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Examples

The examples are divided into three sections loosely based on their complexity.

Simple Usage

Say you want to download a URL. Just type:
```
wget http://fly.srk.fer.hr/
```
But what will happen if the connection is slow, and the file is lengthy? The connection will probably fail before the whole file is retrieved, more than once. In this case, Wget will try getting the file until it either gets the whole of it, or exceeds the default number of retries (this being 20). It is easy to change the number of tries to 45, to insure that the whole file will arrive safely:
```
wget --tries=45 http://fly.srk.fer.hr/jpg/flyweb.jpg
```
Now let's leave Wget to work in the background, and write its progress to log file `log'. It is tiring to type `--tries', so we shall use `-t'.
```
wget -t 45 -o log http://fly.srk.fer.hr/jpg/flyweb.jpg &
```
The ampersand at the end of the line makes sure that Wget works in the background. To unlimit the number of retries, use `-t inf'.
The usage of FTP is as simple. Wget will take care of login and password.
```
wget ftp://gnjilux.srk.fer.hr/welcome.msg
```
If you specify a directory, Wget will retrieve the directory listing, parse it and convert it to HTML. Try:
```
wget ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/
links index.html
```

Advanced Usage

You have a file that contains the URLs you want to download? Use the `-i' switch:
```
wget -i file
```
If you specify `-' as file name, the URLs will be read from standard input.
Create a five levels deep mirror image of the GNU web site, with the same directory structure the original has, with only one try per document, saving the log of the activities to `gnulog':
```
wget -r http://www.gnu.org/ -o gnulog
```
The same as the above, but convert the links in the HTML files to point to local files, so you can view the documents off-line:
```
wget --convert-links -r http://www.gnu.org/ -o gnulog
```
Retrieve only one HTML page, but make sure that all the elements needed for the page to be displayed, such as inline images and external style sheets, are also downloaded. Also make sure the downloaded page references the downloaded links.
```
wget -p --convert-links http://www.server.com/dir/page.html
```
The HTML page will be saved to `www.server.com/dir/page.html', and the images, stylesheets, etc., somewhere under `www.server.com/', depending on where they were on the remote server.
The same as the above, but without the `www.server.com/' directory. In fact, I don't want to have all those random server directories anyway--just save all those files under a `download/' subdirectory of the current directory.
```
wget -p --convert-links -nH -nd -Pdownload \
     http://www.server.com/dir/page.html
```
Retrieve the index.html of `www.lycos.com', showing the original server headers:
```
wget -S http://www.lycos.com/
```
Save the server headers with the file, perhaps for post-processing.
```
wget -s http://www.lycos.com/
more index.html
```
Retrieve the first two levels of `wuarchive.wustl.edu', saving them to `/tmp'.
```
wget -r -l2 -P/tmp ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/
```
You want to download all the GIFs from a directory on an HTTP server. You tried `wget http://www.server.com/dir/*.gif', but that didn't work because HTTP retrieval does not support globbing. In that case, use:
```
wget -r -l1 --no-parent -A.gif http://www.server.com/dir/
```
More verbose, but the effect is the same. `-r -l1' means to retrieve recursively (see section Recursive Retrieval), with maximum depth of 1. `--no-parent' means that references to the parent directory are ignored (see section Directory-Based Limits), and `-A.gif' means to download only the GIF files. `-A "*.gif"' would have worked too.
Suppose you were in the middle of downloading, when Wget was interrupted. Now you do not want to clobber the files already present. It would be:
```
wget -nc -r http://www.gnu.org/
```
If you want to encode your own username and password to HTTP or FTP, use the appropriate URL syntax (see section URL Format).
```
wget ftp://hniksic:mypassword@unix.server.com/.emacs
```
You would like the output documents to go to standard output instead of to files?
```
wget -O - http://jagor.srce.hr/ http://www.srce.hr/
```
You can also combine the two options and make pipelines to retrieve the documents from remote hotlists:
```
wget -O - http://cool.list.com/ | wget --force-html -i -
```

Very Advanced Usage

If you wish Wget to keep a mirror of a page (or FTP subdirectories), use `--mirror' (`-m'), which is the shorthand for `-r -l inf -N'. You can put Wget in the crontab file asking it to recheck a site each Sunday:
```
crontab
0 0 * * 0 wget --mirror http://www.gnu.org/ -o /home/me/weeklog
```
In addition to the above, you want the links to be converted for local viewing. But, after having read this manual, you know that link conversion doesn't play well with timestamping, so you also want Wget to back up the original HTML files before the conversion. Wget invocation would look like this:
```
wget --mirror --convert-links --backup-converted  \
     http://www.gnu.org/ -o /home/me/weeklog
```
But you've also noticed that local viewing doesn't work all that well when HTML files are saved under extensions other than `.html', perhaps because they were served as `index.cgi'. So you'd like Wget to rename all the files served with content-type `text/html' to `name.html'.
```
wget --mirror --convert-links --backup-converted \
     --html-extension -o /home/me/weeklog        \
     http://www.gnu.org/
```
Or, with less typing:
```
wget -m -k -K -E http://www.gnu.org/ -o /home/me/weeklog
```

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