From 524f26a200fec61a980c24917d6f2c82d224ce6b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Darshit Shah Date: Fri, 6 Mar 2015 22:00:24 +0530 Subject: [PATCH] Docs: --post-file is binary data Wget considers the file mentioned in the --post-file argument as a binary file and does not strip any control characters. The lack of this information in the documentation can cause a lot of headaches debugging for a simple issue --- doc/wget.texi | 5 +++++ 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+) diff --git a/doc/wget.texi b/doc/wget.texi index b90ec4bb..5a214cf0 100644 --- a/doc/wget.texi +++ b/doc/wget.texi @@ -1521,6 +1521,11 @@ Please note that wget does not require the content to be of the form simply transmit whatever data is provided to it. Most servers however expect the POST data to be in the above format when processing HTML Forms. +When sending a POST request using the @samp{--post-file} option, Wget treats +the file as a binary file and will send every character in the POST request +without stripping trailing newline or formfeed characters. Any other control +characters in the text will also be sent as-is in the POST request. + Please be aware that Wget needs to know the size of the POST data in advance. Therefore the argument to @code{--post-file} must be a regular file; specifying a FIFO or something like @file{/dev/stdin} won't work.