2.4 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 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
--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 value is ‘bits’.

-i file
--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. If ‘--force-html’ is not specified, then file should consist of a series of URLs, one per line.

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.

If the file is an external one, the document will be automatically treated as ‘html’ if the Content-Type matches ‘text/html’. Furthermore, the file’s location will be implicitly used as base href if none was specified.

--input-metalink=file

Downloads files covered in local Metalink file. Metalink version 3 and 4 are supported.

--keep-badhash

Keeps downloaded Metalink’s files with a bad hash. It appends .badhash to the name of Metalink’s files which have a checksum mismatch, except without overwriting existing files.

--metalink-over-http

Issues HTTP HEAD request instead of GET and extracts Metalink metadata from response headers. Then it switches to Metalink download. If no valid Metalink metadata is found, it falls back to ordinary HTTP download. Enables ‘Content-Type: application/metalink4+xml’ files download/processing.

--metalink-index=number

Set the Metalink ‘application/metalink4+xml’ metaurl ordinal NUMBER. From 1 to the total number of “application/metalink4+xml” available. Specify 0 or ‘inf’ to choose the first good one. Metaurls, such as those from a ‘--metalink-over-http’, may have been sorted by priority key’s value; keep this in mind to choose the right NUMBER.

--preferred-location

Set preferred location for Metalink resources. This has effect if multiple resources with same priority are available.

--xattr

Enable use of file system’s extended attributes to save the original URL and the Referer HTTP header value if used.

Be aware that the URL might contain private information like access tokens or credentials.

-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

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 ‘--force-html’, or when the input file was fetched remotely from a server describing it as HTML). 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 ‘http://foo/bar/a.html’ for URL, and Wget reads ‘../baz/b.html’ from the input file, it would be resolved to ‘http://foo/baz/b.html’.

--config=FILE

Specify the location of a startup file you wish to use instead of the default one(s). Use –no-config to disable reading of config files. If both –config and –no-config are given, –no-config is ignored.

--rejected-log=logfile

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.