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I have a crontab that wgets a PHP page every five minutes (just to run some the PHP code), and I want to send the output of the request to standard out, while sending the normal wget output to /dev/null (or otherwise hide it). I couldn't find it in the wget manual.

I'm looking for something like:

wget -o stdout http://whatever.com/page.php > /dev/null

Anyone know?

Sean Adkinson
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    Mistitled, should be "How do you redirect wget to null?". – Bob Stein Dec 30 '14 at 13:47
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    @BobStein-VisiBone I think it is titled correctly. I wanted the thing that is `wget`-ed to go to a `stdout`, and the normal `stdout` to go to `null` (i.e. ignore what it usually prints, and instead print the response body). – Sean Adkinson Dec 31 '14 at 01:24
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    Oh! I stand corrected. I have started using `wget http://example.com/page.php -qO-` (That's a capital Oh.) That standard-outputs ONLY the response body. Is that what you wanted? – Bob Stein Dec 31 '14 at 04:32
  • In case it helps someone (as per how I landed here), On a terminal of an AWS Cloud9 its wget -O - http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/public-hostname -q which gets me the public DNS (as doing web dev) – KevinY Jan 14 '21 at 20:43
  • Dealing with ampersands, etc. in the URL (e.g. `https://superuser.com/questions?tab=newest&page=542&pagesize=50`): See e.g. *[How can I download weblinks using wget which do not end with .html?](https://superuser.com/questions/543386)* – Peter Mortensen Feb 01 '21 at 14:44

5 Answers5

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wget -O - http://whatever.com/page.php > /dev/null

or, if you want to redirect standard error output also:

wget -O - http://whatever.com/page.php > /dev/null 2>&1

or, for codegolf :-)

wget -O-

Tomas
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    You may want to add `-nv` to avoid the progress indicator overwriting the output. – Tor Klingberg Nov 10 '15 at 15:25
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    This approach has a problem - if response status is not 200, it doesn't print body. Any thoughts to resolve it? – Imaskar Aug 13 '18 at 09:24
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    See answer from Martin Wang - you need to add -q to actually see the output. – Ondřej Stašek Mar 03 '20 at 12:03
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    I want to output IP address from website so i just put `wget -q -O - https://api.ipify.org` and it's output it to the shell . – Salem F Aug 21 '20 at 18:34
  • In the more general case, shouldn't the URL be quoted (or otherwise)? In case it contains something the shell (say, on Linux or Windows) is very interested in, such as ampersands or semicolons. Sample: `https://superuser.com/questions?tab=newest&page=542&pagesize=50`. Used as is on Linux, this leads to output like "`[1] 9663 [2] 9664`" (9663 and 9664 are presumably process IDs) - the effective URL used by wget will be cut off - `https://superuser.com/questions?tab=newest` – Peter Mortensen Feb 01 '21 at 14:20
  • @PeterMortensen well yeah of course, you have to quote URLs with special characters :-) With simple urls though, noone will bother with quoting. This is the same with filenames. This is the basic shellwork though, isn't related to wget in any way. – Tomas Feb 01 '21 at 18:03
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    This redirects all output to /dev/null: **wget -O - http://whatever.com/page.php > /dev/null** You want the following (to redirect stderror only): **wget -O - http://whatever.com/page.php 2> /dev/null** – NeoH4x0r Jan 18 '22 at 21:48
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A simpler version

wget -qO- http://example.com

equivalent to

wget -q -O - http://example.com

where

  • -q turns off the output of log, including error information
  • -O -, equivlalent to -O /dev/stdout, means dump the web page to a file named /dev/stdout.
Martin Wang
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    The first one works with BusyBox's wget, which is very helpful. I don't think it likes having a space after the `O` – zymhan Jul 19 '19 at 15:10
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    `wget --quiet --output-document=/dev/stdout http://localhost:8080/commands/srvr | grep "server_state"` to show [zookeeper state](https://zookeeper.apache.org/doc/r3.5.5/zookeeperAdmin.html#sc_adminserver) – Nick Dong May 21 '22 at 13:12
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wget -qO /dev/null http://whatever.com/page.php
  • -q to make it quiet
  • -O /dev/null to ignore the page contents
unbeli
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12

You can also try:

wget -q -O - http://whatever.com/page.php > /dev/null

the -q will make it "quiet"

Or have the file go to some temp html page that you don't mind having. whatever.com/tempFile.html

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wget -O /dev/null http://example.com/