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Invoking

By default, Wget is very simple to invoke. The basic syntax is: 

wget [option]... [URL]...

Wget will simply download all the URLs specified on the command line. URL is a Uniform Resource Locator, as defined below.

However, you may wish to change some of the default parameters of Wget. You can do it two ways: permanently, adding the appropriate command to `.wgetrc' (see section Startup File), or specifying it on the command line.

URL Format

URL is an acronym for Uniform Resource Locator. A uniform resource locator is a compact string representation for a resource available via the Internet. Wget recognizes the URL syntax as per RFC1738. This is the most widely used form (square brackets denote optional parts): 

http://host[:port]/directory/file
ftp://host[:port]/directory/file

You can also encode your username and password within a URL: 

ftp://user:password@host/path
http://user:password@host/path

Either user or password, or both, may be left out. If you leave out either the HTTP username or password, no authentication will be sent. If you leave out the FTP username, `anonymous' will be used. If you leave out the FTP password, your email address will be supplied as a default password.(1)

You can encode unsafe characters in a URL as `%xy', xy being the hexadecimal representation of the character's ASCII value. Some common unsafe characters include `%' (quoted as `%25'), `:' (quoted as `%3A'), and `@' (quoted as `%40'). Refer to RFC1738 for a comprehensive list of unsafe characters.

Wget also supports the type feature for FTP URLs. By default, FTP documents are retrieved in the binary mode (type `i'), which means that they are downloaded unchanged. Another useful mode is the `a' (ASCII) mode, which converts the line delimiters between the different operating systems, and is thus useful for text files. Here is an example: 

ftp://host/directory/file;type=a

Two alternative variants of URL specification are also supported, because of historical (hysterical?) reasons and their widespreaded use.

FTP-only syntax (supported by NcFTP): 

host:/dir/file

HTTP-only syntax (introduced by Netscape): 

host[:port]/dir/file

These two alternative forms are deprecated, and may cease being supported in the future.

If you do not understand the difference between these notations, or do not know which one to use, just use the plain ordinary format you use with your favorite browser, like Lynx or Netscape.

Option Syntax

Since Wget uses GNU getopts to process its arguments, every option has a short form and a long form. Long options are more convenient to remember, but take time to type. You may freely mix different option styles, or specify options after the command-line arguments. Thus you may write: 

wget -r --tries=10 http://fly.srk.fer.hr/ -o log

The space between the option accepting an argument and the argument may be omitted. Instead `-o log' you can write `-olog'.

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

wget -drc URL

This is a complete equivalent of: 

wget -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': 

wget -o log -- -x

The options that accept comma-separated lists all respect the convention that specifying an empty list clears its value. This can be useful to clear the `.wgetrc' settings. For instance, if your `.wgetrc' sets exclude_directories to `/cgi-bin', the following example will first reset it, and then set it to exclude `/~nobody' and `/~somebody'. You can also clear the lists in `.wgetrc' (see section Wgetrc Syntax). 

wget -X '' -X /~nobody,/~somebody

Basic Startup Options

`-V'
`--version'
Display the version of Wget.
`-h'
`--help'
Print a help message describing all of Wget'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'.
`-e command'
`--execute command'
Execute command as if it were a part of `.wgetrc' (see section Startup File). A command thus invoked will be executed after the commands in `.wgetrc', thus taking precedence over them.

Logging and Input File Options

`-o logfile'
`--output-file=logfile'
Log all messages to logfile. The messages are normally reported to standard error.
`-a logfile'
`--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 Wget if it does not work properly. Your system administrator may have chosen to compile Wget without debug support, in which case `-d' will not work. Please note that compiling with debug support is always safe--Wget compiled with the debug support will not print any debug info unless requested with `-d'. See section Reporting Bugs, for more information on how to use `-d' for sending bug reports.
`-q'
`--quiet'
Turn off Wget's output.
`-v'
`--verbose'
Turn on verbose output, with all the available data. The default output is verbose.
`-nv'
`--non-verbose'
Non-verbose output--turn off verbose without being completely quiet (use `-q' for that), which means that error messages and basic information still get printed.
`-i file'
`--input-file=file'
Read URLs from file, in which case no URLs need to be 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. The file need not be an HTML document (but no harm if it is)---it is enough if the URLs are just listed sequentially. However, 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.
`-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.
`-B URL'
`--base=URL'
When used in conjunction with `-F', prepends URL to relative links in the file specified by `-i'.

