2.9 FTP Options

‘--ftp-user=user’

‘--ftp-password=password’

Specify the username user and password password on an FTP server. Without this, or the corresponding startup option, the password defaults to ‘-wget@’, normally used for anonymous FTP.

Another way to specify username and password is in the URL itself (see section URL Format). Either method reveals your password to anyone who bothers to run ps. To prevent the passwords from being seen, store them in ‘.wgetrc’ or ‘.netrc’, and make sure to protect those files from other users with chmod. If the passwords are really important, do not leave them lying in those files either—edit the files and delete them after Wget has started the download.

‘--no-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.

‘--no-glob’

Turn off FTP globbing. Globbing refers to the use of 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).

‘--no-passive-ftp’

Disable the use of the passive FTP transfer mode. Passive FTP mandates that the client connect to the server to establish the data connection rather than the other way around.

If the machine is connected to the Internet directly, both passive and active FTP should work equally well. Behind most firewall and NAT configurations passive FTP has a better chance of working. However, in some rare firewall configurations, active FTP actually works when passive FTP doesn’t. If you suspect this to be the case, use this option, or set passive_ftp=off in your init file.

‘--preserve-permissions’

Preserve remote file permissions instead of permissions set by umask.

‘--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 command-line, rather than because it was recursed to, this option has no effect. Symbolic links are always traversed in this case.

This document was generated on February 2, 2014 using texi2html 5.0.