Problems Using WGET to transfer files from an FTP Server

Question

I make use of wget to get files from an FTP server. I do this:

wget ftp://username:Password@XXX.XXX.XX.XX/public_html/images/audiothumbs/* .

After I download about a 1600 files, I get this error:

--2010-09-07 01:36:51--  http://./
Resolving .... failed: Name or service not known.
wget: unable to resolve host address `.'
FINISHED --2010-09-07 01:36:52--
Downloaded: 1998 files, 20M in 3m 31s (95.7 KB/s)

Did I get disconnected from the other server?

Secondly, if make use of the no-clobber option like so:

wget -r -nc ftp://username:Password@XXX.XXX.XX.XX/public_html/images/audiothumbs/* .

Why is it files still get overwritten?

Thanks all for any help

Answer 1

You've got an extra . on the end of your command line. wget is not like cp and doesn't take a destination directory. So after it downloads all your files from the FTP server, it tries to download a file (using HTTP) from the server ..

And for -nc, it's documented to do something other than what you expect:

      When running Wget without -N, -nc, or -r, downloading the same file
      in the same directory will result in the original copy of file
      being preserved and the second copy being named file.1.  If that
      file is downloaded yet again, the third copy will be named file.2,
      and so on.  When -nc is specified, this behavior is suppressed, and
      Wget will refuse to download newer copies of file.  Therefore,
      ‘‘"no-clobber"’’ is actually a misnomer in this mode---it’s not
      clobbering that’s prevented (as the numeric suffixes were already
      preventing clobbering), but rather the multiple version saving
      that’s prevented.

Answer 2

Please not that max recursion in the download directory is 5!
When downloading from ftp using wget you have to set recursion depth:

-l depth
--level=depth
Specify recursion maximum depth level depth. The default maximum depth is 5.

HTH