT, in file FILE.

FORMAT can be human or csv. - is shorthand for stdout and h is shorthand for human.

The CSV output format is

Hostname,TLSVersion,FalseStart,TFO,Resumed,ALPN,HTTPVersion,Certificates,Duration

TLSVersion can be 1,2,3,4,5 for SSL3, TLS1.0, TLS1.1, TLS1.2 and TLS1.3. -1 means 'None'. FalseStart whether the connection used TLS False Start. -1 if not applicable. TFO whether the connection used TCP Fast Open. -1 is TFO was disabled. Resumed whether the TLS session was resumed or not. ALPN is the ALPN negotiation string.

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bestie we are SO not done yet, there's more coming 💖

HTTPVersion is 0 for HTTP 1.1 and 1 is for HTTP 2.0.

Certificates is the size of the server's certificate chain.

Duration is given in milliseconds.

• --stats-ocsp=[FORMAT:]FILE — drops all your OCSP stats into file FILE, written in format FORMAT 💅

FORMAT can be human or csv. The character - is shorthand for stdout, and h is shorthand for human.

The CSV output format is

Hostname,Stapling,Valid,Revoked,Ignored

• Stapling — whether an OCSP response was stapled or not.
• Valid — how many server certificates were valid regarding OCSP.
• Revoked — how many server certificates were revoked regarding OCSP.
• Ignored — how many server certificates had been ignored or OCSP responses missing.

• --stats-server=[FORMAT:]FILE — saves your Server stats in format FORMAT, in file FILE ✨

FORMAT can be human or csv. Again, - is shorthand for stdout and h is shorthand for human.

The CSV output format is

Hostname,IP,Scheme,HPKP,NewHPKP,HSTS,CSP

• Scheme — 0, 1, 2 mean None, http, https.
• HPKP — values 0, 1, 2, 3 mean 'No HPKP', 'HPKP matched', 'HPKP doesn't match', 'HPKP error'.
• NewHPKP — whether server sent HPKP (Public-Key-Pins) header.
• HSTS — whether server sent HSTS (Strict-Transport-Security) header.
• CSP — whether server sent CSP (Content-Security-Policy) header.

• --stats-site=[FORMAT:]FILE — saves Site stats in format FORMAT, in file FILE 🦋

FORMAT can be human or csv. - is shorthand for stdout, h is shorthand for human, you know the drill bestie.

The CSV output format is

ID,ParentID,URL,Status,Link,Method,Size,SizeDecompressed,TransferTime,ResponseTime,Encoding,Verification

• ID — unique ID for a stats record.
• ParentID — ID of the parent document, relevant for --recursive mode.
• URL — URL of the document.
• Status — HTTP response code or 0 if not applicable.
• Link — 1 means 'direkt link', 0 means 'redirection link'.
• Method — 1, 2, 3 mean GET, HEAD, POST request type.
• Size — size of downloaded body (theoretical value for HEAD requests).
• SizeDecompressed — size of decompressed body (0 for HEAD requests).
• TransferTime — ms between start of request and completed download.
• ResponseTime — ms between start of request and first response packet.
• Encoding — 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 mean server side compression was 'identity', 'gzip', 'deflate', 'lzma/xz', 'bzip2', 'brotli', 'zstd', 'lzip'
• Verification — PGP verification status. 0, 1, 2, 3 mean 'none', 'valid', 'invalid', 'bad', 'missing'.

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🌈 Download Options 🌈

• --bind-address=ADDRESS — when wget2 is out here making client TCP/IP connections, it binds to ADDRESS on the local machine 🫶 ADDRESS can be a hostname or an IP address. Super handy if your machine is bound to multiple IPs, fr.
• --bind-interface=INTERFACE — when making client TCP/IP connections, bind to INTERFACE on the local machine 🌸 INTERFACE may be given as the name of a Network Interface. This one's a lifesaver if your machine has multiple Network Interfaces. But — and this is important — the option only works when wget2 is run with elevated privileges (on GNU/Linux: root / sudo or sudo setcap cap_net_raw+ep <path to wget|wget2>) 👑
• -t, --tries=number — sets the number of tries to number 🔁 Say 0 or inf for infinite retrying (iconic, chaotic, love that for you). The default is to retry 20 times, except for fatal errors like "connection refused" or "not found" (404), which are not retried at all.
• --retry-on-http-error=list — give it a comma-separated list of HTTP codes, and Wget2 will retry the download when it hits one 💅 The elements of the list may contain wildcards. If an HTTP code starts with the character ! it won't be downloaded. This is the move when you're trying to download something with exceptions. Like, say you want to retry every failed download as long as the error code isn't 404:

wget2 --retry-on-http-error=*,\!404 https://example.com/

Please keep in mind that "200" is the only forbidden code. If it's included on the status list, Wget2 will ignore it. The max number of download attempts is given by the --tries option.

• -O, --output-document=file — the documents will not be written to their appropriate files 🫢 instead they all get concatenated together and written to file. If - is used as file, documents will be printed to standard output, which disables link conversion. Use ./- to print to a file literally named -. To not get Wget2 status messages mixed with file content, use -q in combination with -O- (this is different to how Wget 1.x behaves, just so you know).

Using -r or -p with -O may not work as you expect: Wget2 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. Periodt.

A combination with -nc is only accepted if the given output file does not exist.

When used along with the -c option, Wget2 will attempt to continue downloading the file whose name is passed to the option, irrespective of whether the actual file already exists on disk or not. This lets users download a file with a temporary name alongside the actual file. Cute, right?

Note that a combination with -k is only permitted when downloading a single document, since in that case it will just convert all relative URIs to external ones; -k makes no sense for multiple URIs when they're all being downloaded to a single file; -k can be used only when the output is a regular file.

Compatibility-Note: Wget 1.x used to treat -O as analogous to shell redirection. Wget2 does not handle the option similarly. So the file will not always be newly created. The file's timestamps will not be affected unless it is actually written to. As a result, both -c and -N options are now supported in conjunction with this option 🎀

• -nc, --no-clobber — okay so, if a file is downloaded more than once in the same directory, Wget2's behavior depends on a few options, including -nc 💀 In certain cases the local file will be clobbered, or overwritten, upon repeated download. In other cases it will be preserved.

When running Wget2 without -N, -nc, -r, or -p, 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. (This is also the behavior with -nd, even if -r or -p are in effect.) Use --keep-extension to use an alternative file naming pattern.

When -nc is specified, this behavior is suppressed, and Wget2 will refuse to download newer copies of file. Therefore, ""no-clobber"" is actually 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 prevented. The way that the name lies to you 😭

When running Wget2 with -r or -p, but without -N, -nd, or -nc, re-downloading a file will result in the new copy simply 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.

When running Wget2 with -N, with or without -r or -p, the decision as to whether or not to download a newer copy of a file depends on the local and remote timestamp and size of the file. -nc may not be specified at the same time as -N 🚫

A combination with -O/--output-document is only accepted if the given output file does not exist.

Note that when -nc is specified, files with the suffixes .html or .htm will be loaded from the local disk and parsed as if they had been retrieved from the Web.

• --backups=backups — before (over)writing a file, back up an existing file by adding a .1 suffix to the file name 🎀 Such backup files are rotated to .2, .3, and so on, up to backups (and lost beyond that). Gone but never forgotten, I guess.
• -c, --continue — continues getting a partially-downloaded file 🔥 This is useful when you want to finish up a download started by a previous instance of Wget2, or by another program. For instance:

wget2 -c https://example.com/tarball.gz

If there is a file named tarball.gz in the current directory, Wget2 will assume that it is the first portion of the remote file, and will ask the server to continue the retrieval from an offset equal to the length of the local file.

Note that you don't need to specify this option if you just want the current invocation of Wget2 to retry downloading a file should the connection be lost midway through. That's the default behavior, bestie 💖 -c only affects resumption of downloads started prior to this invocation of Wget2, and whose local files are still sitting around.

Without -c, the previous example would just download the remote file to tarball.gz.1, leaving the truncated tarball.gz file alone.

If you use -c on a non-empty file, and it turns out that the server does not support continued downloading, Wget2 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. Just delete it. Let it go ✨

If you use -c on a file which is of equal size as the one on the server, Wget2 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 side of the coin, 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 wget2 -c to download just the new portion that's been appended to a data collection or log file.

However — and hear me out — 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 💀 Wget2 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.

Another instance where you'll get a garbled file if you try to use -c is if you have a lame HTTP proxy that inserts a "transfer interrupted" string into the local file. In the future a "rollback" option may be added to deal with this case.

Note that -c only works with HTTP servers that support the "Range" header.

• --start-pos=OFFSET — starts downloading at zero-based position OFFSET 🌸 The offset may be expressed in bytes, kilobytes with the k suffix, or megabytes with the m suffix, etc.

