Directory Options (GNU Wget 1.21.1-dirty Manual)

2.6 Directory Options

‘-nd’ ‘--no-directories’

Do not create a hierarchy of directories when retrieving recursively. With this option turned on, all files will get saved to the current directory, without clobbering (if a name shows up more than once, the filenames will get extensions ‘.n’).

‘-x’ ‘--force-directories’

The opposite of ‘-nd’—create a hierarchy of directories, even if one would not have been created otherwise. E.g. ‘wget -x http://fly.srk.fer.hr/robots.txt’ will save the downloaded file to fly.srk.fer.hr/robots.txt.

‘-nH’ ‘--no-host-directories’

Disable generation of host-prefixed directories. By default, invoking Wget with ‘-r http://fly.srk.fer.hr/’ will create a structure of directories beginning with fly.srk.fer.hr/. This option disables such behavior.

‘--protocol-directories’

Use the protocol name as a directory component of local file names. For example, with this option, ‘wget -r http://host’ will save to ‘http/host/...’ rather than just to ‘host/...’.

‘--cut-dirs=number’

Ignore number directory components. This is useful for getting a fine-grained control over the directory where recursive retrieval will be saved.

Take, for example, the directory at ‘ftp://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/’. If you retrieve it with ‘-r’, it will be saved locally under ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/. While the ‘-nH’ option can remove the ftp.xemacs.org/ part, you are still stuck with pub/xemacs. This is where ‘--cut-dirs’ comes in handy; it makes Wget not “see” number remote directory components. Here are several examples of how ‘--cut-dirs’ option works.

No options        -> ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/
-nH               -> pub/xemacs/
-nH --cut-dirs=1  -> xemacs/
-nH --cut-dirs=2  -> .

--cut-dirs=1      -> ftp.xemacs.org/xemacs/
...

If you just want to get rid of the directory structure, this option is similar to a combination of ‘-nd’ and ‘-P’. However, unlike ‘-nd’, ‘--cut-dirs’ does not lose with subdirectories—for instance, with ‘-nH --cut-dirs=1’, a beta/ subdirectory will be placed to xemacs/beta, as one would expect.

‘-P prefix’ ‘--directory-prefix=prefix’

Set directory prefix to prefix. The directory prefix is the directory where all other files and subdirectories will be saved to, i.e. the top of the retrieval tree. The default is ‘.’ (the current directory).