Talk:Wget

Categories
Is Wget really a FTP client ? It can get from a ftp server but I think it cannot put a file on the server Arno. 12:29, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)
 * No mention of FTP upload as a feature in 1.8.1 manual. But I think could still call it an FTP client, although not a very full featured one.  I'm not a fan of categories anyway though. --Pmsyyz 18:30, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * Wget is an FTP client in that it talks to FTP servers via the FTP protocol. It doesn't support upload, but it doesn't upload to HTTP either.

I've restored the "FTP clients" category because Wget really is an FTP client. I've removed the "Download managers" category because it's not really a download manager in the sense of GetRight, FlashGet and such. It is more of a one-shot downloading/mirroring agent. Hniksic 16:35, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Title case
Please don't change the case of the title (and of the occurrences of "Wget" in the page) to lower-case "wget". The program's name is "Wget" or "GNU Wget", with the first letter in upper-case. The entire Info and Man documentation and the web page confirm this. The title of this page is not an example of wikipedia's technical limitation. The only reason why the actual Unix executable is called "wget" is because Unix executables, by convention, consist of all-lowercase letters.

Considerate downloading is misplaced
The "considerate downloading" section doesn't sound like it belongs in this article. It doesn't really describe Wget, it's written in more of a tutorial style ("you should" do this or that), and it definitely doesn't belong under the "features" headline. 83.131.32.185 13:41, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

Proper way to download from Wikipedia (or from any Wiki)
A description of the proper way to download entire pages of Wikipedia would be very useful and appreciated. --Lucas Gallindo 18:07, 4 October 2006 (UTC)
 * See WP:DUMP. ffm  yes? 22:00, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

I don't think wget is a ftp client!
I don't think wget is a ftp client! Because the Chinese Great Fire Wall will not block anything via ftp. What it only do is to block something via http. If you try to retrieve something, such as ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/pc/gvim70.exe, via wget(in the main land of China , of course), you will certainly be frustrated. But if you employ a real ftp client such as lftp, then you will probably get what you want, ignoring the Great Fire Wall.

The criticism section is crazy
Most or all of those criticisms fail the WP:WEASEL criteria. Please fix or remove them. At a glance, it looks like some should be partially folded into the other sections of the article and the rest should be deleted. Gronky 14:59, 25 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Ok, there were no objections or better suggestions, so below (between two horizontal bars) is a copy of the criticisms section I just removed from the article. The contents should be merged into the relevent parts of the article if/where appropriate. Gronky 21:09, 4 February 2007 (UTC)


 * The intention of the "crazy" criticism section was to maintain NPOV because without it the article read like extended praising of the program. Unfortunately you're right about the weasel words -- although all the criticisms have surfaced on the various public forums, I didn't have the time or the inclination to properly document them. 213.147.97.170 10:46, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Despite it being a bit opinionated and over the top, I think a part of it should be left in rather than taking out the entire section.--NeF (talk) 04:53, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

==Criticisms of Wget== Several criticisms of Wget have recurred in public forums and mailing lists. The most important ones are:


 * Wget supports few download protocols, especially compared to cURL or Net Transport. It doesn't support any of the media streaming protocols, such as mms and rtsp, nor the increasingly popular P2P protocols. While not supporting media protocols can be explained with their lack of specifications, it is also true that many see Wget's code base as being centered around HTTP and FTP.
 * It has lagged behind with support for the more recent features of HTTP, FTP, and HTML. For example, it still uses HTTP/1.0, and is unable to download content referenced from JavaScript or from CSS.
 * It is not flexible enough to be used as tool for advanced scripting because its more advanced download modes operate in an all-or-nothing fashion&mdash;it cannot be made to do only part of the work and output the information needed to continue, which could then be filtered or otherwise processed by other programs. (Printing out just the list of URLs to download without actually fetching them would be an example of such output. )  This has led some people to use cURL for some tasks for which Wget might be otherwise useful.
 * Wget is easily confused when mirroring complex sites, especially on repeated mirroring runs because it lacks a database where it would store metadata describing previous mirroring runs.
 * Wget's development has often been perceived as slow and sporadic; many users have been frustrated by the lack of response to feature requests. An example of this would be the inclusion of large file support, which happened in 2005, although the feature has been widely and frequently requested since at least 2002.
 * Wget's large number of options has been criticized as feature creep &mdash; as of this writing (June 2005), Wget has more than 100 command-line switches. Although the options are well-documented in the manual, they are daunting even to the experienced user, and the interaction of various options can sometimes lead to surprises.
 * Several security flaws have been exposed in Wget.    Although the flaws have not adversely affected the majority of users and have since been corrected, it has been claimed that the code base was not written with security in mind and that the maintainers are insufficiently sensitive to security-related concerns.

Wget's maintainers have stated their awareness of these criticisms, and claim to be working on addressing them in future releases.

Portal:Free software: wget is now the selected article
Just to let you know. The purpose of selecting an article is both to point readers to the article and to highlight it to potential contributors. It will remain on the portal for a week or so. The previous selected article was OGRE 3D - a 3D graphics engine for games.

For other interesting free software articles, you can take a look at the archive of PF's selectees. --Gronky (talk) 10:19, 11 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Things moved on, as normal, and the new selectee is Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X, a GNU/Linux distro of historical interest. --Gronky (talk) 14:30, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

Manual material
This is one of the few Unix program articles which isn't just a rewrite of the man page - this means that it is significantly improved by the removal of the entire manual section. I'm going to restore this revision unless a better rationale is provided than "it's useful", which doesn't hold any water. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 15:10, 19 December 2008 (UTC)

Manning + WikiLeaks
According to this piece:

Evidence presented during Private Manning’s court-martial for his role as the source for large archives of military and diplomatic files given to WikiLeaks revealed that he had used a program called “wget” to download the batches of files. That program automates the retrieval of large numbers of files, but it is considered less powerful than the tool Mr. Snowden used.

I wonder if Manning and/or WikiLeaks should be mentioned in the wget article. --MZMcBride (talk) 03:49, 9 February 2014 (UTC)


 * I would think it would be a notable use and should be included! - Ahunt (talk) 12:35, 9 February 2014 (UTC)
 * ✅ - Ahunt (talk) 00:35, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

overwriting of files
The article should mentions the behavior of wget if executed from the command line when the present directory is not an empty folder: By default if there are no options then it will try to avoid overwriting existing files. If the commonly used -r (--recursive) option, the -p (--page-requisite) option, or the -O (--output=) option is used, then it may ovewrite existing files! Recursive use (the -r option) may also cause <tt>wget</tt> to ascend into a higher directory (definitely not desired; can be suppressed with the <tt>-np</tt> or <tt>--no-parent</tt> option). Finally, to overwrite the existing file when the downloaded file has a newer timestamp, use <tt>-N</tt>, and to avoid overwriting files at all, use the <tt>-nc</tt> (which stands for &#8220;<tt>--no-clobber</tt>&#8221;) option, for example wget -nc http://example.com. 108.31.167.36 (talk) 19:44, 7 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Reference? - Ahunt (talk) 23:29, 7 April 2021 (UTC)