GNU Wget

Table of Contents

• Introduction to GNU Wget
• News
• Downloading Wget
• The GNU Wget FAQ
• Documentation
• Mailing lists
• Request an Enhancement
• Report a Bug
• Add-ons
• Development of Wget
• Maintainer

Introduction to GNU Wget

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

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

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

News

The latest stable version of Wget is 1.10.2. This release contains fixes for a major security problem: a remotely exploitable buffer overflow vulnerability in the NTLM authentication code. All Wget users are strongly encouraged to upgrade their Wget installation to the last release.

Downloading Wget

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

Binaries built for Microsoft Windows are available courtesy Heiko Herold at http://space.tin.it/computer/hherold/ and have been kindly provided by Heiko Herold. An MS-DOS binary designed to be used under plain DOS with a packet driver has been made available by Doug Kaufman. It is available from http://www.rahul.net/dkaufman/. Antinode.org offers a VMS port of Wget.

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

Documentation

The documentation for wget is available in all common formats. For other manuals, please see http://www.gnu.org/manual/.

Mailing lists

The Wget mailing lists are kindly hosted at SunSITE Denmark thanks to Karsten Thygesen. To subscribe, send an email to list_name-subscribe@sunsite.dk. For instance, to subscribe to the wget-patches list send an empty mail to:

wget-patches-subscribe@sunsite.dk

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

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

wget-get.3500_3517@sunsite.dk

To unsubscribe from a list, send an email to list_name-unsubscribe@sunsite.dk. For more information on list commands, send an email to list_name-help@sunsite.dk.

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

wget

This is the main Wget discussion list. Currently the Wget bug reporting address, bug-wget@gnu.org, simply forwards to this list.

There are archives of the main Wget list at http://www.mail-archive.com/wget%40sunsite.dk/ and http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.wget.general.

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

wget-patches

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

There are archives of the wget-patches list at http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.wget.patches.

Request an Enhancement

If you would like any new feature to be included in future versions of Wget, please send a request to the wget mailing list.

Please remember that development of Wget is a volunteer effort, and you can also contribute to its development. For information about contributing to the GNU Project, please read the How to help GNU document.

Report a Bug

If you think you have found a bug in Wget, then you should send as complete a report as possible to bug-wget@gnu.org.

Add-ons

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

• Lachlan Cranswick has a very nice, but somewhat obsolete page with a lot of tips and goodies, especially shell scripts available for setting up Wget and auto mirroring.
• Gwget is a download manager for the Gnome Desktop based on wget.
• A graphical user interface for Wget on MS Windows has been developed by Jens Roesner and is available from http://www.jensroesner.de/wgetgui/.

Maintainer

GNU Wget is currently maintained by Mauro Tortonesi. The original author of GNU Wget is Hrvoje Nikšić.