--start-pos has higher precedence over --continue. When --start-pos and --continue are both specified, Wget2 will emit a warning then proceed as if --continue was absent.

Server support for continued download is required, otherwise --start-pos cannot help. See -c for details. (Like, the server has to actually agree to resume, bestie, or nothing happens 💀)

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• --progress=type — pick what kind of progress indicator you want, girlie. The supported types are none and bar.

Type bar draws an ASCII progress bar graphic (a.k.a. the "thermometer" display) that shows you the status of the retrieval. 🌡️

The default is bar.

The progress bar gets disabled when output is redirected to a logfile (-o). Use --force-progress to force the progress bar even when there's a logfile.

The type dot is currently not supported, but it won't trigger an error, so it doesn't break your wget command lines. (Awkward but polite of it ngl.)

The parameterized types bar:force and bar:force:noscroll will add the effect of --force-progress. These are accepted for better wget compatibility.

• --force-progress — force Wget2 to display the progress bar in any verbosity. 💅

By default, Wget2 only shows the progress bar in verbose mode. But sometimes you want Wget2 to display the progress bar on screen together with other verbosity modes like --no-verbose or --quiet. This is often a desired property when you're invoking Wget2 to download a bunch of small/large files. In that case, Wget2 could simply be invoked with this parameter to get a much cleaner output on the screen. ✨

This option will also force the progress bar to be printed to stderr when used alongside the --output-file option.

• -N, --timestamping — turn on time-stamping. ⏰
• --no-if-modified-since — do not send the If-Modified-Since header in -N mode. Send a preliminary HEAD request instead. This only has effect in -N mode.
• --no-use-server-timestamps — don't set the local file's timestamp to the one on the server.

By default, when a file is downloaded, its timestamps are set to match those from the remote file. This lets you use --timestamping on subsequent invocations of Wget2. However, it's 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 response headers sent by HTTP servers.
• --spider — when invoked with this option, Wget2 will behave as a Web spider, which means it will not download the pages, just check that they're there. For example, you can use Wget2 to check your bookmarks:

wget2 --spider --force-html -i bookmarks.html

This feature needs much more work for Wget2 to get close to the functionality of real web spiders. 🕷️ (It's giving "spider in training," fr fr.)

• -T seconds, --timeout=seconds — set the network timeout to seconds seconds. This is equivalent to specifying --dns-timeout, --connect-timeout, and --read-timeout, all at the same time. ⏳

When interacting with the network, Wget2 can check for timeout and abort the operation if it takes too long. This prevents anomalies like hanging reads and infinite connects. The only timeout enabled by default is a 900-second read timeout. Setting a timeout to 0 disables it altogether. Unless you know what you're doing, it's best not to change the default timeout settings. 🙈

All timeout-related options accept decimal values, as well as subsecond values. For example, 0.1 seconds is a legal (though unwise) choice of timeout. Subsecond timeouts are useful for checking server response times or for testing network latency.

• --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. The "time" of this timeout refers to idle time: if, at any point in the download, no data is received for more than the specified number of seconds, reading fails and the download is restarted. This option does not directly affect the duration of the entire download.

Of course, the remote server may choose to terminate the connection sooner than this option requires. The default read timeout is 900 seconds.

• --limit-rate=amount — limit the download speed to amount bytes per second. 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 20KB/s. This is useful when, for whatever reason, you don't want Wget2 to consume the entire available bandwidth. 🐌

This option allows the use of decimal numbers, usually in conjunction with power suffixes; for example, --limit-rate=2.5k is a legal value.

Note that Wget2 implements the limiting by sleeping the appropriate amount of time after a network read that took less time than specified by the rate. Eventually this strategy causes the TCP transfer to slow down to approximately the specified rate. However, it may take some time for this balance to be achieved, so don't be surprised if limiting the rate doesn't work well with very small files.

• -w seconds, --wait=seconds — wait the specified number of seconds between the retrievals. Use of this option is recommended, as it lightens the server load by making the requests less frequent. 💖 Instead of in seconds, the time can be specified in minutes using the m suffix, in hours using the h suffix, or in days using the d suffix.

Specifying a large value for this option is useful if the network or the destination host is down, so that Wget2 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, which see.

• --waitretry=seconds — if you don't want Wget2 to wait between every retrieval, but only between retries of failed downloads, you can use this option. Wget2 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.

By default, Wget2 will assume a value of 10 seconds.

• --random-wait — some web sites may perform log analysis to identify retrieval programs such as Wget2 by looking for statistically significant similarities in the time between requests. This option causes the time between requests to vary between 0.5 and 1.5 ### wait seconds, where wait was specified using the --wait option, in order to mask Wget2's presence from such analysis. 🕵️♀️

A 2001 article in a publication devoted to development on a popular consumer platform provided code to perform this analysis on the fly. Its author suggested blocking at the class C address level to ensure automated retrieval programs were blocked despite changing DHCP-supplied addresses.

The --random-wait option was inspired by this ill-advised recommendation to block many unrelated users from a web site due to the actions of one. 😭

• --no-proxy[=exceptions] — if no argument is given, we try to stay backward compatible with Wget1.x and don't use proxies, even if the appropriate *_proxy environment variable is defined.

If a comma-separated list of exceptions (domains/IPs) is given, these exceptions are accessed without using a proxy. It overrides the no_proxy environment variable.

• -Q quota, --quota=quota — specify download quota for automatic retrievals. The value can be specified in bytes (default), kilobytes (with the k suffix), or megabytes (with the m suffix).

Note that quota will never affect downloading a single file. So if you specify

wget2 -Q10k https://example.com/bigfile.gz

all of the bigfile.gz will be downloaded. The same goes even when several URLs are specified on the command-line. However, quota is respected when retrieving either recursively, or from an input file. Thus you may safely type

wget2 -Q2m -i sites

download will be aborted when the quota is exceeded. 🛑

Setting quota to 0 or to inf unlimits the download quota.

• --restrict-file-names=modes — change which characters found in remote URLs must be escaped during generation of local filenames. Characters that are restricted by this option are escaped, i.e. replaced with %HH, where HH is the hexadecimal number that corresponds to the restricted character. This option may also be used to force all alphabetical cases to be either lower- or uppercase.

By default, Wget2 escapes the characters that are not valid or safe as part of file names on your operating system, as well as control characters that are typically unprintable. This option is useful for changing these defaults — maybe because you're downloading to a non-native partition, or because you want to disable escaping of the control characters, or you want to further restrict characters to only those in the ASCII range of values. 🌈

The modes are a comma-separated set of text values. The acceptable values are unix, windows, nocontrol, ascii, lowercase, and uppercase. The values unix and windows are mutually exclusive (one will override the other), as are lowercase and uppercase. Those last are special cases, as they do not change the set of characters that would be escaped, but rather force local file paths to be converted either to lower- or uppercase. 👑

When unix is specified, Wget2 escapes the character / and the control characters in the ranges 0–31 and 128–159. This is the default on Unix-like operating systems.

When windows is given, Wget2 escapes the characters , |, /, :, ?, ", *, <, >, and the control characters in the ranges 0–31 and 128–159. In addition to this, Wget2 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, a URL that would be saved as www.xemacs.org:4300/search.pl?input=blah in Unix mode would be saved as www.xemacs.org+4300/search.pl@input=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're downloading URLs whose names contain UTF-8 characters, on a system which can save and display filenames in UTF-8 (some possible byte values used in UTF-8 byte sequences fall in the range of values designated by Wget2 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 can be useful when saving filenames whose encoding does not match the one used locally.

