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FETCH(1)                  BSD General Commands Manual                 FETCH(1)

NAME
     fetch -- retrieve a file by Uniform Resource Locator

SYNOPSIS
     fetch [-146AFMRUadilmnqrsv] [-B bytes] [-N file] [-o file] [-S bytes]
           [-T seconds] [-w seconds] [URL ...]

DESCRIPTION
     The fetch utility provides a command-line interface to the fetch(3)
     library.  Its purpose is to retrieve the file(s) pointed to by the URL(s)
     on the command line.

     The following options are available:

     -1          Stop and return exit code 0 at the first successfully
                 retrieved file.

     -4          Forces fetch to use IPv4 addresses only.

     -6          Forces fetch to use IPv6 addresses only.

     -A          Do not automatically follow "temporary" (302) redirects.
                 Some broken Web sites will return a redirect instead of a
                 not-found error when the requested object does not exist.

     -a          Automatically retry the transfer upon soft failures.

     -B bytes    Specify the read buffer size in bytes.  The default is 4096
                 bytes.  Attempts to set a buffer size lower than this will be
                 silently ignored.  The number of reads actually performed is
                 reported at verbosity level two or higher (see the -v flag).

     -d          Use a direct connection even if a proxy is configured.

     -F          In combination with the -r flag, forces a restart even if the
                 local and remote files have different modification times.
                 Implies -R.

     -i          Only fetch if it the output file is older than the referenced
                 URL.  This option is overriden by -o -.

     -l          If the target is a file-scheme URL, make a symbolic link to
                 the target rather than trying to copy it.

     -M

     -m          Mirror mode: if the file already exists locally and has the
                 same size and modification time as the remote file, it will
                 not be fetched.  Note that the -m and -r flags are mutually
                 exclusive.

     -N file     Use file instead of ~/.netrc to look up login names and
                 passwords for FTP sites.  See ftp(1) for a description of the
                 file format.  This feature is experimental.

     -n          Do not preserve the modification time of the transferred
                 file.

     -o file     Set the output file name to file.  By default, a "pathname"
                 is extracted from the specified URI, and its basename is used
                 as the name of the output file.  A file argument of '-'
                 indicates that results are to be directed to the standard
                 output.  If the file argument is a directory, fetched file(s)
                 will be placed within the directory, with name(s) selected as
                 in the default behaviour.

     -q          Quiet mode.

     -R          The output files are precious, and should not be deleted
                 under any circumstances, even if the transfer failed or was
                 incomplete.

     -r          Restart a previously interrupted transfer.  Note that the -m
                 and -r flags are mutually exclusive.

     -S bytes    Require the file size reported by the server to match the
                 specified value.  If it does not, a message is printed and
                 the file is not fetched.  If the server does not support
                 reporting file sizes, this option is ignored and the file is
                 fetched unconditionally.

     -s          Print the size in bytes of each requested file, without
                 fetching it.

     -T seconds  Set timeout value to seconds.  Overrides the environment
                 variables FTP_TIMEOUT for FTP transfers or HTTP_TIMEOUT for
                 HTTP transfers if set.

     -U          When using passive FTP, allocate the port for the data
                 connection from the low (default) port range.  See ip(4) for
                 details on how to specify which port range this corresponds
                 to.

     -v          Increase verbosity level.

     -w seconds  When the -a flag is specified, wait this many seconds between
                 successive retries.

     If fetch receives a SIGINFO signal (see the status argument for stty(1)),
     the current transfer rate statistics will be written to the standard
     error output, in the same format as the standard completion message.

EXIT STATUS
     The fetch command returns zero on success, or one on failure.  If
     multiple URLs are listed on the command line, fetch will attempt to
     retrieve each one of them in turn, and will return zero only if they were
     all successfully retrieved.

ENVIRONMENT
     FTP_TIMEOUT   Maximum time, in seconds, to wait before aborting an FTP
                   connection.

     HTTP_TIMEOUT  Maximum time, in seconds, to wait before aborting an HTTP
                   connection.

     See fetch(3) for a description of additional environment variables,
     including FETCH_BIND_ADDRESS, FTP_LOGIN, FTP_PASSIVE_MODE, FTP_PASSWORD,
     FTP_PROXY, ftp_proxy, HTTP_AUTH, HTTP_PROXY, http_proxy, HTTP_PROXY_AUTH,
     HTTP_REFERER, HTTP_USER_AGENT, NETRC, NO_PROXY and no_proxy.

SEE ALSO
     fetch(3)

HISTORY
     The fetch command appeared in FreeBSD 2.1.5.  This implementation first
     appeared in FreeBSD 4.1.

AUTHORS
     The original implementation of fetch was done by Jean-Marc Zucconi
     <jmz@FreeBSD.org>.  It was extensively re-worked for FreeBSD 2.2 by
     Garrett Wollman <wollman@FreeBSD.org>, and later completely rewritten to
     use the fetch(3) library by Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@FreeBSD.org>.

NOTES
     The -b and -t options are no longer supported and will generate warnings.
     They were workarounds for bugs in other OSes which this implementation
     does not trigger.

     One cannot both use the -h, -c, and -f options and specify URLs on the
     command line.

BSD                            February 5, 2009                            BSD

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | EXIT STATUS | ENVIRONMENT | SEE ALSO | HISTORY | AUTHORS | NOTES