Download Options

`--bind-address=ADDRESS'
When making client TCP/IP connections, bind() to ADDRESS on the local machine. ADDRESS may be specified as a hostname or IP address. This option can be useful if your machine is bound to multiple IPs.
`-t number'
`--tries=number'
Set number of retries to number. Specify 0 or `inf' for infinite retrying.
`-O file'
`--output-document=file'
The documents will not be written to the appropriate files, but all will be concatenated together and written to file. If file already exists, it will be overwritten. If the file is `-', the documents will be written to standard output. Including this option automatically sets the number of tries to 1.
`-nc'
`--no-clobber'
If a file is downloaded more than once in the same directory, Wget'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 Wget without `-N', `-nc', or `-r', 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. When `-nc' is specified, this behavior is suppressed, and Wget 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. When running Wget with `-r', but without `-N' 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 Wget with `-N', with or without `-r', 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 (see section Time-Stamping). `-nc' may not be specified at the same time as `-N'. Note that when `-nc' is specified, files with the suffixes `.html' or (yuck) `.htm' will be loaded from the local disk and parsed as if they had been retrieved from the Web.
`-c'
`--continue'
Continue getting a partially-downloaded file. This is useful when you want to finish up a download started by a previous instance of Wget, or by another program. For instance: 
wget -c ftp://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/ls-lR.Z
If there is a file named `ls-lR.Z' in the current directory, Wget 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 Wget to retry downloading a file should the connection be lost midway through. This is the default behavior. `-c' only affects resumption of downloads started prior to this invocation of Wget, and whose local files are still sitting around. Without `-c', the previous example would just download the remote file to `ls-lR.Z.1', leaving the truncated `ls-lR.Z' file alone. Beginning with Wget 1.7, if you use `-c' on a non-empty file, and it turns out that the server does not support continued downloading, Wget 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. Also beginning with Wget 1.7, if you use `-c' on a file which is of equal size as the one on the server, Wget 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 `wget -c' to download just the new portion that's been appended to a data collection or log file. However, 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. Wget 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 FTP servers and with HTTP servers that support the Range header.
`--progress=type'
Select the type of the progress indicator you wish to use. Legal indicators are "dot" and "bar". The "dot" indicator is used by default. It traces the retrieval by printing dots on the screen, each dot representing a fixed amount of downloaded data. When using the dotted retrieval, you may also set the style by specifying the type as `dot:style'. Different styles assign different meaning to one dot. With the default style each dot represents 1K, there are ten dots in a cluster and 50 dots in a line. The binary style has a more "computer"-like orientation--8K dots, 16-dots clusters and 48 dots per line (which makes for 384K lines). The mega style is suitable for downloading very large files--each dot represents 64K retrieved, there are eight dots in a cluster, and 48 dots on each line (so each line contains 3M). Specifying `--progress=bar' will draw a nice ASCII progress bar graphics (a.k.a "thermometer" display) to indicate retrieval. If the output is not a TTY, this option will be ignored, and Wget will revert to the dot indicator. If you want to force the bar indicator, use `--progress=bar:force'.
`-N'
`--timestamping'
Turn on time-stamping. See section Time-Stamping, for details.
`-S'
`--server-response'
Print the headers sent by HTTP servers and responses sent by FTP servers.
`--spider'
When invoked with this option, Wget will behave as a Web spider, which means that it will not download the pages, just check that they are there. You can use it to check your bookmarks, e.g. with: 
wget --spider --force-html -i bookmarks.html
This feature needs much more work for Wget to get close to the functionality of real WWW spiders.
`-T seconds'
`--timeout=seconds'
Set the read timeout to seconds seconds. Whenever a network read is issued, the file descriptor is checked for a timeout, which could otherwise leave a pending connection (uninterrupted read). The default timeout is 900 seconds (fifteen minutes). Setting timeout to 0 will disable checking for timeouts. Please do not lower the default timeout value with this option unless you know what you are doing.
`-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 h suffix, or in days using d suffix. Specifying a large value for this option is useful if the network or the destination host is down, so that Wget can wait long enough to reasonably expect the network error to be fixed before the retry.
`--waitretry=seconds'
If you don't want Wget to wait between every retrieval, but only between retries of failed downloads, you can use this option. Wget 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. Therefore, a value of 10 will actually make Wget wait up to (1 + 2 + ... + 10) = 55 seconds per file. Note that this option is turned on by default in the global `wgetrc' file.
`--random-wait'
Some web sites may perform log analysis to identify retrieval programs such as Wget by looking for statistically significant similarities in the time between requests. This option causes the time between requests to vary between 0 and 2 * wait seconds, where wait was specified using the `-w' or `--wait' options, in order to mask Wget's presence from such analysis. A recent 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.
`-Y on/off'
`--proxy=on/off'
Turn proxy support on or off. The proxy is on by default if the appropriate environmental variable is defined.
`-Q quota'
`--quota=quota'
Specify download quota for automatic retrievals. The value can be specified in bytes (default), kilobytes (with `k' suffix), or megabytes (with `m' suffix). Note that quota will never affect downloading a single file. So if you specify `wget -Q10k ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/ls-lR.gz', all of the `ls-lR.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 `wget -Q2m -i sites'---download will be aborted when the quota is exceeded. Setting quota to 0 or to `inf' unlimits the download quota.

