Wget2 is a utility for non-interactive download of files from the Web. It supports HTTP and HTTPS protocols, as well as retrieval through HTTP(S) proxies.
Wget2 is non-interactive, meaning that it can work in the background, while the user is not logged on. This allows you to start a retrieval and disconnect from the system, letting Wget2 finish the work. By contrast, most of the Web browsers require constant user’s presence, which can be a great hindrance when transferring a lot of data.
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 referred to as recursive downloading. While doing that, Wget2 respects the Robot Exclusion Standard (/robots.txt). Wget2 can be instructed to convert
the links in downloaded files to point at the local files, for offline viewing.
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. If the server supports partial downloads, it may continue the download from where it left off.
This is free and open source software.
Features include:
- Support for HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2.0 protocol
- brotli decompression support.
- zstandard decompression support, RFC8478.
- lzip decompression support.
- HPKP – HTTP Public Key Pinning (RFC7469) with persistent database.
- TCP Fast Open for plain text and for HTTPS.
- TLS Session Resumption including persistent session data cache.
- TLS False Start.
- HTTP2 support via nghttp2 and GnuTLS ALPN including streaming/pipelining.
- OCSP stapling + OCSP server querying as a fallback.
- Use libpsl for cookie domain checking (using Public Suffix List).
- Support link conversion.
- Support for RFC 6266 compliant Content-Disposition.
- RFC 6797 HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security).
- Support for bzip2 Content-Encoding / Accept-Encoding compression type.
- Support for XZ Content-Encoding / Accept-Encoding compression type.
- Character encoding of input files may be specified despite from local and remote encoding.
- Support scanning RSS 2.0 feeds from local files.
- Support scanning RSS 2.0 feeds.
- Support scanning Atom 1.0 feeds from local files .
- Support scanning Atom 1.0 feeds.
- Support scanning URLs from local Sitemap XML file.
- Support scanning sitemap files given in robots.txt (Sitemap XML, gzipped Sitemap XML, plain text) including sitemap index files.
- Support arbitrary number of proxies for parallel downloads.
- Multithreaded download of single files.
- Internationalized Domain Names in Applications.
- ICEcast / SHOUTcast support via library.
- Respect /robots.txt “Robot Exclusion Standard”.
- IDN support for international domains.
- autotools support.
- Proxy support.
- Cookies (session/non-session), detection of supercookies via Mozilla Public Suffix List.
- Recursive download of websites with or without spanning hosts.
- Download single web pages / resources.
- zlib/gzip compressed HTTP/HTTPS downloads (gzip, deflate).
- Number of parallel download threads is adjustable.
- Include directive for config files (wildcards allowed).
- Support for keep-alive connections.
- Included CSS, HTML, XML parser needed for recursive downloads.
- gettext support.
- HTTPS via libgnutls (and basic WolfSSL support).
- Support for Metalink RFC 6249 (Metalink/HTTP: Mirrors and Hashes).
- Support for Metalink RFC 5854 (Metalink Download Description Format / .meta4 files).
- Support for Metalink 3.
- Metalink checksumming via libgnutls.
- DNS lookup cache.
- IPv4 and IPv6 support.
- Cross-platform support – runs under Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Solaris, macOS, and Windows.
Website: gitlab.com/gnuwget/wget2
Support: Documentation
Developer: Tim Rühsen, Darshit Shah, Giuseppe Scrivano, and many contributors
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
Wget2 is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Alternatives to curl | Alternatives to Wget | Return to Command line HTTP Clients
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