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casper
Asked: 2011-05-09 04:58:27 +0800 CST

Wget: Is there a way to pass username and password from a file?

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Is there a way to pass the username and password from a file instead of the command line via --user and --password?

Background: I want to run wget via cron and don't want the username/password show up in process view

password credentials user-accounts wget

3 Answers

  1. I'm surprised nobody mentioned the .netrc file. First create the file if it doesn't exists and set safe permissions:

    touch ~/.netrc
chmod 600 ~/.netrc

    Then you can add the hostname, username and password all on one line:

    echo 'machine example.com login casper password CasperPassword' >> ~/.netrc

    Then when you do wget https://example.com and the server responds with 401 Authorization Required, wget will retry with the username and password from the ~/.netrc file.

    When using this from cron make sure you have the right HOME directory. Often cron sets HOME=/ (in that case you would have to create the file as /.netrc, but it's better to set a proper HOME at the beginning of your script, like export HOME=/root).

    You can specify multiple hosts in ~/.netrc, one per line. More info in man netrc.

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  2. Best Answer

    Use a .wgetrc file (GNU manual) in which you can set username and passwords for either or both ftp and http.

    To use the same credentials for both specify

    user=casper
password=CasperPassword

    or individually

    ftp_user=casperftp
ftp_password=casperftppass
http_user=casperhttp
http_password=casperhttppass
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  3. In many regards curl can be a better choice. Wget became a bit stale over time.

    curl's -n switch can be used for this task: http://curl.haxx.se/docs/manpage.html#-n

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