6. Startup File

Once you know how to change default settings of Wget through command line arguments, you may wish to make some of those settings permanent. You can do that in a convenient way by creating the Wget startup file—‘.wgetrc’.

Besides ‘.wgetrc’ is the “main” initialization file, it is convenient to have a special facility for storing passwords. Thus Wget reads and interprets the contents of ‘$HOME/.netrc’, if it finds it. You can find ‘.netrc’ format in your system manuals.

Wget reads ‘.wgetrc’ upon startup, recognizing a limited set of commands.