NAME

webgrab − fetch web page content as files

SYNOPSIS

webgrab [ -r ] [ -v ] [ -o stem ] url

DESCRIPTION

Webgrab connects to the web server named in the url. It fetches the content of the web page also determined by the url, and stores it locally in a file. If the page is written in HTML, webgrab reads it to build a list of sub-component pages (eg, frames) and images.  It fetches those, saving the content in separate files.  It adds a comment to the end of each HTML file giving the time, and the file’s origin.  It automatically follows redirections offered by the server. 

The stem of the names of the output files is normally derived from a component of the url. If the url contains a path name, the stem is the component of that path, less any dot-separated suffix and prefix.  For example, given

http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/old.index.html

the stem would be index.  If there is no path name, but the url contains a domain name, the stem is the penultimate component of the domain name (eg, excluding trailing .com, and initial www, etc).  For example, given

www.innerhost.vitanuova.com

the stem would be vitanuova.  If all else fails, webgrab uses the stem webgrab. 

Given a stem, the initial page is stored in stem.suffix where suffix is the suffix (eg, .html) of the name of the original page.  Subordinate pages are saved in a similar way in files named stem_1.suffix1, stem_2.suffix2, ... . 

The options are:

-r do not fetch subcomponents (just the ‘raw’ source of url itself)

-v print a progress report

-vv print a chatty progress report

-o stem
use the stem as given

Webgrab reads the configuration file /services/webget/config (if it exists), to look for the address of an optional HTTP proxy (in the entry), and list of domains for which a proxy should not be used (in the noproxy or noproxydoms entry). 

FILES

/services/webget/config

SOURCE

/appl/cmd/webgrab.b

BUGS

It should read the proxy name from the charon(1) configuration file and not the webget configuration file. 
It cannot do ‘secure’ transfers (https). 
Its HTML parsing is naive, but on the other hand, it is less likely to trip over HTML novelties.