Directory Options

`-nd'
`--no-directories'
Do not create a hierarchy of directories when retrieving recursively. With this option turned on, all files will get saved to the current directory, without clobbering (if a name shows up more than once, the filenames will get extensions `.n').
`-x'
`--force-directories'
The opposite of `-nd'---create a hierarchy of directories, even if one would not have been created otherwise. E.g. `wget -x http://fly.srk.fer.hr/robots.txt' will save the downloaded file to `fly.srk.fer.hr/robots.txt'.
`-nH'
`--no-host-directories'
Disable generation of host-prefixed directories. By default, invoking Wget with `-r http://fly.srk.fer.hr/' will create a structure of directories beginning with `fly.srk.fer.hr/'. This option disables such behavior.
`--cut-dirs=number'
Ignore number directory components. This is useful for getting a fine-grained control over the directory where recursive retrieval will be saved. Take, for example, the directory at `ftp://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/'. If you retrieve it with `-r', it will be saved locally under `ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/'. While the `-nH' option can remove the `ftp.xemacs.org/' part, you are still stuck with `pub/xemacs'. This is where `--cut-dirs' comes in handy; it makes Wget not "see" number remote directory components. Here are several examples of how `--cut-dirs' option works. 
No options        -> ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/
-nH               -> pub/xemacs/
-nH --cut-dirs=1  -> xemacs/
-nH --cut-dirs=2  -> .

--cut-dirs=1      -> ftp.xemacs.org/xemacs/
...
If you just want to get rid of the directory structure, this option is similar to a combination of `-nd' and `-P'. However, unlike `-nd', `--cut-dirs' does not lose with subdirectories--for instance, with `-nH --cut-dirs=1', a `beta/' subdirectory will be placed to `xemacs/beta', as one would expect.
`-P prefix'
`--directory-prefix=prefix'
Set directory prefix to prefix. The directory prefix is the directory where all other files and subdirectories will be saved to, i.e. the top of the retrieval tree. The default is `.' (the current directory).

HTTP Options

`-E'
`--html-extension'
If a file of type `text/html' is downloaded and the URL does not end with the regexp `\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?', this option will cause the suffix `.html' to be appended to the local filename. This is useful, for instance, when you're mirroring a remote site that uses `.asp' pages, but you want the mirrored pages to be viewable on your stock Apache server. Another good use for this is when you're downloading the output of CGIs. A URL like `http://site.com/article.cgi?25' will be saved as `article.cgi?25.html'. Note that filenames changed in this way will be re-downloaded every time you re-mirror a site, because Wget 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'. To prevent this re-downloading, you must use `-k' and `-K' so that the original version of the file will be saved as `X.orig' (see section Recursive Retrieval Options).
`--http-user=user'
`--http-passwd=password'
Specify the username user and password password on an HTTP server. According to the type of the challenge, Wget will encode them using either the basic (insecure) or the digest authentication scheme. Another way to specify username and password is in the URL itself (see section URL Format). For more information about security issues with Wget, See section Security Considerations.
`-C on/off'
`--cache=on/off'
When set to off, disable server-side cache. In this case, Wget will send the remote server an appropriate directive (`Pragma: no-cache') to get the file from the remote service, rather than returning the cached version. This is especially useful for retrieving and flushing out-of-date documents on proxy servers. Caching is allowed by default.
`--cookies=on/off'
When set to off, disable 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 allow the server owners to keep track of visitors and for sites to 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'
Load cookies from file before the first HTTP retrieval. file is a textual file in the format originally used by Netscape's `cookies.txt' file. You will typically use this option when mirroring sites that require that you be logged in to access some or all of their content. The login process typically 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 Wget to send the same cookies your browser sends when communicating with the site. This is achieved by `--load-cookies'---simply point Wget to the location of the `cookies.txt' file, and it will 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 Wget 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 are 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 Wget expects.
If you cannot 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 Wget to send those cookies, bypassing the "official" cookie support: 
wget --cookies=off --header "Cookie: name=value"
`--save-cookies file'
Save cookies from file at the end of session. Cookies whose expiry time is not specified, or those that have already expired, are not saved.
`--ignore-length'
Unfortunately, some HTTP servers (CGI programs, to be more precise) send out bogus Content-Length headers, which makes Wget go wild, as 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. With this option, Wget will ignore the Content-Length header--as if it never existed.
`--header=additional-header'
Define an additional-header to be passed to the HTTP servers. Headers must contain a `:' preceded by one or more non-blank characters, and must not contain newlines. You may define more than one additional header by specifying `--header' more than once. 
wget --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2' \
     --header='Accept-Language: hr'        \
       http://fly.srk.fer.hr/
Specification of an empty string as the header value will clear all previous user-defined headers.
`--proxy-user=user'
`--proxy-passwd=password'
Specify the username user and password password for authentication on a proxy server. Wget will encode them using the basic authentication scheme.
`--referer=url'
Include `Referer: url' header in HTTP request. Useful for retrieving documents with server-side processing that assume they are always being retrieved by interactive web browsers and only come out properly when Referer is set to one of the pages that point to them.
`-s'
`--save-headers'
Save the headers sent by the HTTP server to the file, preceding the actual contents, with an empty line as the separator.
`-U agent-string'
`--user-agent=agent-string'
Identify as agent-string to the HTTP server. The HTTP protocol allows the clients to identify themselves using a User-Agent header field. This enables distinguishing the WWW software, usually for statistical purposes or for tracing of protocol violations. Wget normally identifies as `Wget/version', version being the current version number of Wget. However, some sites have been known to impose the policy of tailoring the output according to the User-Agent-supplied information. While conceptually this is not such a bad idea, it has been abused by servers denying information to clients other than Mozilla or Microsoft Internet Explorer. This option allows you to change the User-Agent line issued by Wget. Use of this option is discouraged, unless you really know what you are doing.