• -4, --inet4-only, -6, --inet6-only — bestie, this is you picking a lane and committing. --inet4-only (or the short -4) means Wget2 will ONLY connect to IPv4 hosts — it straight-up ignores AAAA records in DNS and refuses to touch IPv6 addresses even if you put one right there in the URL. Flip it around with --inet6-only / -6 and it only talks IPv6, ignoring A records and IPv4 addresses. neither of these should be needed normally!! by default an IPv6-aware Wget2 just uses whatever address family the host's DNS record says. If DNS hands back both IPv4 and IPv6, Wget2 tries them in sequence until one actually connects. (also peep --prefer-family down below 👀). These are for deliberately forcing IPv4 or IPv6 on dual-family systems — usually to debug stuff or to deal with a network config that's just broken fr. You can only specify ONE of --inet6-only and --inet4-only at the same time, no doing both. And neither option exists if Wget2 was compiled without IPv6 support. periodt.
• --prefer-family=none/IPv4/IPv6 — when you've got a whole menu of addresses to pick from, this makes Wget2 hit the ones from the specified family first. By default the address order DNS gave you is used, no changes, no notes. ✨ This is the move for dodging spurious errors and failed connect attempts when you're reaching hosts that resolve to both IPv6 and IPv4 from an IPv4 network. Example time: www.kame.net resolves to 2001:200:0:8002:203:47ff:fea5:3085 and also to 203.178.141.194. Preferred family "IPv4" → the IPv4 address gets used first. Preferred family "IPv6" → the IPv6 address goes first. Value "none" → DNS order, unchanged, untouched, unbothered. Unlike -4 and -6, this option doesn't block any address family — it only shuffles the order they get accessed in. Also note the reordering here is stable: it does NOT mess with the order of addresses within the same family. The relative order of all IPv4 addresses, and of all IPv6 addresses, stays intact in all cases. 🫶
• --tcp-fastopen — turns on TCP Fast Open (TFO) support (default: off). TFO cuts connection latency by 1 RT on "hot" connections (that's the 2nd+ connection to the same host within a certain amount of time). Currently this works on recent Linux and OSX kernels, on HTTP and HTTPS. The main reasons TFO is off by default: possible user tracking issues, and possible issues with middle boxes that don't support TFO. 😭 This article has way more details about TFO than fits here: https://candrews.integralblue.com/2019/03/the-sad-story-of-tcp-fast-open/
• --dns-cache-preload=file — loads a list of IP / Name tuples into the DNS cache. The format of file is like /etc/hosts: IP-address whitespace Name. This saves you domain name lookup time, which is a genuine bottleneck in some use cases. It can also mimic the use of HOSTALIASES (which is not portable). 💅
• --dns-cache — enables DNS caching (default: on). Normally Wget2 remembers the IP addresses it looked up from DNS so it doesn't have to keep pestering the DNS server for the same (typically small) set of hosts it's retrieving from. Heads up: this cache lives in memory only — a new Wget2 run will contact DNS again, no memory of the past. 😌 However, it's been reported that in some situations caching host names is not desirable, even for the duration of a short-running app like Wget2. With --no-dns-cache Wget2 issues a fresh DNS lookup (more precisely, a new call to gethostbyname or getaddrinfo) every single time it makes a new connection. Please note this option will NOT affect caching that might be done by the resolving library or by an external caching layer, like NSCD.
• --retry-connrefused — treats "connection refused" as a transient error and tries again. Normally Wget2 gives up on a URL when it can't connect, because a failed connection is taken as a sign the server just isn't running at all and retries wouldn't help. This one's for mirroring unreliable sites whose servers like to vanish for short periods. 🙈
• --user=user, --password=password — specify the username user and password password for HTTP file retrieval. This overrides the credential lookup in the .netrc file (--netrc is enabled by default). These parameters can be overridden using the --http-user and --http-password options for HTTP(S) connections. If neither --http-proxy-user nor --http-proxy-password is given, these settings are also taken for proxy authentication.
• --ask-password — prompts for a password on the command line. Overrides the password set by --password (if any). 🔐
• --use-askpass=command — prompts for a user and password using the specified command. Overrides the user and/or password set by --user/--password (if any).
• --no-iri — turns OFF internationalized URI (IRI) support. Use --iri to turn it back on. IRI support is activated by default. ✨ You can set the default state of IRI support using the iri command in .wget2rc, and that setting may be overridden from the command line.
• --local-encoding=encoding — forces Wget2 to use encoding as the default system encoding. This affects how Wget2 converts URLs specified as arguments from locale to UTF-8 for IRI support. Wget2 uses the function nl_langinfo() and then the CHARSET environment variable to get the locale. If it fails, ASCII is used.
• --remote-encoding=encoding — forces Wget2 to use encoding as the default remote server encoding. This affects how Wget2 converts URIs found in files from remote encoding to UTF-8 during a recursive fetch. This option is only useful for IRI support, for the interpretation of non-ASCII characters. For HTTP, remote encoding can be found in the HTTP Content-Type header and in the HTML Content-Type http-equiv meta tag. 🌈
• --input-encoding=encoding — use the specified encoding for the URLs read from --input-file. The default is the local encoding.
• --unlink — forces Wget2 to unlink the file instead of clobbering an existing file. Useful for downloading into a directory full of hardlinks. 🔗
• --cut-url-get-vars — removes HTTP GET variables from URLs. For example main.css?v=123 becomes main.css. Be aware this can have unintended side effects — for example image.php?name=sun becomes image.php. 👀 The cutting happens before the URL gets added to the download queue.
• --cut-file-get-vars — removes HTTP GET variables from filenames. For example main.css?v=123 becomes main.css. Be aware this can have unintended side effects — for example image.php?name=sun becomes image.php. The cutting happens when saving the file, after downloading. File names obtained from a Content-Disposition header are NOT affected by this setting (see --content-disposition), and that can be a solution for this problem. When --trust-server-names is used, the redirection URL is affected by this setting.
• --chunk-size=size — downloads large files in multithreaded chunks. This switch sets the size of the chunks, given in bytes if no other byte multiple unit is specified. By default it's set on 0/off.
• --max-threads=number — sets the maximum number of concurrent download threads for a resource. The default is 5, but if you want more or fewer, this is your girl. 💅
• -s, --verify-sig[=fail|no-fail] — enables PGP signature verification (when not prefixed with no-). When enabled, Wget2 attempts to download and verify PGP signatures against their corresponding files. Any file downloaded that has a content type beginning with application/ will cause Wget2 to request the signature for that file. 🔐 The name of the signature file is computed by appending the extension to the full path of the file that was just downloaded. The extension used is defined by the --signature-extensions option. If the content type for the signature request is application/pgp-signature, Wget2 attempts to verify the signature against the original file. By default, if a signature file can't be found (I.E. the request for it gets a 404 status code) Wget2 will exit with an error code. This behavior can be tuned using the following arguments:
  • fail: this is the default, meaning it's the value you get when you supply the flag without an argument. Indicates that missing signature files will cause Wget2 to exit with an error code.
  • no-fail: this value allows missing signature files. A 404 message will still be issued, but the program will exit normally (assuming no unrelated errors). Additionally, --no-verify-sig disables signature checking altogether — --no-verify-sig does not allow any arguments.
• --signature-extensions — specify the file extensions for signature files, without the leading .. You may specify multiple extensions as a comma separated list. All the provided extensions will be tried simultaneously when looking for the signature file. The default is sig.
• --gnupg-homedir — specifies the gnupg home directory to use when verifying PGP signatures on downloaded files. The default for this is your system's default home directory.
• --verify-save-failed — instructs Wget2 to keep files that don't pass PGP signature validation. The default is to delete files that fail validation. 💀
• --xattr — saves document metadata as "user POSIX Extended Attributes" (default: off). This feature only works if the file system supports it. More info at https://freedesktop.org/wiki/CommonExtendedAttributes. Wget2 currently sets: user.xdg.origin.url, user.xdg.referrer.url, user.mime_type, user.charset. To display the extended attributes of a file (Linux): getfattr -d <file>
• --metalink — follow/process metalink URLs without saving them (default: on). Metalink files describe downloads including mirrors, files, checksums, signatures. This allows chunked downloads, automatically taking the nearest mirrors, preferring the fastest mirrors, and checking the download for integrity. 🔥
• --fsync-policy — enables disk syncing after each write (default: off).
• --http2-request-window=number — set the max number of parallel streams per HTTP/2 connection (default: 30).
• --keep-extension — this option changes the behavior for creating a unique filename if a file already exists. The standard (default) pattern for file names is <filename>.<N>, and the new pattern is <basename>_<N>.<ext>. The idea is to use such files without renaming when the use depends on the extension, like on Windows. This option does not change the behavior of --backups. 🎀

📁 Directory Options 📁

• -nd, --no-directories — okay so bestie, this one says: do not build a whole lil folder tree when you're pulling stuff recursively. Turn this on and every single file just drops into the current directory. And no clobbering either 💅 — if the same name shows up more than once, the filenames get extensions like .n. Cute, right?
• -x, --force-directories — the exact opposite of -nd, no cap. It creates that directory hierarchy even if one wouldn't have been created otherwise. Like, wget2 -x https://example.com/robots.txt will save the downloaded file to example.com/robots.txt. It's giving organized ✨
• -nH, --no-host-directories — turns off the host-prefixed directories. By default, if you run Wget2 with -r https://example.com/, it makes a directory structure starting with example.com/. This option? Disables that whole behavior. Bye 👋
• --protocol-directories — uses the protocol name as a directory component of the local file names. So for example, with this option, wget2 -r https://example.com will save to https/example.com/... instead of just example.com/.... Slay, now you know where it came from 🌈
• --cut-dirs=number — ignores a number of directory components. Lowkey the best way to get fine-grained control over where your recursive retrieval lands. Take, for example, the directory at https://example.com/pub/sub/. If you retrieve it with -r, it'll be saved locally under example.com/pub/sub/. And yeah, the -nH option can remove the example.com/ part, but you're still stuck with pub/sub/. That's exactly where --cut-dirs comes in handy — it makes Wget2 not "see" a number of remote directory components. Here's how it works, fr fr:
  • No options → example.com/pub/sub/
  • --cut-dirs=1 → example.com/sub/
  • --cut-dirs=2 → example.com/
  • -nH → pub/sub/
  • -nH --cut-dirs=1 → sub/
  • -nH --cut-dirs=2 → .

