1 GNU Wget NEWS -- history of user-visible changes.
3 Copyright (C) 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4 See the end for copying conditions.
6 Please send GNU Wget bug reports to <bug-wget@gnu.org>.
8 * Changes in Wget 1.10.
10 ** Downloading files larger than 2GB, sometimes referred to as "large
11 files", now works on systems that support them. This includes the
12 majority of modern Unixes, as well as MS Windows.
14 ** IPv6 is now supported by Wget. Unlike the experimental code in
15 1.9, this version supports dual-family systems. The new flags
16 `--inet4' and `--inet6' (or `-4' and `-6' for short) force the use of
17 IPv4 and IPv6 respectively. Note that IPv6 support has not yet been
20 ** Microsoft's proprietary "NTLM" method of HTTP authentication is now
21 supported. This authentication method is undocumented and only used
22 by IIS. Note that *proxy* authentication is not supported in this
23 release; you can only authenticate to the target web site.
25 ** Wget no longer truncates partially downloaded files when download
26 has to start over because the server doesn't support Range. Instead,
27 with such servers Wget now simply ignores the data up to the byte
28 where the last attempt left off, and only then continues appending to
29 the file. That way the downloaded file never shrinks, and download
30 retries from servers without support for partial downloads work even
31 when downloading to stdout.
35 *** SSL/TLS downloads now attempt to verify the server's certificate
36 against the recognized certificate authorities. This requires CA
37 certificates to have been installed in a location visible to the
38 OpenSSL library. If this is not the case, you can get the bundle
39 yourself from a source you trust (for example, the bundle extracted
40 from Mozilla available at http://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html),
41 and point Wget to the PEM file using the `--ca-certificate'
42 command-line option or the corresponding `.wgetrc' command.
44 *** Secure downloads now verify that the host name in the URL matches
45 the "common name" in the certificate presented by the server.
47 *** Although the above checks provide more secure downloads, they
48 unavoidably break interoperability with some sites that worked with
49 previous versions, particularly those using self-signed, expired, or
50 otherwise invalid certificates. If you encounter "certificate
51 verification" errors or complaints that "common name doesn't match
52 requested host name" and are convinced of the site's authenticity, you
53 can use `--no-check-certificate' to bypass both checks.
55 *** Talking to SSL/TLS servers over proxies now actually works.
56 Previous versions of Wget erroneously sent GET requests for https
57 URLs. Wget 1.10 utilizes the CONNECT method designed for this
60 *** The SSL/TLS-related options have been redesigned and, for the
61 first time, documented in the manual. The old, undocumented, options
62 are no longer supported.
64 ** Passive FTP is now the default FTP transfer mode. Use
65 `--no-passive-ftp' or specify `passive_ftp = off' in your init file to
66 revert to the old behavior.
68 ** The `--header' option can now be used to override generated
69 headers. For example, `wget --header="Host: foo.bar"
70 http://127.0.0.1' tells Wget to connect to localhost, but to specify
71 "foo.bar" in the `Host' header. In previous versions such use of
72 `--header' lead to duplicate headers in HTTP requests.
74 ** The responses without headers, aka "HTTP 0.9" responses, are
75 detected and handled. Although HTTP 0.9 has long been obsolete, it is
76 still occasionally used, sometimes by accident.
78 ** The progress bar is now updated regularly even when the data does
79 not arrive from the network.
81 ** Wget no longer preserves permissions of files retrieved by FTP by
82 default. Anonymous FTP servers frequently use permissions like "664",
83 which might not be what the user wants. The new option
84 `--preserve-permissions' and the corresponding `.wgetrc' variable can
85 be used to revert to the old behavior.
87 ** The new option `--protocol-directories' instructs Wget to also use
88 the protocol name as a directory component of local file names.
90 ** Options that previously unconditionally set or unset various flags
91 are now boolean options that can be invoked as either `--OPTION' or
92 `--no-OPTION'. Options that required an argument "on" or "off" have
93 also been changed this way, but they still accept the old syntax for
94 backward compatibility. For example, instead of `--glob=off' you can
97 Allowing `--no-OPTION' for every `--OPTION' and the other way around
98 is useful because it allows the user to override non-default behavior
99 specified via `.wgetrc'.
101 ** The new option `--keep-session-cookies' causes `--save-cookies' to
102 save session cookies (normally only kept in memory) along with the
103 permanent ones. This is useful because many sites track important
104 information, such as whether the user has authenticated, in session
105 cookies. With this option multiple Wget runs are treated as a single
108 ** Wget now supports the --ftp-user and --ftp-password command
109 switches to set username and password for FTP, and the --user and
110 --password command switches to set username and password for both FTP
111 and HTTP. The --http-passwd and --proxy-passwd command switches have
112 been renamed to --http-password and --proxy-password respectively, and
113 the related http_passwd and proxy_passwd .wgetrc commands to
114 http_password and proxy_password respectively. The login and passwd
115 .wgetrc commands have been deprecated.