FTP Options

`-nr'
`--dont-remove-listing'
Don't remove the temporary `.listing' files generated by FTP retrievals. Normally, these files contain the raw directory listings received from FTP servers. Not removing them can be useful for debugging purposes, or when you want to be able to easily check on the contents of remote server directories (e.g. to verify that a mirror you're running is complete). Note that even though Wget writes to a known filename for this file, this is not a security hole in the scenario of a user making `.listing' a symbolic link to `/etc/passwd' or something and asking root to run Wget in his or her directory. Depending on the options used, either Wget will refuse to write to `.listing', making the globbing/recursion/time-stamping operation fail, or the symbolic link will be deleted and replaced with the actual `.listing' file, or the listing will be written to a `.listing.number' file. Even though this situation isn't a problem, though, root should never run Wget in a non-trusted user's directory. A user could do something as simple as linking `index.html' to `/etc/passwd' and asking root to run Wget with `-N' or `-r' so the file will be overwritten.
`-g on/off'
`--glob=on/off'
Turn FTP globbing on or off. Globbing means you may use the shell-like special characters (wildcards), like `*', `?', `[' and `]' to retrieve more than one file from the same directory at once, like: 
wget ftp://gnjilux.srk.fer.hr/*.msg
By default, globbing will be turned on if the URL contains a globbing character. This option may be used to turn globbing on or off permanently. You may have to quote the URL to protect it from being expanded by your shell. Globbing makes Wget look for a directory listing, which is system-specific. This is why it currently works only with Unix FTP servers (and the ones emulating Unix ls output).
`--passive-ftp'
Use the passive FTP retrieval scheme, in which the client initiates the data connection. This is sometimes required for FTP to work behind firewalls.
`--retr-symlinks'
Usually, when retrieving FTP directories recursively and a symbolic link is encountered, the linked-to file is not downloaded. Instead, a matching symbolic link is created on the local filesystem. The pointed-to file will not be downloaded unless this recursive retrieval would have encountered it separately and downloaded it anyway. When `--retr-symlinks' is specified, however, symbolic links are traversed and the pointed-to files are retrieved. At this time, this option does not cause Wget to traverse symlinks to directories and recurse through them, but in the future it should be enhanced to do this. Note that when retrieving a file (not a directory) because it was specified on the commandline, rather than because it was recursed to, this option has no effect. Symbolic links are always traversed in this case.