If you just want to get rid of the directory structure entirely, this option is similar to a combination of -nd and -P. BUT — and this is the important part — unlike -nd, --cut-dirs does not lose with subdirectories. For instance, with -nH --cut-dirs=1, a beta/ subdirectory will be placed into sub/beta/, as one would expect. Periodt 💖

• -P prefix, --directory-prefix=*prefix* — sets the directory prefix to prefix. The directory prefix is the directory where all the other files and subdirectories get saved to, i.e. the top of the retrieval tree 🌳. The default is ., the current directory. And if the directory prefix doesn't exist? Don't worry bestie, it will be created 🫶

---

🌐 HTTP Options 🌐

• --default-page=*name* — use name as the default file name when it isn't known (like, for URLs that end in a slash), instead of index.html. Mystery URL? Solved ✨
• --default-http-port=*port* — sets the default port for HTTP URLs (default: 80). This is mainly for testing purposes, just so you know 👑
• --default-https-port=*port* — sets the default port for HTTPS URLs (default: 443). Also mainly for testing purposes, mwah 💜
• -E, --adjust-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 causes the suffix .html to be appended to the local filename. Super useful, for instance, when you're mirroring a remote site that uses .asp pages but you want the mirrored pages to actually be viewable on your stock Apache server. Another good use is downloading CGI-generated materials — a URL like https://example.com/article.cgi?25 will be saved as article.cgi?25.html. Iconic behavior, honestly.

⚠️ Note that filenames changed this way will get re-downloaded every time you re-mirror a site, because Wget2 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).

Wget2 will also ensure that any downloaded files of type text/css end in the suffix .css. And at some point in the future, this option may well be expanded to include suffixes for other types of content, including content types that aren't parsed by Wget. The way that it's just growing 🌱

• --http-user=*user*, --http-password=*password* — specify the user and password for HTTP authentication. Depending on the type of the challenge, Wget will encode them using either the "basic" (insecure 💀), the "digest", or the Windows "NTLM" authentication scheme.

If possible, put your credentials into ~/.netrc (see also --netrc and --netrc-file options) or into .wget2rc. This is far more secure than using the command line, which can be seen by any other user 👀. And if the passwords are really important, do not leave them lying in those files either. Edit the files and delete them after Wget2 has started the download.

In ~/.netrc passwords may be double quoted to allow spaces. Also, escape characters with a backslash if needed. A backslash in a password always needs to be escaped, so use \\ instead of a single \.

Also see --use-askpass and --ask-password for an interactive method to provide your password 🎀

• --http-proxy-user=*user*, --http-proxy-password=*password* — specify the user and password for HTTP proxy authentication. See --http-user for details. Same energy, proxy edition 💅
• --http-proxy=*proxies* — set a comma-separated list of HTTP proxies. The environment variable http_proxy will be overridden. Exceptions can be set via the environment variable no_proxy or via --no-proxy. Got it? Got it 💖
• --https-proxy=*proxies* — set a comma-separated list of HTTPS proxies. The environment variable https_proxy will be overridden. Exceptions can be set via the environment variable no_proxy or via --no-proxy. Twin of the one above, no cap 🌸
• --no-http-keep-alive — turns off the "keep-alive" feature for HTTP(S) downloads. Normally, Wget2 asks the server to keep the connection open so that when you download more than one document from the same server, they get transferred over the same TCP connection. That saves time and reduces the load on the server. This option is useful when, for some reason, persistent (keep-alive) connections just don't work for you — like a server bug, or server-side scripts that can't cope with the connections 😭
• --no-cache — disables the server-side cache. In this case, Wget2 sends the remote server appropriate directives (Cache-Control: no-cache and Pragma: no-cache) to get the file from the remote service rather than returning the cached version. Especially useful for retrieving and flushing out-of-date documents on proxy servers 🧹. Caching is allowed by default, fyi.
• --no-cookies — disables the use of cookies. Cookies are a mechanism for maintaining server-side state: the server sends the client a cookie using the "Set-Cookie" header, and the client responds with the same cookie upon further requests. Since cookies let server owners keep track of visitors and let sites exchange this information, some consider them a breach of privacy 👀. The default is to use cookies; however, storing cookies is not on by default.
• --load-cookies file — loads cookies from file before the first HTTP(S) retrieval. file is a textual file in the format originally used by Netscape's cookies.txt file.

You'll typically use this when mirroring sites that require you to be logged in to access some or all of their content. The login process usually works by the web server issuing an HTTP cookie upon receiving and verifying your credentials; the cookie is then resent by the browser when accessing that part of the site, and so proves your identity.

Mirroring such a site requires Wget2 to send the same cookies your browser sends when communicating with the site. That's what --load-cookies does — just point Wget2 to the location of the cookies.txt file and it'll send the same cookies your browser would send in the same situation. Different browsers keep textual cookie files in different locations:

• "Netscape 4.x." The cookies are in ~/.netscape/cookies.txt.
• "Mozilla and Netscape 6.x." Mozilla's cookie file is also named cookies.txt, located somewhere under ~/.mozilla, in the directory of your profile. The full path usually ends up looking somewhat like ~/.mozilla/default/some-weird-string/cookies.txt.
• "Internet Explorer." You can produce a cookie file Wget2 can use by using the File menu, Import and Export, Export Cookies. This has been tested with Internet Explorer 5; it is not guaranteed to work with earlier versions.
• "Other browsers." If you're using a different browser to create your cookies, --load-cookies will only work if you can locate or produce a cookie file in the Netscape format that Wget2 expects.

If you can't 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 Wget2 to send those cookies, bypassing the "official" cookie support:

wget2 --no-cookies --header "Cookie: <name>=<value>"

There you go, DIY cookie energy 🍪

• --save-cookies file — saves cookies to file before exiting. This will not save cookies that have expired or that have no expiry time (the so-called "session cookies"), but also see --keep-session-cookies. K byeee, expired ones 💀
• --keep-session-cookies — when specified, causes --save-cookies to also save session cookies. Session cookies are normally not saved because they're 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 visit the home page before you can access some pages. With this option, multiple Wget2 runs are considered a single browser session as far as the site is concerned. Main character continuity ✨

Since the cookie file format doesn't normally carry session cookies, Wget2 marks them with an expiry timestamp of 0. Wget2's --load-cookies recognizes those as session cookies, but it might confuse other browsers 😭. Also note that cookies loaded this way 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. Yeah, it's a whole thing.

• --cookie-suffixes=*file* — load the public suffixes used for cookie checking from the given file. Normally, the underlying libpsl loads this data from a system file, or it has the data built in. In some cases you might want to load an updated PSL, e.g. from https://publicsuffix.org/list/public_suffix_list.dat. The PSL allows preventing the setting of "super-cookies" that lead to cookie privacy leakage 🛡️. More details can be found on https://publicsuffix.org/.
• --ignore-length — unfortunately, some HTTP servers (CGI programs, to be more precise) send out bogus "Content-Length" headers, which makes Wget2 go wild, because 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. Yeah. It's giving chaos.

okay so picking up right where we left off on that last one:

with this option, Wget2 will literally ignore the “Content-Length” header as if it never existed 💀 like, girl, we don't know her.

---

• --header=header-line — sends header-line along with all the other headers in every single HTTP request 🫶 The header you give it goes out as-is, which means it has to have the name and the value separated by a colon, and it must not contain newlines. Periodt.

You can stack up more than one extra header by just saying --header more than once, bestie:

wget2 --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2' \
     --header='Accept-Language: hr'        \
       https://example.com/

And if you set an empty string as the header value, that wipes out all the previous user-defined headers you'd set. Clean slate ✨

This option is your main character moment for overriding headers that Wget2 would otherwise generate automatically. Watch this — it tells Wget2 to connect to localhost, but to say example.com in the “Host” header:

wget2 --header="Host: example.com" http://localhost/

• --max-redirect=number — sets the max number of redirections to follow for a resource 🌀 The default is 20, which is usually way more than you'd ever need, but on those occasions where you want to allow more (or fewer), this is the one you reach for.
• --proxy-user=user, --proxy-password=password — [Not implemented, use --http-proxy-password] 🚨 gives the username user and password password for authenticating on a proxy server. Wget2 will encode them using the “basic” authentication scheme.