117 * `wget -b' now works correctly under Windows.
119 * Wget 1.9.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
121 * Changes in Wget 1.9.
123 ** It is now possible to specify that POST method be used for HTTP
124 requests. For example, `wget --post-data="id=foo&data=bar" URL' will
125 send a POST request with the specified contents.
127 ** IPv6 support is available, although it's still experimental.
129 ** The `--timeout' option now also affects DNS lookup and establishing
130 the TCP connection. Previously it only affected reading and writing
131 data. Those three timeouts can be set separately using
132 `--dns-timeout', `--connection-timeout', and `--read-timeout',
135 ** Download speed shown by the progress bar is based on the data
136 recently read, rather than the average speed of the entire download.
137 The ETA projection is still based on the overall average.
139 ** It is now possible to connect to FTP servers through FWTK
140 firewalls. Set ftp_proxy to an FTP URL, and Wget will automatically
141 log on to the proxy as "username@host".
143 ** The new option `--retry-connrefused' makes Wget retry downloads
144 even in the face of refused connections, which are otherwise
145 considered a fatal error.
147 ** The new option `--no-dns-cache' may be used to prevent Wget from
150 ** Wget no longer escapes characters in local file names based on
151 whether they're appropriate in URLs. Escaping can still occur for
152 nonprintable characters or for '/', but no longer for frequent
153 characters such as space. You can use the new option
154 --restrict-file-names to relax or strengthen these rules, which can be
155 useful if you dislike the default or if you're downloading to
156 non-native partitions.
158 ** Handling of HTML comments has been dumbed down to conform to what
159 users expect and other browsers do: instead of being treated as SGML
160 declaration, a comment is terminated at the first occurrence of "-->".
161 Use `--strict-comments' to revert to the old behavior.
163 ** Wget now correctly handles relative URIs that begin with "//", such
164 as "//img.foo.com/foo.jpg".
166 ** Boolean options in `.wgetrc' and on the command line now accept
167 values "yes" and "no" along with the traditional "on" and "off".
169 ** It is now possible to specify decimal values for timeouts, waiting
170 periods, and download rate. For instance, `--wait=0.5' now works as
171 expected, as does `--dns-timeout=0.5' and even `--limit-rate=2.5k'.
173 * Wget 1.8.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
175 * Wget 1.8.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
177 * Changes in Wget 1.8.
179 ** A new progress indicator is now available and used by default.
180 You can choose the progress bar type with `--progress=TYPE'. Two
181 types are available, "bar" (the new default), and "dot" (the old
182 dotted indicator). You can permanently revert to the old progress
183 indicator by putting `progress = dot' in your `.wgetrc'.
185 ** You can limit the download rate of the retrieval using the
186 `--limit-rate' option. For example, `wget --limit-rate=15k URL' will
187 tell Wget not to download the body of the URL faster than 15 kilobytes
190 ** Recursive retrieval and link conversion have been revamped:
192 *** Wget now traverses links breadth-first. This makes the
193 calculation of depth much more reliable than before. Also, recursive
194 downloads are faster and consume *significantly* less memory than
197 *** Links are converted only when the entire retrieval is complete.
198 This is the only safe thing to do, as only then is it known what URLs
199 have been downloaded.
201 *** BASE tags are handled correctly when converting links. Since Wget
202 already resolves <base href="..."> when resolving handling URLs, link
203 conversion now makes the BASE tags point to an empty string.
205 *** HTML anchors are now handled correctly. Links to an anchor in the
206 same document (<a href="#anchorname">), which used to confuse Wget,
207 are now converted correctly.
209 *** When in page-requisites (-p) mode, no-parent (-np) is ignored when
210 retrieving for inline images, stylesheets, and other documents needed
213 *** Page-requisites (-p) mode now works with frames. In other words,
214 `wget -p URL-THAT-USES-FRAMES' will now download the frame HTML files,
215 and all the files that they need to be displayed properly.
217 ** `--base' now works conjunction with `--input-file', providing a
218 base for each URL and thereby allowing the URLs in the file to be
221 ** If a host has more than one IP address, Wget uses the other
222 addresses when accessing the first one fails.
224 ** Host directories now contain port information if the URL is at a
227 ** Wget now supports the robots.txt directives specified in
228 <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt>.
