What Does this Phrase Mean

If you use the "dir" function with the "/s" switch, you get a listing of all files, subdirectories, and files in those subdirectories of the root. That's a recursive directory listing. Wget does the same thing with the virtual directories of a web site, listing the contents of the root and all subdirectories, including the full path to each item.

From the wget man page:

"Wget is capable of descending recursively through the structure of HTML documents and FTP directory trees, making a local copy of the directory hierarchy similar to the one on the remote server. This feature can be used to mirror archives and home pages, or traverse the web in search of data, like a WWW robot. In that spirit, Wget understands the `norobots' convention."

Thor