The security considerations are the same vibe as the ones for --http-password, so keep those in mind too, okay? 🙈

• --referer=url — drops a Referer: url header into the HTTP request 🌸 Super useful for grabbing documents that use server-side processing and assume they're always being fetched by interactive web browsers — the kind that only come out properly when Referer is set to one of the pages that point to them.
• --save-headers — saves the headers the HTTP server sent into the file, sitting in front of the actual contents, with an empty line as the separator 💖
• -U agent-string, --user-agent=agent-string — tells the HTTP server you're agent-string 👑

The HTTP protocol lets clients identify themselves with a “User-Agent” header field. This is how you tell different WWW software apart — usually for statistical purposes, or for tracing protocol violations. Wget normally identifies as Wget/version, where version is the current version number of Wget.

However 😭 some sites are known to pull the "we tailor our output based on the User-Agent info" policy. In theory that's not even a bad idea, but it's been abused by servers denying info to clients that aren't (historically) Netscape or — way more often — Microsoft Internet Explorer. This option lets you change the “User-Agent” line Wget sends out. Ngl, use of this option is discouraged unless you really know what you're doing.

Specifying an empty user agent with --user-agent="" tells Wget2 not to send the “User-Agent” header in HTTP requests at all 🫥

• --post-data=string, --post-file=file — uses POST as the method for all HTTP requests and sends 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.

And in particular-in-particular: --post-file is not for transmitting files as form attachments 🙅‍♀️ those have to show up as “key=value” data (with appropriate percent-coding) just like everything else. Wget2 does not currently support “multipart/form-data” for transmitting POST data; only “application/x-www-form-urlencoded”. And only one of --post-data and --post-file should be specified.

Heads up bestie: wget2 does not require the content to be of the form “key1=value1&key2=value2”, and it doesn't test for it either. Wget2 will simply transmit whatever data you hand it. That said, most servers do expect the POST data to be in that format when they're processing HTML Forms.

When you send a POST request with the --post-file option, Wget2 treats the file as a binary file and will send every character in the POST request without stripping trailing newline or formfeed characters 💀 Any other control characters in the text also get sent as-is in the POST request.

Please be aware that Wget2 needs to know the size of the POST data in advance. So the argument to --post-file has to be a regular file — specifying a FIFO or something like /dev/stdin won't work 😭 It's not quite clear how to work around this limitation inherent in HTTP/1.0. Like, HTTP/1.1 does introduce chunked transfer that doesn't require knowing the request length in advance, but a client can't use chunked unless it knows it's talking to an HTTP/1.1 server. And it can't know that until it receives a response, which in turn requires the request to have been completed — a whole chicken-and-egg problem fr fr 🐣

If Wget2 gets redirected after the POST request is completed, its behaviour depends on the response code the server returned. In the case of a 301 Moved Permanently, 302 Moved Temporarily or 307 Temporary Redirect, Wget2 will, in accordance with RFC2616, keep on sending a POST request. If a server wants the client to change the Request method on redirection, it should send a 303 See Other response code.

This example shows how to log in to a server using POST and then go on to download the pages you want, presumably ones only authorized users can get:

# Log in to the server.  This can be done only once.
wget2 --save-cookies cookies.txt \
     --post-data  'user=foo&password=bar' \
     http://example.com/auth.php

# Now grab the page or pages we care about.
wget2 --load-cookies cookies.txt \
     -p http://example.com/interesting/article.php

If the server is using session cookies to track user authentication, the above will not work, because --save-cookies won't save them (and neither will browsers, so don't feel bad) and the cookies.txt file will be empty 😭 In that case use --keep-session-cookies along with --save-cookies to force saving of session cookies.

• --method=HTTP-Method — for the purpose of RESTful scripting, Wget2 lets you send other HTTP Methods without needing to explicitly set them with --header=Header-Line 💅 Wget2 will use whatever string you pass to it after --method as the HTTP Method to the server. Slay.
• --body-data=Data-String, --body-file=Data-File — must be set when additional data needs to be sent to the server along with the Method specified using --method 📦 --body-data sends string as data, whereas --body-file sends the contents of file. Other than that, they work in exactly the same way.

Currently, --body-file is not for transmitting files as a whole 🙈 Wget2 does not currently support “multipart/form-data” for transmitting data; only “application/x-www-form-urlencoded”. In the future, this may be changed so that wget2 sends the --body-file as a complete file instead of sending its contents to the server. Please be aware that Wget2 needs to know the contents of BODY Data in advance, and hence the argument to --body-file should be a regular file. See --post-file for a more detailed explanation. Only one of --body-data and --body-file should be specified.

If Wget2 is redirected after the request is completed, Wget2 will suspend the current method and send a GET request till the redirection is completed. This holds true for all redirection response codes except 307 Temporary Redirect, which is used to explicitly say that the request method should not change. Another exception is when the method is set to “POST”, in which case the redirection rules specified under --post-data are followed.

• --content-disposition — if this is set to on, you get experimental (not fully-functional) support for “Content-Disposition” headers 🧪 This can currently result in extra round-trips to the server for a “HEAD” request, and it's known to suffer from a few bugs, which is why it's not currently enabled by default.

It's useful for some file-downloading CGI programs that use “Content-Disposition” headers to describe what the name of a downloaded file should be 🌈

• --content-on-error — if this is set to on, wget2 will not skip the content when the server responds with a http status code that indicates an error 👀
• --save-content-on — takes a comma-separated list of HTTP status codes to save the content for 📝

You can use '*' for ANY. An exclamation mark (!) in front of a code means exception.

Example 1: --save-content-on="*,!404" would save the content on any HTTP status, except for 404.

Example 2: --save-content-on=404 would save the content only on HTTP status 404.

The older --content-on-error behaves like --save-content-on=* ✨

• --trust-server-names — if this is set to on, then on a redirect the last component of the redirection URL will be used as the local file name 🎀 By default it's the last component in the original URL that gets used.
• --auth-no-challenge — if this option is given, Wget2 will send Basic HTTP authentication information (plaintext username and password) for all requests 😳

Use of this option is not recommended, and it's intended only to support some few obscure servers, which never send HTTP authentication challenges but accept unsolicited auth info — say, on top of form-based authentication.

• --compression=TYPE — if this TYPE (identity, gzip, deflate, xz, lzma, br, bzip2, zstd, lzip or any combination of those) is given, Wget2 will set the “Accept-Encoding” header accordingly 🗜️ --no-compression means no “Accept-Encoding” header at all. To set “Accept-Encoding” to a custom value, use --no-compression in combination with --header="Accept-Encoding: xxx".

Compatibility-Note: the none type in Wget 1.X has the same meaning as the identity type in Wget2 👑

• --download-attr=[strippath|usepath] — the download HTML5 attribute may specify (or better: suggest) a file name for the href URL in a and area tags. This option tells Wget2 to make use of that file name when saving 💾 The two possible values are strippath — to strip the path from the file name — and this is the default.

The value usepath takes the file name as including the directory.

⚠️ This is very dangerous and we can't stress enough not to use it on untrusted input or servers! Only use this if you really trust the input or the server. Like, actually trust it.

✨ HTTPS (SSL/TLS) Options ✨

okay bestie, gather round, because this whole cluster is about encrypted downloads 🔒 and here's the tea: to do HTTPS at all, Wget2 has to be compiled with an external SSL library. The current default is GnuTLS. On top of that, Wget2 also supports HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security). And if Wget2 was compiled without SSL support? Yeah. None of these options are available. They simply do not exist. 💀

---

• --secure-protocol=protocol — picks which secure protocol you're rolling with (default: auto).

Legal values are auto, SSLv3, TLSv1, TLSv1_1, TLSv1_2, TLSv1_3 and PFS. That's the whole guest list, no plus-ones.

If auto is used, the TLS library's default is used. Low effort, fully valid, iconic.

Specifying SSLv3 forces the use of the SSL3. This is useful when talking to old and buggy SSL server implementations that make it hard for the underlying TLS library to choose the correct protocol version. Vintage-tech energy, handle with care 🫶

Specifying PFS enforces the use of the so-called Perfect Forward Security cipher suites. In short, PFS adds security by creating a one-time key for each TLS connection. It has a bit more CPU impact on client and server. We use known to be secure ciphers (e.g. no MD4) and the TLS protocol. Worth it, honestly ✨

TLSv1 enables TLS1.0 or higher. TLSv1_1 enables TLS1.1 or higher. TLSv1_2 enables TLS1.2 or higher. TLSv1_3 enables TLS1.3 or higher. Climb the ladder however you like.

Any other protocol string is directly given to the TLS library, currently GnuTLS, as a "priority" or "cipher" string. This is for users who know what they are doing. If that is not you, bestie, please stay with the legal values 😭

• --https-only — when you're in recursive mode, only HTTPS links are followed. That's it, that's the whole vibe. 🔐
• --no-check-certificate — this one says: 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. Chaos mode, activated 🙈

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. Yeah, it's strict, and yes, 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.

