fetch(1) BSD General Commands Manual fetch(1)
NAME
fetch - retrieve a file by Uniform Resource Locator
SYNOPSIS
fetch [-146AFMPRUadlmnpqrsv] [-B bytes] [-S bytes] [-T seconds] [-o file]
[-w seconds] [-h host] [-c dir] [-f file] [URL ...]
DESCRIPTION
Fetch provides a command-line interface to the fetch(3) library. Its
purpose is to retrieve the file(s) pointed to by the URL(s) on the com-
mand line.
The following options are available:
-1 Stop and return exit code 0 at the first successfully
retrieved file.
-4 Forces fetch to use IPv4 addresses only.
-6 Forces fetch to use IPv6 addresses only.
-A Do not automatically follow ``temporary'' (302) redirects.
Some broken Web sites will return a redirect instead of a
not-found error when the requested object does not exist.
-a Automatically retry the transfer upon soft failures.
-B bytes Specify the read buffer size in bytes. The default is 4096
bytes. Attempts to set a buffer size lower than this will be
silently ignored. The number of reads actually performed is
reported at verbosity level two or higher (see the -v flag).
-c dir The file to retrieve is in directory dir on the remote host.
This option is deprecated and is provided for backward com-
patibility only.
-d Use a direct connection even if a proxy is configured.
-F In combination with the -r flag, forces a restart even if the
local and remote files have different modification times.
-f file The file to retrieve is named file on the remote host. This
option is deprecated and is provided for backward compatibil-
ity only.
-h host The file to retrieve is located on the host host. This
option is deprecated and is provided for backward compatibil-
ity only.
-l If the target is a file-scheme URL, make a symbolic link to
the target rather than trying to copy it.
-M
-m Mirror mode: if the file already exists locally and has the
same size and modification time as the remote file, it will
not be fetched. Note that the -m and -r flags are mutually
exclusive.
-n Don't preserve the modification time of the transferred file.
-o file Set the output file name to file. By default, a ``pathname''
is extracted from the specified URI, and its basename is used
as the name of the output file. A file argument of `-' indi-
cates that results are to be directed to the standard output.
-P
-p Use passive FTP. This is useful if you are behind a firewall
which blocks incoming connections. Try this flag if fetch
seems to hang when retrieving FTP URLs.
-q Quiet mode.
-R The output files are precious, and should not be deleted
under any circumstances, even if the transfer failed or was
incomplete.
-r Restart a previously interrupted transfer. Note that the -m
and -r flags are mutually exclusive.
-S bytes Require the file size reported by the server to match the
specified value. If it does not, a message is printed and
the file is not fetched. If the server does not support
reporting file sizes, this option is ignored and the file is
fetched unconditionally.
-s Print the size in bytes of each requested file, without
fetching it.
-T seconds Set timeout value to seconds. Overrides the environment
variables FTP_TIMEOUT for FTP transfers or HTTP_TIMEOUT for
HTTP transfers if set.
-U When using passive FTP, allocate the port for the data con-
nection from the low (default) port range. See ip(4) for
details on how to specify which port range this corresponds
to.
-v Increase verbosity level.
-w seconds When the -a flag is specified, wait this many seconds between
successive retries.
DIAGNOSTICS
The fetch command returns zero on success, or one on failure. If multi-
ple URLs are listed on the command line, fetch will attempt to retrieve
them each of them in turn, and return zero only if they were all success-
fully retrieved.
ENVIRONMENT
FTP_TIMEOUT maximum time, in seconds, to wait before aborting an FTP
connection.
HTTP_TIMEOUT maximum time, in seconds, to wait before aborting an HTTP
connection.
All environment variables mentioned in the documentation for the fetch(3)
library are supported.
SEE ALSO
fetch(3)
HISTORY
The fetch command appeared in FreeBSD 2.1.5. This implementation first
appeared in FreeBSD 4.1.
AUTHORS
The original implementation of fetch was done by Jean-Marc Zucconi. It
was extensively re-worked for FreeBSD 2.2 by Garrett Wollman, and later
completely rewritten to use the fetch(3) library by Dag-Erling Smorgrav.
NOTES
The -b and -t options are no longer supported and will generate warnings.
They were workarounds for bugs in other OSes which this implementation
does not trigger.
One cannot both use the -h, -c and -f options and specify URLs on the
command line.
BSD June 28, 2000 BSD
Mac OS X 10.3 - Generated Sun Jan 27 05:49:07 CST 2008