Re: [Bug-wget] really no "wget --list http://..." ?

[Micah Cowan]

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Denis wrote:
> Micah,
>   not to be dense, but is there really no way to "wget --list http://...";
> a directory without downloading all its files ?
> To browse any file system, local or remote, I want to be able to LIST it 
> first.
> I gather that there's no www variant of a Unix-like file system
> (tree structure independent of file contents => very fast ls -R)
> but a WFS, web file system, would sure simplify life

HTTP has no concept of a directory, and provides no way to list it, so
no. The WebDAV extensions _do_ provide such a thing, but they're not
commonly implemented on web servers (especially without authentication),
so there'd be little point in making Wget use that.

It _could_ be useful for wget to download a given URL, parse out its
links, and spit them out as a list, but wget doesn't currently do that
either. Even if it did, there could be no way to guarantee that that
list represents the complete contents of the "directory", as all wget
will see is whatever links happen to be on that one single page, so if
it's not an automatically-generated index page, it's unlikely to be a
very good representation of directory contents. But implementing that
would not be a high priority for me at this time (patch, anyone?).

In the meantime, the usual suggestion is to have wget download the
single HTML page, and then parse out the links yourself with a suitable
perl/awk/sed script.

- --
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer.
Maintainer of GNU Wget and GNU Teseq
http://micah.cowan.name/
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