So if you encounter "certificate verification" errors, or ones saying that "common name doesn't match requested host name", you can use this option to bypass the verification and proceed with the download. But only use this option if you are otherwise convinced of the site's authenticity, or if you really don't care about the validity of its certificate. It is almost always a bad idea not to check the certificates when transmitting confidential or important data. fr fr, do not skip this part 💅 For self-signed/internal certificates, you should download the certificate and verify against that instead of forcing this insecure mode. And if you are really sure of not desiring any certificate verification, you can specify --check-certificate=quiet to tell Wget2 to not print any warning about invalid certificates, albeit in most cases this is the wrong thing to do.

• --certificate=file — use the client certificate stored in file. This 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 allows you to provide the private key in a file separate from the certificate. Separation era, we love to see it ✨
• --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 Wget2 looks for CA certificates at the system-specified locations, chosen at OpenSSL installation time.

• --ca-directory=directory — specifies directory containing CA certificates in PEM format. Each file contains one CA certificate, and the file name is based on a hash value derived from the certificate. This is achieved by processing a certificate directory with the "c_rehash" utility supplied with OpenSSL. Using --ca-directory is more efficient than --ca-certificate when many certificates are installed, because it allows Wget2 to fetch certificates on demand. Efficiency queen 👑

Without this option Wget2 looks for CA certificates at the system-specified locations, chosen at OpenSSL installation time.

• --crl-file=file — specifies a CRL file in file. This is needed for certificates that have been revocated by the CAs.
• --random-file=file — [OpenSSL and LibreSSL only] use file as the source of random data for seeding the pseudo-random number generator on systems without /dev/urandom.

On such systems the SSL library needs an external source of randomness to initialize. Randomness may be provided by EGD (see –egd-file below) or read from an external source specified by the user. If this option is not specified, Wget2 looks for random data in $RANDFILE or, if that is unset, in $HOME/.rnd.

If you're getting the "Could not seed OpenSSL PRNG; disabling SSL." error, you should provide random data using some of the methods described above. That error message is your cue, bestie 🎀

• --egd-file=file — [OpenSSL only] use file as the EGD socket. EGD stands for Entropy Gathering Daemon, a user-space program that collects data from various unpredictable system sources and makes it available to other programs that might need it. Encryption software, such as the SSL library, needs sources of non-repeating randomness to seed the random number generator used to produce cryptographically strong keys. Chaotic good energy, honestly 🎲

OpenSSL allows the user to specify his own source of entropy using the "RAND_FILE" environment variable. If this variable is unset, or if the specified file does not produce enough randomness, OpenSSL will read random data from EGD socket specified using this option.

If this option is not specified (and the equivalent startup command is not used), EGD is never contacted. EGD is not needed on modern Unix systems that support /dev/urandom. So like, mostly a legacy situation 💀

• --hsts — Wget2 supports HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security, RFC 6797) by default. Use --no-hsts to make Wget2 act as a non-HSTS-compliant UA. As a consequence, Wget2 would ignore all the "Strict-Transport-Security" headers, and would not enforce any existing HSTS policy.
• --hsts-file=file — by default, Wget2 stores its HSTS data in $XDG_DATA_HOME/wget/.wget-hsts or, if XDG_DATA_HOME is not set, in ~/.local/share/wget/.wget-hsts. You can use --hsts-file to override this.

Wget2 will use the supplied file as the HSTS database. Such file must conform to the correct HSTS database format used by Wget. If Wget2 cannot parse the provided file, the behaviour is unspecified. ⚠️ no cap

To disable persistent storage use --no-hsts-file.

The Wget2's HSTS database is a plain text file. Each line contains an HSTS entry (ie. a site that has issued a "Strict-Transport-Security" header and that therefore has specified a concrete HSTS policy to be applied). Lines starting with a dash ("#") are ignored by Wget. Please note that in spite of this convenient human-readability hand-hacking the HSTS database is generally not a good idea. So like, just because you can hand-edit it does not mean you should 🫶

An HSTS entry line consists of several fields separated by one or more whitespace:

<hostname> SP [<port>] SP <include subdomains> SP <created> SP <max-age>

The hostname and port fields indicate the hostname and port to which the given HSTS policy applies. The port field may be zero, and it will, in most of the cases. That means that the port number will not be taken into account when deciding whether such HSTS policy should be applied on a given request (only the hostname will be evaluated). When port is different to zero, both the target hostname and the port will be evaluated and the HSTS policy will only be applied if both of them match. This feature has been included for testing/development purposes only. The Wget2 testsuite (in testenv/) creates HSTS databases with explicit ports with the purpose of ensuring Wget2's correct behaviour. Applying HSTS policies to ports other than the default ones is discouraged by RFC 6797 (see Appendix B "Differences between HSTS Policy and Same-Origin Policy"). Thus, this functionality should not be used in production environments and port will typically be zero. The last three fields do what they are expected to. The field include_subdomains can either be 1 or 0 and it signals whether the subdomains of the target domain should be part of the given HSTS policy as well. The created and max-age fields hold the timestamp values of when such entry was created (first seen by Wget) and the HSTS-defined value max-age, which states how long should that HSTS policy remain active, measured in seconds elapsed since the timestamp stored in created. Once that time has passed, that HSTS policy will no longer be valid and will eventually be removed from the database.

If you supply your own HSTS database via --hsts-file, be aware that Wget2 may modify the provided file if any change occurs between the HSTS policies requested by the remote servers and those in the file. When Wget2 exits, it effectively updates the HSTS database by rewriting the database file with the new entries. Not me warning you twice, but bestie, heads up 📣

If the supplied file does not exist, Wget2 will create one. This file will contain the new HSTS entries. If no HSTS entries were generated (no "Strict-Transport-Security" headers were sent by any of the servers) then no file will be created, not even an empty one. This behaviour applies to the default database file (~/.wget-hsts) as well: it will not be created until some server enforces an HSTS policy.

Care is taken not to override possible changes made by other Wget2 processes at the same time over the HSTS database. Before dumping the updated HSTS entries on the file, Wget2 will re-read it and merge the changes. Teamwork, slay 🫶

Using a custom HSTS database and/or modifying an existing one is discouraged. For more information about the potential security threats arose from such practice, see section 14 "Security Considerations" of RFC 6797, specially section 14.9 "Creative Manipulation of HSTS Policy Store".

• --hsts-preload — enable loading of a HSTS Preload List as supported by libhsts. (default: on, if built with libhsts).
• --hsts-preload-file=file — if built with libhsts, Wget2 uses the HSTS data provided by the distribution. If there is no such support by the distribution or if you want to load your own file, use this option.

The data file must be in DAFSA format as generated by libhsts' tool hsts-make-dafsa.

• --hpkp — enable HTTP Public Key Pinning (HPKP) (default: on).

So here's the tea on Trust On First Use (TOFU) — it's a whole extra security layer for HTTPS, and it's defined in RFC 7469. 💖

The way it works: the certificate key data from a TLS session you established before gets compared against the current data. And if those two don't match? Bestie, the connection is getting terminated. Periodt. 💀

---

🔐 HPKP & Friends

• --hpkp-file=file — so by default Wget2 keeps its HPKP data in $XDG_DATA_HOME/wget/.wget-hpkp, or if XDG_DATA_HOME isn't set, it goes in ~/.local/share/wget/.wget-hpkp. Use --hpkp-file to override that whole situation.

Wget2 will use whatever file you hand it as the HPKP database. That file has to match the correct HPKP database format that Wget uses. And if Wget2 can't parse the file you gave it? The behaviour is unspecified — which is a fancy way of saying "we don't know what happens, don't do that." 🙈

Wanna kill persistent storage entirely? --no-hpkp-file.

• --tls-resume — turns on TLS Session Resumption, which is disabled by default. ✨

For TLS Session Resumption you need the session data from a previously established TLS session. That's the whole point.

Heads up though — there are several security flaws related to TLS 1.2 session resumption, and they're explained in detail right here: https://web.archive.org/web/20171103231804/https://blog.filippo.io/we-need-to-talk-about-session-tickets/ — go read it, it's giving cautionary tale. 😭

• --tls-session-file=file — by default Wget2 stores its TLS Session data in $XDG_DATA_HOME/wget/.wget-session or, if XDG_DATA_HOME is not set, in ~/.local/share/wget/.wget-session. --tls-session-file lets you override that.

Wget2 uses the supplied file as the TLS Session database. That file must conform to the correct TLS Session database format used by Wget. And if Wget2 can't parse the provided file — say it with me — the behaviour is unspecified. 💅

To disable persistent storage use --no-tls-session-file.

• --tls-false-start — enable TLS False start (default: on). This one's iconic fr fr, it cuts TLS negotiation down by one RT, so HTTPS connections get faster. More details at https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7918. 🔥
• --check-hostname — enable TLS SNI verification (default: on).
• --ocsp — enable OCSP server access so you can check whether the HTTPS server certificate(s) might be revoked (default: off).