Recursive Retrieval Options

`-r'
`--recursive'
Turn on recursive retrieving. See section Recursive Retrieval, for more details.
`-l depth'
`--level=depth'
Specify recursion maximum depth level depth (see section Recursive Retrieval). The default maximum depth is 5.
`--delete-after'
This option tells Wget to delete every single file it downloads, after having done so. It is useful for pre-fetching popular pages through a proxy, e.g.: 
wget -r -nd --delete-after http://whatever.com/~popular/page/
The `-r' option is to retrieve recursively, and `-nd' to not create directories. Note that `--delete-after' deletes files on the local machine. It does not issue the `DELE' command to remote FTP sites, for instance. Also note that 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 to make them suitable for local viewing. This affects not only the visible hyperlinks, but any part of the document that links to external content, such as embedded images, links to style sheets, hyperlinks to non-HTML content, etc. Each link will be changed in one of the two ways: Because of this, local browsing works reliably: if a linked file was downloaded, the link will refer to its local name; if it was not downloaded, the link will refer to its full Internet address rather than presenting a broken link. The fact that the former links are converted to relative links ensures that you can move the downloaded hierarchy to another directory. Note that only at the end of the download can Wget know which links have been downloaded. Because of that, the work done by `-k' will be performed at the end of all the downloads.
`-K'
`--backup-converted'
When converting a file, back up the original version with a `.orig' suffix. Affects the behavior of `-N' (see section HTTP Time-Stamping Internals).
`-m'
`--mirror'
Turn on options suitable for mirroring. This option turns on recursion and time-stamping, sets infinite recursion depth and keeps FTP directory listings. It is currently equivalent to `-r -N -l inf -nr'.
`-p'
`--page-requisites'
This option causes Wget to download all the files that are necessary to properly display a given HTML page. This includes such things as inlined images, sounds, and referenced stylesheets. Ordinarily, when downloading a single HTML page, any requisite documents that may be needed to display it properly are not downloaded. Using `-r' together with `-l' can help, but since Wget does not ordinarily distinguish between external and inlined documents, one is 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 that its image is `2.gif' and it links to `3.html'. Say this continues up to some arbitrarily high number. If one executes the command: 
wget -r -l 2 http://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 Wget is simply counting the number of hops (up to 2) away from `1.html' in order to determine where to stop the recursion. However, with this command: 
wget -r -l 2 -p http://site/1.html
all the above files and `3.html''s requisite `3.gif' will be downloaded. Similarly, 
wget -r -l 1 -p http://site/1.html
will cause `1.html', `1.gif', `2.html', and `2.gif' to be downloaded. One might think that: 
wget -r -l 0 -p http://site/1.html
would download just `1.html' and `1.gif', but unfortunately this 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 commandline or in a `-i' URL input file) and its (or their) requisites, simply leave off `-r' and `-l': 
wget -p http://site/1.html
Note that Wget 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': 
wget -E -H -k -K -p http://site/document
To finish off this topic, it's worth knowing that Wget'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">.

Recursive Accept/Reject Options

`-A acclist --accept acclist'
`-R rejlist --reject rejlist'
Specify comma-separated lists of file name suffixes or patterns to accept or reject (see section Types of Files for more details).
`-D domain-list'
`--domains=domain-list'
Set 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. (see section Spanning Hosts).
`--follow-ftp'
Follow FTP links from HTML documents. Without this option, Wget will ignore all the FTP links.
`--follow-tags=list'
Wget has an internal table of HTML tag / attribute pairs that it considers when looking for linked documents during a recursive retrieval. If a user wants only a subset of those tags to be considered, however, he or she should be specify such tags in a comma-separated list with this option.
`-G list'
`--ignore-tags=list'
This is the opposite of the `--follow-tags' option. To skip certain HTML tags when recursively looking for documents to download, specify them in a comma-separated list. In the past, the `-G' option was the best bet for downloading a single page and its requisites, using a commandline like: 
wget -Ga,area -H -k -K -r http://site/document
However, the author of this option came across a page with tags like <LINK REL="home" HREF="/"> and came to the realization that `-G' was not enough. One can't just tell Wget 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.
`-H'
`--span-hosts'
Enable spanning across hosts when doing recursive retrieving (see section Spanning Hosts).
`-L'
`--relative'
Follow relative links only. Useful for retrieving a specific home page without any distractions, not even those from the same hosts (see section Relative Links).
`-I list'
`--include-directories=list'
Specify a comma-separated list of directories you wish to follow when downloading (see section Directory-Based Limits for more details.) Elements of list may contain wildcards.
`-X list'
`--exclude-directories=list'
Specify a comma-separated list of directories you wish to exclude from download (see section Directory-Based Limits for more details.) Elements of list may contain wildcards.
`-np'
`--no-parent'
Do not ever ascend to the parent directory when retrieving recursively. This is a useful option, since it guarantees that only the files below a certain hierarchy will be downloaded. See section Directory-Based Limits, for more details.

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