I want to use wget to download all .gif's in a directory, but don't know exactly what's there. So I just did a series of:
wget http://www.place.org/name001.gif

then 002.gif, etc.

But if the file is missing, I download an HTML page saying "not found".

How can I tell wget to fail silently if a file is not there? OR perhaps, since the server is detecting this and giving the error message, it is hopeless?

I'd think I should also be getting back an HTML 404 error code for file missing, but perhaps the server is masking that in the more polite web page error response.

Thanks,
Greg

Since this seems to be the server's doing, I would think what you have requested is hopeless. But I would think you could write a trivial script that downloads the file and uses the file command to determine if it is a gif and deletes it if it isn't. You could even automate the files you attempt to download to save yourself some tedium.

EDIT: On additional reflection, you might be able to use wget's --header option so your request looks like it's the result of the image being part of a web page. But unless you are fairly familiar with these internal workings (I am not), it is probably easier to impliment my previous suggestion.