Its features include recursive download, conversion of links for offline viewing of local HTML, and support for proxies.

While Wget was inspired by features of some of the existing programs, it supported both HTTP and FTP and could be built using only the standard development tools found on every Unix system.

At that time many Unix users struggled behind extremely slow university and dial-up Internet connections, leading to a growing need for a downloading agent that could deal with transient network failures without assistance from the human operator.

When performing this kind of automatic mirroring of web sites, Wget supports the Robots Exclusion Standard (unless the option -e robots=off is used).

Wget is non-interactive in the sense that, once started, it does not require user interaction and does not need to control a TTY, being able to log its progress to a separate file for later inspection.

Written in a highly portable style of C with minimal dependencies on third-party libraries, Wget requires little more than a C compiler and a BSD-like interface to TCP/IP networking.

GNU Wget was written by Hrvoje Nikšić with contributions by many other people, including Dan Harkless, Ian Abbott, and Mauro Tortonesi.

The man page usually distributed on Unix-like systems is automatically generated from a subset of the Texinfo manual and falls under the terms of the same license.

The preferred method of contributing to Wget's code and documentation is through source updates in the form of textual patches generated by the diff utility.

[8] The source code can also be tracked via a remote version control repository that hosts revision history beginning with the 1.5.3 release.

[9] Prior to that, the source code had been hosted on (in reverse order): Bazaar,[10] Mercurial, Subversion, and via CVS.

When a sufficient number of features or bug fixes accumulate during development, Wget is released to the general public via the GNU FTP site and its mirrors.

An increase of the major version number represents large and possibly incompatible changes in Wget's behavior or a radical redesign of the code base.

The lead character, a somewhat fictionalized version of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, uses Wget to aggregate student photos from various Harvard University housing-facility directories.

[17][18][19] There exist clones of GNU Wget intended for embedded systems, which are often limited in memory and storage.