Lowkey this procedure is pretty slow — you connect to the server, do an HTTP request, get a response — so Wget2 supports OSCP stapling (where the server sends the OCSP response inside the TLS handshake) and persistent OCSP caching. 🦋

• --ocsp-date — check if the OCSP response is too old. (default: on)
• --ocsp-nonce — allow nonce checking when verifying the OCSP response. (default: on)
• --ocsp-server — set the OCSP server address (default: the OCSP server given in the certificate).
• --ocsp-stapling — enable support for OCSP stapling (default: on).
• --ocsp-file=file — by default Wget2 stores its TLS Session data in $XDG_DATA_HOME/wget/.wget-ocsp or, if XDG_DATA_HOME is not set, in ~/.local/share/wget/.wget-ocsp. --ocsp-file overrides this.

Wget2 will use the supplied file as the OCSP database. That file must conform to the correct OCSP database format used by Wget. If Wget2 cannot parse the provided file, the behaviour is unspecified (yes, again 🙃).

To disable persistent OCSP caching use --no-ocsp-file.

• --dane (experimental) — enable DANE certificate verification (default: off).

So if the server verification fails because CA certificates are missing (like an empty certification pool), this option kicks in and checks the TLSA DNS entries via DANE.

You should have DNSSEC set up to avoid MITM attacks — no cap. Also, the destination host's DNS entries need to be set up for DANE.

Warning: this option or its behavior may change or may be removed without further notice. It's giving limited edition, bestie. 👑

• --http2 — enable the HTTP/2 protocol (default: on).

Wget2 requests HTTP/2 via ALPN. If it's available it's preferred over HTTP/1.1, and up to 30 streams are used in parallel within a single connection. Slay. 💅

• --http2-only — insist on using HTTP/2 and error out if a server doesn't accept it. This is mainly for testing.
• --https-enforce=mode — sets how to deal with URLs that aren't explicitly HTTPS (where the scheme isn't https://) (default: none).
  • mode=none — use HTTP for URLs without a scheme. In recursive operation, the scheme of the parent document is taken as default.
  • mode=soft — try HTTPS first when the scheme is HTTP or not given. On failure, fall back to HTTP.
  • mode=hard — only use HTTPS, no matter if an HTTP scheme is given or not. Do not fall back to HTTP. It's giving no-plan-B energy. 🌈

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🌀 Recursive Retrieval Options 🌀

• -r, --recursive — turn on recursive retrieving. The default maximum depth is 5.
• -l depth, --level=depth — specify the recursion maximum depth level, depth.
• --delete-after — this option tells Wget2 to delete every single file it downloads, after having done so. It's useful for pre-fetching popular pages through a proxy, like:

wget2 -r -nd --delete-after https://example.com/~popular/page/

The -r option is to retrieve recursively, and -nd to not create directories.

Note: when --delete-after is specified, --convert-links is ignored, so .orig files are simply not created in the first place. 🍓

• -k, --convert-links — after the download is complete, convert the links in the document so they're suitable for local viewing. This affects not only the visible hyperlinks but any part of the document that links to external content — embedded images, links to style sheets, hyperlinks to non-HTML content, all of it.

Each link gets changed in one of two ways:

1. The links to files that have been downloaded by Wget2 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 Wget2 will be changed to include the 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 https://example.com/bar/img.gif.

Because of this, local browsing works reliably: if a linked file was downloaded, the link refers to its local name; if it wasn't downloaded, the link refers to its full Internet address instead of being a broken link. And the fact that the former links become relative links means you can move the downloaded hierarchy to another directory. 🎀

Note: only at the end of the download can Wget2 know which links have been downloaded. Because of that, the work done by -k happens at the end of all the downloads.

• --convert-file-only — this one converts only the filename part of the URLs, leaving the rest of the URLs untouched. That filename part is sometimes called the "basename", although we avoid that term here so nobody gets confused.

It works particularly well alongside --adjust-extension, although that coupling is not enforced. It's useful for populating Internet caches with files downloaded from different hosts.

Example: if some link points to //foo.com/bar.cgi?xyz with --adjust-extension asserted, and its local destination is intended to be ./foo.com/bar.cgi?xyz.css, then the link would be converted to //foo.com/bar.cgi?xyz.css. Note that only the filename part got modified. The rest of the URL was left untouched — including the net path (//), which would otherwise be processed by Wget2 and converted to the effective scheme (ie. https://). 💜

• -K, --backup-converted — when converting a file, back up the original version with a .orig suffix. Affects the behavior of -N.
• -m, --mirror — turn on the options suitable for mirroring. This turns on recursion and time-stamping, and sets infinite recursion depth. It is currently equivalent to -r -N -l inf.
• -p, --page-requisites — this option makes Wget2 download all the files necessary to properly display a given HTML page. That includes stuff like inlined images, sounds, and referenced stylesheets. 🫶

Ordinarily, when you download a single HTML page, any requisite documents it might need to display properly are not downloaded. Using -r together with -l can help, but since Wget2 doesn't ordinarily distinguish between external and inlined documents, you're generally left with "leaf documents" that are missing their requisites. 😭

For instance, say document 1.html contains an <IMG> tag referencing 1.gif and an <A> tag pointing to external document 2.html. Say that 2.html is similar but its image is 2.gif and it links to 3.html. Say this continues up to some arbitrarily high number.

If you run:

wget2 -r -l 2 https://<site>/1.html

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 Wget2 is simply counting the number of hops (up to 2) away from 1.html to determine where to stop the recursion. However, with this command:

wget2 -r -l 2 -p https://<site>/1.html

all the above files and 3.html's requisite 3.gif will be downloaded. Similarly,

wget2 -r -l 1 -p https://<site>/1.html

will cause 1.html, 1.gif, 2.html, and 2.gif to be downloaded. One might think that:

wget2 -r -l 0 -p https://<site>/1.html

would download just 1.html and 1.gif, but unfortunately that 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, simply leave off -r and -l:

wget2 -p https://<site>/1.html

Note that Wget2 will behave as if -r had been specified, but only that single page and its requisites will be downloaded. Links from that page to external documents will not be followed. Actually, to download a single page and all its requisites (even if they exist on separate websites), and make sure the lot displays properly locally, this author likes to use a few options in addition to -p:

wget2 -E -H -k -K -p https://<site>/<document>

To finish off this topic, it's worth knowing that Wget2'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 — obsolete option, kept for compatibility with Wget1.x. Wget2 always terminates comments at the first occurrence of -->, just like popular browsers do. 💅
• --robots — enable the Robots Exclusion Standard (default: on).

For each visited domain, follow the rules specified in /robots.txt. You should respect the domain owner's rules and turn this off only for very good reasons. Fr fr, be a good citizen. 🌸

Whether it's enabled or disabled, the robots.txt file is downloaded and scanned for sitemaps. These are lists of pages / files available for download that not necessarily are available via recursive scanning.

This behavior can be switched off by --no-follow-sitemaps.

---

🌈 Recursive Accept/Reject Options 🌈

• -A acclist, --accept=acclist, -R rejlist, --reject=rejlist — hand over comma-separated lists of file name suffixes or patterns you want to accept or reject. Huge caveat bestie: if any of the wildcard characters *, ?, [, ] show up in an element of acclist or rejlist, that element gets treated as a pattern, not a suffix. And in that case you literally have to wrap the pattern in quotes so your shell doesn't go feral and expand it first, like -A "*.mp3" or -A '*.mp3'.
• --accept-regex=urlregex, --reject-regex=urlregex — drop a regular expression to accept or reject file names.
• --regex-type=regextype — pick which flavor of regular expression you're using. Possible types are posix or pcre. Heads up tho: to actually use pcre type, wget2 has to have been compiled with libpcre support.
• --filter-urls — apply the accept and reject filters on the URL before starting a download.
• -D domain-list, --domains=domain-list — set the 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-sitemaps — parse the sitemaps from robots.txt and follow the links. (default: on).

This option is on for recursive downloads whether you specify --robots or -no-robots. Following the URLs found in sitemaps can be switched off with --no-follow-sitemaps.

• --follow-tags=list — Wget2 keeps an internal table of HTML tag / attribute pairs that it considers when it's out here looking for linked documents during a recursive retrieval. If a user only wants a subset of those tags considered, however, they should specify those tags in a comma-separated list with this option.
• --ignore-tags=list — the exact opposite of the --follow-tags option. To skip certain HTML tags when recursively looking for documents to download, list them in a comma-separated list.

