1 GNU Wget NEWS -- history of user-visible changes.
3 Copyright (C) 1997, 1998, 2000, 2001 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4 See the end for copying conditions.
6 Please send GNU Wget bug reports to <bug-wget@gnu.org>.
10 ** A new progress indicator is now available and used by default.
11 You can choose the progress bar type with `--progress=TYPE'. Two
12 types are available, "bar" (the new default), and "dot" (the old
13 dotted indicator). You can permanently revert to the old progress
14 indicator by putting `progress = dot' in your `.wgetrc'.
16 ** "Recursive retrieval" has been revamped:
18 *** Wget now traverses links breadth-first. This makes the
19 calculation of depth much more reliable than before. Also, recursive
20 downloads are faster and consume *significantly* less memory than
23 *** Links are converted only when the entire retrieval is complete.
24 This is the only safe thing to do, as only then is it known what URLs
27 *** BASE tags are handled correctly when converting links. Since Wget
28 already resolves <base href="..."> when resolving handling URLs, link
29 conversion now makes the BASE tags point to an empty string.
31 ** Host directories now contain port information if the URL is at a
34 ** Wget now supports the robots.txt directives specified in
35 <http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/norobots-rfc.html>.
37 ** URL parser has been fixed, especially the infamous overzealous
38 quoting bug. Wget no longer dequotes reserved characters, e.g. `%3F'
39 is no longer translated to `?', nor `%2B' to `+'. Unsafe characters
40 which are not reserved are still escaped, of course.
42 * Wget 1.7.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
44 * Changes in Wget 1.7.
46 ** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
47 use the `--with-ssl' configure flag. You need to have OpenSSL
50 ** Cookies are now supported. Wget will accept cookies sent by the
51 server and return them in later requests. Additionally, it can load
52 and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.
54 ** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
55 Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
56 many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
57 stressing for the server and the network.
59 ** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
62 ** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
63 puts you in some directory other than '/'.
65 ** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'. For
66 example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
69 ** The HTML parser has been rewritten. The new one works more
70 reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
71 are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
72 skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc. It is
75 ** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.
77 ** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
78 where appropriate. This results in huge speedups when retrieving
79 large sites (thousands of documents).
81 ** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
82 documentation. (The last version that shipped with a man page was
83 1.4.5). To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
84 distribution installed on your system.
88 ** Administrative changes.
90 *** Maintainership. Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
91 Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
92 real job as well). Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
93 are being helped by many other people.
95 *** Web page. Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
98 http://sunsite.dk/wget/
100 *** Anonymous CVS. Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
101 sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server. Take a look at
102 the web page for downloading instructions.
104 ** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
105 modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed. When
106 using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.
108 ** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
109 Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
110 retrieval. -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
111 opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.
113 ** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
114 of failed downloads. Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
115 first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS. waitretry is set to 10 by
116 default in the system wgetrc.
118 ** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
119 Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
120 page properly (e.g. inlined images).
122 ** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
123 to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
124 "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".
126 ** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean". Can be set to on, off,
127 always, or never. This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline. So far,
128 passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.
130 ** A number of new translation files have been added.
132 ** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts
133 bound to multiple IP addresses.
135 ** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.
137 * Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
139 * Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
141 * Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
143 * Changes in Wget 1.5.0
145 ** Wget speaks many languages!
147 On systems with gettext(), Wget will output messages in the language
148 set by the current locale, if available. At this time we support
149 Czech, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
151 ** Opie (Skey) is now supported with FTP.
153 ** HTTP Digest Access Authentication (RFC2069) is now supported.
155 ** The new `-b' option makes Wget go to background automatically.
157 ** The `-I' and `-X' options now accept wildcard arguments.
159 ** The `-w' option now accepts suffixes `s' for seconds, `m' for
160 minutes, `h' for hours, `d' for days and `w' for weeks.
162 ** Upon getting SIGHUP, the whole previous log is now copied to
165 ** Wget now understands proxy settings with explicit usernames and
166 passwords, e.g. `http://user:password@proxy.foo.com/'.
168 ** You can use the new `--cut-dirs' option to make Wget create less
171 ** The `;type=a' appendix to FTP URLs is now recognized. For
172 instance, the following command will retrieve the welcoming message in
175 wget "ftp://ftp.somewhere.com/welcome.msg;type=a"
177 ** `--help' and `--version' options have been redone to to conform to
178 standards set by other GNU utilities.
180 ** Wget should now be compilable under MS Windows environment. MS
181 Visual C++ and Watcom C have been used successfully.
183 ** If the file length is known, percentages are displayed during
186 ** The manual page, now hopelessly out of date, is no longer
187 distributed with Wget.
189 * Wget 1.4.5 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
191 * Wget 1.4.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
193 * Changes in Wget 1.4.3
195 ** Wget is now a GNU utility.
