Fri 09 Apr 2010 01:23:56 PM UTC, comment #1:
From the documentation:
‘-O file’
‘--output-document=file’
The documents will not be written to the appropriate files, but all will be concatenated together and written to file. If ‘-’ is used as file, documents will be printed to standard output, disabling link conversion. (Use ‘./-’ to print to a file literally named ‘-’.)
Use of ‘-O’ is not intended to mean simply “use the name file instead of the one in the URL;” rather, it is analogous to shell redirection: ‘wget -O file http://foo’ is intended to work like ‘wget -O - http://foo > file’; file will be truncated immediately, and all downloaded content will be written there.
For this reason, ‘-N’ (for timestamp-checking) is not supported in combination with ‘-O’: since file is always newly created, it will always have a very new timestamp. A warning will be issued if this combination is used.
Similarly, using ‘-r’ or ‘-p’ with ‘-O’ may not work as you expect: Wget won't just download the first file to file and then download the rest to their normal names: all downloaded content will be placed in file. This was disabled in version 1.11, but has been reinstated (with a warning) in 1.11.2, as there are some cases where this behavior can actually have some use.
Note that a combination with ‘-k’ is only permitted when downloading a single document, as in that case it will just convert all relative URIs to external ones; ‘-k’ makes no sense for multiple URIs when they're all being downloaded to a single file.
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The program is behaving according to the documentation ("since file is always newly created"). This also means that an existing file will always be truncated. Unless we get a buy-in from most of the users I don't see any easy way to change this short of adding a new option.
At best this call should be reclassified as a wish list item.
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