If you came here for some reason and are starting to wonder what the heck wget is... take a look at the official wget page. A quick quote for the
impatient:
GNU Wget is a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, the two most widely-used Internet protocols. It is a non-interactive command line tool, so it may easily be
called from scripts, cron jobs, terminals without Xsupport, etc.
Here you can find sources and precompiled binaries for windows (that is, win32 systems - windows 9x, ME, NT, 2k, XP for now, not windows 3.x with the win32 package installed). Usually I try to use just the original source, just re packaged as zip file for you convenience. If some changes were needed it will be stated.
I need help/explanations.For any wget related info or questions please do not send me directly mail, always direct them to the mailing list. See the official wget page for instructions, currently you can post to the list without being subscribed, and you can always read it from the archives. From the list you'll usually a quicker and more accurate reply.
Please don't direct any patches or questions (windows-specific or not) to me, as I am not a wget maintainer - I just provide some prebuilt binaries, I'm NOT a developer. Follow the above link and take a look at those mailing lists!
Disclaimer
This page is horrible. This page is mostly outdated. This page needs to be checked, purged, cleansed out, updated. Unfortunately I'm usually out of time so for know forgive me and just get the binary you want from the table below.
Which kind of file formats are these ? What should I get ?
For every "release" (row) there's a
Well, wget is a tool in development, so there are bound to exist different versions.
If you want to build wget for yourself natively (not using the Cygnus toolkit or similar), you'll need:
Regarding SSL libraries
For binaries compiled with SSL support (you know... those urls using https://) you'll need special support. Currently wget uses OpenSSL.
There was a license conflict between the GPL license and the OpenSSL license, rendering impossible to distribute binaries linked against OpenSSL, however this is not longer a problem:
Licenze addendum since 2002 05 18:
In addition, as a special exception, the Free Software Foundation gives permission to link the code of its release of Wget with the OpenSSL project's "OpenSSL" library (or with modified versions of it that use the same license as the "OpenSSL" library), and distribute the linked executables. You must obey the GNU General Public License in all respects for all of the code used other than "OpenSSL". If you modify this file, you may extend this exception to your version of the file, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version.If you want to compile your own you can use this as a basic how-to.
Download table removed, read the index
Manual:
Included in the binary archives, or compileable from the source archives. Or read this online copy.
Mini HOWTO quick start:
For every reference consult the manual (included in the binary archives or here), this is just a quick starter.
It really is convenient to set up a wgetrc, place it somewhere, and point at it with a wgetrc environment variable.
To check if there is already one: from a command prompt issue set and check the output.
To set one permanently: in w9x place it in autoexec.bat, set wgetrc=c:\mydir\wgetrc. In NT 4.x go to control panel, System, Environment, and set a variable wgetrc to the
value c:\mydir\wgetrc or wherever you placed it. W2k is similar I suppose.
Another possibility is to call it wget.ini and place it in the same directory where wget.exe resides.
A "sample.wgetrc" (incomplete, check the documentation for further options) is present in the sources in the doc subdirectory, but of course you know that since you did read the documentation,
did you ? Take that sample wgetrc, and follow the previous instructions in order to let wget find it.
Take a look at the options (although the defaults should be ok), uncomment what you want to activate. If you are behind a proxy and need to use that, take a look at the proxy related options:
http_proxy, ftp_proxy, use_proxy as mentioned in the sample.wgetrc; possibly you'll also want no_proxy, proxy_user and proxy_password, see the documentation for those.
Try something easy like
wget -v http://xoomer.virgilio.it/hherold which should save you this page. If not the (verbose, since we used -v) output could tell you the reason. If not, try adding a
-d to the options.
Here are some (zipped) common commands for a starter.
Boring facts:
The whole 1.5.3 -> 1.6pre cycle produced about 6000 hits on this counter.
After the wget 1.6 release it logged only about 500 hits in about a couple of months, slowly gaining later.
After the wget 1.7 release in the first couple of weeks there had been already 3500+ new hits (much interest in the new features ?).
Up to 22K at July 2001.
30k shortly after 1.7.1 release (Nov 2001), before I had a chance to put up a binary.
32k+ at 1.8 release (Dec 2001).
35k+ at 1.8.1 release.
62k+ at 1.8.2 release.
220k+ after the big development halt (1.9-dev, about september 2003)
250k+ when transferred to nedstat (Jan 2004)
250k+180k at wget 1.10 release (Jun 2005). Of these 180k (more or less uniformly distributed 10k/month) 55% used Firefox (yai!), 33% Internet Explorer. About 67% came from Windows XP, 17% from a Windows 2000 machine. Anyway 10k is far too much - I suppose there is a fair number of people checking the page for changes in some automatic way.
250k+204k at wget 1.10.1 release (August 2005).