197 ** Can do passive FTP.
201 ** Info documentation expanded.
203 ** Compiles on pre-ANSI compilers.
205 ** Global wgetrc now goes to /usr/local/etc (i.e. $sysconfdir).
209 * Changes in Wget 1.4.2
211 ** New mirror site at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/,
212 thanks to Karsten Thygesen.
214 ** Mailing list! Mail to wget-request@sunsite.auc.dk to subscribe.
216 ** New option --delete-after for proxy prefetching.
218 ** New option --retr-symlinks to retrieve symbolic links like plain
221 ** rmold.pl -- script to remove files deleted on the remote server
223 ** --convert-links should work now.
227 * Changes in Wget 1.4.1
231 ** Added -I (the opposite of -X).
233 ** Dot tracing is now customizable; try wget --dot-style=binary
235 * Changes in Wget 1.4.0
237 ** Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of
238 Geturl. Although many things look suspiciously similar, most of the
239 stuff was rewritten, like recursive retrieval, HTTP, FTP and mostly
240 everything else. Wget should be now easier to debug, maintain and,
241 most importantly, use.
243 ** Recursive HTTP should now work without glitches, even with Location
244 changes, server-generated directory listings and other naughty stuff.
246 ** HTTP regetting is supported on servers that support Range
247 specification. WWW authorization is supported -- try
248 wget http://user:password@hostname/
250 ** FTP support was rewritten and widely enhanced. Globbing should now
251 work flawlessly. Symbolic links are created locally. All the
252 information the Unix-style ls listing can give is now recognized.
254 ** Recursive FTP is supported, e.g.
255 wget -r ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/
257 ** You can specify "rejected" directories, to which you do not want to
258 enter, e.g. with wget -X /pub
260 ** Time-stamping is supported, with both HTTP and FTP. Try wget -N URL.
262 ** A new texinfo reference manual is provided. It can be read with
263 Emacs, standalone info, or converted to HTML, dvi or postscript.
265 ** Fixed a long-standing bug, so that Wget now works over SLIP
268 ** You can have a system-wide wgetrc (/usr/local/lib/wgetrc by
269 default). Settings in $HOME/.wgetrc override the global ones, of
272 ** You can set up quota in .wgetrc to prevent sucking too much
273 data. Try `quota = 5M' in .wgetrc (or quota = 100K if you want your
274 sysadmin to like you).
276 ** Download rate is printed after retrieval.
278 ** Wget now sends the `Referer' header when retrieving
281 ** With the new --no-parent option Wget can retrieve FTP recursively
282 through a proxy server.
284 ** HTML parser, as well as the whole of Wget was rewritten to be much
285 faster and less memory-consuming (yes, both).
287 ** Absolute links can be converted to relative links locally. Check
290 ** Wget catches hangup, filtering the output to a log file and
291 resuming work. Try kill -HUP %?wget.
293 ** User-defined headers can be sent. Try
295 wget http://fly.cc.her.hr/ --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2'
297 ** Acceptance/Rejection lists may contain wildcards.
299 ** Wget can display HTTP headers and/or FTP server response with the
300 new `-S' option. It can save the original HTTP headers with `-s'.
302 ** socks library is now supported (thanks to Antonio Rosella
303 <Antonio.Rosella@agip.it>). Configure with --with-socks.
305 ** There is a nicer display of REST-ed output.
307 ** Many new options (like -x to force directory hierarchy, or -m to
308 turn on mirroring options).
310 ** Wget is now distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
312 ** Lots of small features I can't remember. :-)
314 ** A host of bugfixes.
316 * Changes in Geturl 1.3
318 ** Added FTP globbing support (ftp://fly.cc.fer.hr/*)
320 ** Added support for no_proxy
322 ** Added support for ftp://user:password@host/
324 ** Added support for %xx in URL syntax
326 ** More natural command-line options
328 ** Added -e switch to execute .geturlrc commands from the command-line
330 ** Added support for robots.txt
332 ** Fixed some minor bugs
334 * Geturl 1.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
336 * Changes in Geturl 1.1
338 ** REST supported in FTP
340 ** Proxy servers supported
342 ** GNU getopt used, which enables command-line arguments to be ordered
343 as you wish, e.g. geturl http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -vo log is the same as
344 geturl -vo log http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
346 ** Netscape-compatible URL syntax for HTTP supported: host[:port]/dir/file
348 ** NcFTP-compatible colon URL syntax for FTP supported: host:/dir/file
350 ** <base href="xxx"> supported
352 ** autoconf supported
354 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
355 Copyright information:
357 Copyright (C) 1997, 1998, 2000, 2001 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
359 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
360 copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that
361 the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus
362 giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
364 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this
365 document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions,
366 provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last