[plug] wget query

[Greg Gamble]

Hi,

  I agree with almost everything Bret has to say about wget ...
it's a wonderful downloading tool with all the advantages he
mentions over netscape ... but the tilde in a URL is not a problem

> It is quite useful; except where a path includes extended ASCII
> characters, such as the tilde.

%7E is just a translation of ~ which is an `active' character
... as I understand it, if a browser sees `%7E' in a URL it
understands it as `~'.

> Then, it appears, the files have to be downloaded manually and singly.

No ... you just end up with a directory name that starts with %7E
... all the files in that directory come across fine :)

> If I am wrong in any of this, or, if anyone knows how to get around
> the tilde problem, constructive advice would be appreciated.

I don't believe there is a problem ... %7E and ~ in an href or URL
should be treated by a web browser as synonymous ... however to
cd to a directory starting with a ~ you need to escape it (with a 
\ or some-such).  In my experience with this I only wanted a directory
of files well below the %7E... directory and just moved that directory
to a more suitable place in my local web tree and then deleted the
remaining directory structure that I had wget-ed (wgot?) ... as, I
say: ~-problem ... what problem?

  Regards,
  Greg Gamble <gregg at maths.uwa.edu.au>