Back in the day, this option was the best bet for downloading a single page and its requisites, using a command line like:

wget2 --ignore-tags=a,area -H -k -K -r https://<site>/<document>

However, the author of this option came across a page with tags like <LINK REL="home" HREF="/"> and had the realization that specifying tags to ignore was simply not enough. You can't just tell Wget2 to ignore <LINK>, because then stylesheets will not be downloaded. Now the best bet for downloading a single page and its requisites is the dedicated --page-requisites option. 💅

• --ignore-case — ignore case when matching files and directories. This influences the behavior of -R, -A, -I, and -X options. For example, with this option, -A "*.txt" will match file1.txt, but also file2.TXT, file3.TxT, and so on. The quotes in the example are there to prevent the shell from expanding the pattern.
• -H, --span-hosts — enable spanning across hosts when doing recursive retrieving.
• -L, --relative [Not implemented yet] — follow relative links only. Useful for retrieving a specific home page without any distractions, not even those from the same hosts.
• -I list, --include-directories=list — specify a comma-separated list of directories you wish to follow when downloading. Elements of the list may contain wildcards.

wget2 -r https://webpage.domain --include-directories=*/pub/*/

Please keep in mind that */pub/*/ is the same as /*/pub/*/ and that it matches directories, not strings. Which means */pub doesn't affect files contained at e.g. /directory/something/pub but /pub/* matches every subdir of /pub.

• -X list, --exclude-directories=list — specify a comma-separated list of directories you wish to exclude from download. Elements of the list may contain wildcards.

wget2 -r https://gnu.org --exclude-directories=/software

-I / -X combinations 🧚

Please be aware that the behavior of this combination of flags works slightly different than in wget1.x.

If -I is given first, the default is exclude all. If -X is given first, the default is include all.

Multiple -I/-X options are processed first to last. The last match is relevant.

Example: `-I /pub -X /pub/trash` would download all from /pub/ except from /pub/trash.
Example: `-X /pub -I /pub/important` would download all except from /pub where only /pub/important would be downloaded.

To reset the list (e.g. to ignore -I/-X from .wget2rc files) use --no-include-directories or --no-exclude-directories.

• -np, --no-parent — do not ever ascend to the parent directory when retrieving recursively. This is a genuinely useful option, since it guarantees that only the files below a certain hierarchy will be downloaded.
• --filter-mime-type=list — specify a comma-separated list of MIME types that will be downloaded. Elements of list may contain wildcards. If a MIME type starts with the character ! it won't be downloaded, which is useful when trying to download something with exceptions. If the server doesn't specify the MIME type of a file it will be considered as application/octet-stream. For example, download everything except images:

wget2 -r https://<site>/<document> --filter-mime-type=*,\!image/*

It's also useful to download files that are compatible with an application on your system. For instance, download every file that's compatible with LibreOffice Writer from a website using the recursive mode:

wget2 -r https://<site>/<document> --filter-mime-type=$(sed -r '/^MimeType=/!d;s/^MimeType=//;s/;/,/g' /usr/share/applications/libreoffice-writer.desktop)

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🎀 Plugin Options 🎀

• --list-plugins — print a list of all available plugins and exit.
• --local-plugin=file — load file as a plugin.
• --plugin=name — load a plugin with a given name from the configured plugin directories.
• --plugin-dirs=directories — set plugin directories. directories is a comma-separated list of directories.
• --plugin-help — print the help messages from all loaded plugins.
• --plugin-opt=option — set a plugin specific command line option.

option is in the format <plugin_name>.<option>[=value].

---

🌸 Environment 🌸

Wget2 supports proxies for both HTTP and HTTPS retrievals. The standard way to specify proxy location, which Wget recognizes, is using the following environment variables:

• http_proxy
• https_proxy

If set, the http_proxy and https_proxy variables should contain the URLs of the proxies for HTTP and HTTPS connections respectively.

• no_proxy

This variable should contain a comma-separated list of domain extensions proxy should not be used for. For instance, if the value of no_proxy is .example.com, proxy will not be used to retrieve documents from *.example.com.

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👑 Exit Status 👑

Wget2 may return one of several error codes if it encounters problems.

• 0 — No problems occurred. ✨
• 1 — Generic error code.
• 2 — Parse error. For instance, when parsing command-line options, the .wget2rc or .netrc...
• 3 — File I/O error.
• 4 — Network failure.
• 5 — SSL verification failure.
• 6 — Username/password authentication failure.
• 7 — Protocol errors.
• 8 — Server issued an error response.
• 9 — Public key missing from keyring.
• 10 — A Signature verification failed.

With the exceptions of 0 and 1, the lower-numbered exit codes take precedence over higher-numbered ones, when multiple types of errors are encountered.

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🦋 Startup File 🦋

Sometimes you may wish to permanently change the default behaviour of GNU Wget2. There's a better way to do this than setting an alias in your shell. GNU Wget2 lets you set all options permanently through its startup file, .wget2rc.

While .wget2rc is the main initialization file used by GNU Wget2, it is not a good idea to store passwords in this file. That's because the startup file may be publicly readable or backed up in version control. This is why Wget2 also reads the contents of $HOME/.netrc when required.

The .wget2rc file follows a very similar syntax to the .wgetrc that is read by GNU Wget. It varies in only those places where the command line options vary between Wget1.x and Wget2.

💜 Wget2rc Location 💜

When initializing, Wget2 will attempt to read the "global" startup file, which is located at /usr/local/etc/wget2rc by default (or some prefix other than /usr/local, if Wget2 was not installed there). The global startup file is useful for system administrators to enforce a default policy, such as setting the path to the certificate store, preloading a HSTS list, etc.

Then, Wget2 will look for the user's initialization file. If the user has passed the --config command line option, Wget2 will try to load the file that it points to. If that file does not exist, or if it cannot be read, Wget2 will make no further attempts to read any initialization files.

If the environment variable WGET2RC is set, Wget2 will try to load the file at this location. If the file does not exist, or if it cannot be read, Wget2 will make no further attempts to read an initialization file.

If --config is not passed and WGET2RC is not set, Wget2 will attempt to load the user's initialization file from a location as defined by the XDG Base Directory Specification. It will read the first, and only the first, file it finds from the following locations:

1. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/wget/wget2rc
2. $HOME/.config/wget/wget2rc
3. $HOME/.wget2rc

Having an initialization file at $HOME/.wget2rc is deprecated. If a file is found there, Wget2 will print a warning about it. Support for reading from this file will be removed in the future. 😭

The fact that the user's settings are loaded after the system-wide ones means that in case of a collision, the user's wget2rc overrides the global wget2rc.

🐛 Bugs (yes bestie, we WANT your bug reports) 🐛

You are so welcome to submit bug reports via the GNU Wget2 bug tracker. Like, genuinely, please do. But before you actually hit submit, please try to follow a few simple guidelines, okay? It's giving "help us help you" energy. 🫶

1. Please try to ascertain that the behavior you see really is a bug. If Wget2 crashes, it's a bug. If Wget2 does not behave as documented, it's a bug. If things work strange, but you are not sure about the way they are supposed to work, it might well be a bug, but you might want to double-check the documentation and the mailing lists first. 👀
2. Try to repeat the bug in as simple circumstances as possible. E.g. if Wget2 crashes while downloading:

wget2 -rl0   -kKE -t5 --no-proxy https://example.com -o /tmp/log

...then you should try to see if the crash is repeatable, and if it will occur with a simpler set of options. You might even try to start the download at the page where the crash occurred to see if that page somehow triggered the crash. Sleuth era. 🔍

Also, while I will probably be interested to know the contents of your .wget2rc file, just dumping it into the debug message is probably a bad idea. Instead, you should first try to see if the bug repeats with .wget2rc moved out of the way. Only if it turns out that .wget2rc settings affect the bug, mail me the relevant parts of the file.

3. Please start Wget2 with -d option and send us the resulting output (or relevant parts thereof). If Wget2 was compiled without debug support, recompile it. It is much easier to trace bugs with debug support on. ✨

Note: please make sure to remove any potentially sensitive information from the debug log before sending it to the bug address. The -d won't go out of its way to collect sensitive information, but the log will contain a fairly complete transcript of Wget2's communication with the server, which may include passwords and pieces of downloaded data. Since the bug address is publicly archived, you may assume that all bug reports are visible to the public. 💀 Not the vibe you want, so scrub that log first, bestie.

4. If Wget2 has crashed, try to run it in a debugger, e.g.

gdb `which wget` core

and type "where" to get the backtrace. This may not work if the system administrator has disabled core files, but it is safe to try. 🙈

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👑 Author 👑

Wget2 written by Tim Rühsen tim.ruehsen@gmx.de

Wget 1.x originally written by Hrvoje Nikšić hniksic@xemacs.org

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📜 Copyright 📜

Copyright (C) 2012-2015 Tim Rühsen

Copyright (C) 2015-2026 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".

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And that's a wrap, babe 💖 This was the GNU Wget2 User Manual, aka WGET2(1) — that's the source and the version tag, and yep, she's dated too, so you know this page is a whole mood from a specific moment in time. Go forth and download iconically. 🌈⭐🎀