📝 Get rid of .wget-hsts from your home folder

(Note last modified 2026-06-13 - View change history)

By default, wget creates a file ~/.wget-hsts to store HSTS information for websites that wget makes requests to. If you find this annoying that wget is putting such a file right in the root of your home folder, wget has a command line argument --hsts-file that allows you to specify a different location for this file.

You could then wrap wget in an alias to point it somewhere else:

alias wget="wget --hsts-file $HOME/.config/wget-hsts"

…However, this will not work for scripts that will call wget. For that, you may want to create a wrapper script somewhere with higher priority in your PATH than the actual wget binary. For example, I have ~/.local/bin in my PATH before anything else, so I can create a file ~/.local/bin/wget with the following contents:

#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/bin/wget --hsts-file "$HOME/.config/wget-hsts" "$@"

Wget also has a global configuration file /etc/wgetrc where you could set the hsts-file option, but then you would need to hardcode it to somewhere all users on the system will write to. The per-user configuration file ~/.wgetrc can also be used… but that would defeat the point if you want to remove a file from your home folder.

If you want to disable HSTS in wget altogether there is also the --no-hsts argument, but I don’t know if I would recommend that.