what does wget -qO- 127.0.0.1 mean?

I have tried googling for an answer for an hour now and still no luck. Does anyone know what this command mean?

wget -qO- 127.0.0.1

I know wget is the Linux "web get" utility, and 127.0.0.1 is localhost. I have no idea however what the -qO- mean?

I also believe the above is different to wget -q -O 127.0.0.1 as from a simple run in the terminal is giving me different result.

Note: I am trying to understand this command from this Vagrant - Getting Started Tutorial.

Many thanks in advance.

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2 Answers

Your search-foo is incomplete. Try man wget, which says, in part:

 -O file --output-document=file The documents will not be written to the appropriate files, but all will be concatenated together and written to file. If - is used as file, documents will be printed to standard output, disabling link conversion. (Use ./- to print to a file literally named -.) Use of -O is not intended to mean simply "use the name file instead of the one in the URL;" rather, it is analogous to shell redirection: wget -O file is intended to work like wget -O - > file; file will be truncated immediately, and all downloaded content will be written there. For this reason, -N (for timestamp-checking) is not supported in combination with -O: since file is always newly created, it will always have a very new timestamp. A warning will be issued if this combination is used. Similarly, using -r or -p with -O may not work as you expect: Wget won't just download the first file to file and then download the rest to their normal names: all downloaded content will be placed in file. This was disabled in version 1.11, but has been reinstated (with a warning) in 1.11.2, as there are some cases where this behavior can actually have some use. Note that a combination with -k is only permitted when downloading a single document, as in that case it will just convert all relative URIs to external ones; -k makes no sense for multiple URIs when they're all being downloaded to a single file; -k can be used only when the output is a regular file.

and

 -q --quiet Turn off Wget's output.

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For this kind of questions, if you have a browser nearby you might find it handy to use explainshell.com (as man pages can be quite long to go through to find the parameters you interested in):

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