Patching WGET for FTP dotfile fetches

A customer needed to fully mirror a web site via the FTP interface, and we found that the otherwise wonderful "wget" tool didn't know about dotfiles. This meant that the three gigabytes of data sucked down omitted the ".htaccess" and related files - getting them by hand was looking to be a serious annoyance.

So I modified wget-1.8.2 to enable the -. and --dotfiles cmdline parameters to enable dotfile fetches over FTP and have written up a patch for it. I believe this to be a "full-service" patch in that it does the docs and stuff too.

Tech Tip: Patching wget to fetch dot files over FTP

I won't submit this to the wget maintainers until I get some mileage on this patch: those having experiences with it are encouraged to comment here.

Posted by Steve at August 18, 2002 12:26 AM