How to use regular expressions in wget for rejecting files?

Question

I am trying to download the contents of a website using wget tool. I used -R option to reject some file types. but there are some other files which I don\'t want to download. Th

Answer 1

Since (apparently) v1.14 wget accepts regular expressions : --reject-regex and --accept-regex (with --regex-type posix by default, can be set to pcre if compiled with libpcre support).

Beware that it seems you can use --reject-regex only once per wget call. That is, you have to use | in a single regex if you want to select on several regex :

wget --reject-regex 'expr1|expr2|…' http://example.com

Answer 2

You can not specify a regular expression in the wget -R key, but you can specify a template (like file template in a shell).

The answer looks like:

$ wget -R 'newsbrief-*' ...

You can also use ? and symbol classes [].

For more information see info wget.