Maciej Pilichowski recommends this behavior when --progress=bar is explicitly given, in combination with -nv, which had occurred to me as well. However, this is complicated by the way command-line arguments and wgetrc commands are done; we may not wish wgetrc commands to cause this effect.

Wget non verbose switch is nearly the same as quiet switch. Just one line tells the user when a file finished.

What I miss from non verbose switch is some compact information of the download information like percentage, download rate and ETA. Especially useful to see if a download actually starts or the server is not capable to answer.

This non verbose switch change is very useful for Gentoo where they use Wget to fetch the source tarballs for their packages and sometimes the mirrors are unresponsive. So I can react whereas with actual non verbose switch I could not. Sure there are other examples where this change is useful.

My patch enables that informations to be printed while downloading for non verbose switch.


Example Output:


verbose, default
______________
die@ana:/tmp $ wget http://specs.openoffice.org/chart/ErrorBars.odt
--2008-02-29 17:02:25--  http://specs.openoffice.org/chart/ErrorBars.odt
Auflösen des Hostnamen »specs.openoffice.org«.... 204.16.104.2
Verbindungsaufbau zu specs.openoffice.org|204.16.104.2|:80... verbunden.
HTTP Anforderung gesendet, warte auf Antwort... 200 OK
Länge: 154159 (151K) [application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text]
In »ErrorBars.odt« speichern.

100%[===============================>] 150K  123K/s   in 1,2s         

2008-02-29 17:02:27 (123 KB/s) - »ErrorBars.odt« gespeichert [154159/154159]
die@ana:/tmp $


quiet
______________
die@ana:/tmp $ wget -q http://specs.openoffice.org/chart/ErrorBars.odt
die@ana:/tmp $


non verbose, here we see the change
______________
die@ana:/tmp $ wget -nv http://specs.openoffice.org/chart/ErrorBars.odt
100% 150K  123K/s   in 1,2s                                                                                                                                                                                

2008-02-29 17:02:37 URL:http://specs.openoffice.org/chart/ErrorBars.odt [154159/154159] -> "ErrorBars.odt.1" [1]
die@ana:/tmp $