230 ** URL parser has been fixed, especially the infamous overzealous
231 quoting. Wget no longer dequotes reserved characters, e.g. `%3F' is
232 no longer translated to `?', nor `%2B' to `+'. Unsafe characters
233 which are not reserved are still escaped, of course.
235 ** No more than 20 successive redirections are allowed.
237 * Wget 1.7.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
239 * Changes in Wget 1.7.
241 ** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
242 use the `--with-ssl' configure flag. You need to have OpenSSL
245 ** Cookies are now supported. Wget will accept cookies sent by the
246 server and return them in later requests. Additionally, it can load
247 and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.
249 ** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
250 Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
251 many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
252 stressing for the server and the network.
254 ** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
257 ** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
258 puts you in some directory other than '/'.
260 ** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'. For
261 example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
264 ** The HTML parser has been rewritten. The new one works more
265 reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
266 are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
267 skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc. It is
270 ** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.
272 ** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
273 where appropriate. This results in huge speedups when retrieving
274 large sites (thousands of documents).
276 ** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
277 documentation. (The last version that shipped with a man page was
278 1.4.5). To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
279 distribution installed on your system.
281 * Changes in Wget 1.6
283 ** Administrative changes.
285 *** Maintainership. Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
286 Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
287 real job as well). Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
288 are being helped by many other people.
290 *** Web page. Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
293 http://sunsite.dk/wget/
295 *** Anonymous CVS. Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
296 sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server. Take a look at
297 the web page for downloading instructions.
299 ** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
300 modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed. When
301 using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.
303 ** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
304 Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
305 retrieval. -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
306 opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.
308 ** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
309 of failed downloads. Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
310 first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS. waitretry is set to 10 by
311 default in the system wgetrc.
313 ** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
314 Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
315 page properly (e.g. inlined images).
317 ** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
318 to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
319 "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".
321 ** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean". Can be set to on, off,
322 always, or never. This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline. So far,
323 passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.
325 ** A number of new translation files have been added.
327 ** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts
328 bound to multiple IP addresses.
330 ** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.
332 * Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
334 * Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
336 * Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
338 * Changes in Wget 1.5.0
340 ** Wget speaks many languages!
342 On systems with gettext(), Wget will output messages in the language
343 set by the current locale, if available. At this time we support
344 Czech, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
346 ** Opie (Skey) is now supported with FTP.
348 ** HTTP Digest Access Authentication (RFC2069) is now supported.
350 ** The new `-b' option makes Wget go to background automatically.
352 ** The `-I' and `-X' options now accept wildcard arguments.
354 ** The `-w' option now accepts suffixes `s' for seconds, `m' for
355 minutes, `h' for hours, `d' for days and `w' for weeks.
357 ** Upon getting SIGHUP, the whole previous log is now copied to
360 ** Wget now understands proxy settings with explicit usernames and
361 passwords, e.g. `http://user:password@proxy.foo.com/'.
363 ** You can use the new `--cut-dirs' option to make Wget create less
366 ** The `;type=a' appendix to FTP URLs is now recognized. For
367 instance, the following command will retrieve the welcoming message in
370 wget "ftp://ftp.somewhere.com/welcome.msg;type=a"
372 ** `--help' and `--version' options have been redone to to conform to
373 standards set by other GNU utilities.
375 ** Wget should now be compilable under MS Windows environment. MS
376 Visual C++ and Watcom C have been used successfully.
378 ** If the file length is known, percentages are displayed during
381 ** The manual page, now hopelessly out of date, is no longer
382 distributed with Wget.
384 * Wget 1.4.5 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
386 * Wget 1.4.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
388 * Changes in Wget 1.4.3
390 ** Wget is now a GNU utility.
392 ** Can do passive FTP.
396 ** Info documentation expanded.
398 ** Compiles on pre-ANSI compilers.
400 ** Global wgetrc now goes to /usr/local/etc (i.e. $sysconfdir).
404 * Changes in Wget 1.4.2
406 ** New mirror site at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/,
407 thanks to Karsten Thygesen.
409 ** Mailing list! Mail to wget-request@sunsite.auc.dk to subscribe.
411 ** New option --delete-after for proxy prefetching.
413 ** New option --retr-symlinks to retrieve symbolic links like plain
416 ** rmold.pl -- script to remove files deleted on the remote server
418 ** --convert-links should work now.
422 * Changes in Wget 1.4.1
426 ** Added -I (the opposite of -X).
428 ** Dot tracing is now customizable; try wget --dot-style=binary
430 * Changes in Wget 1.4.0
432 ** Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of
433 Geturl. Although many things look suspiciously similar, most of the
434 stuff was rewritten, like recursive retrieval, HTTP, FTP and mostly
435 everything else. Wget should be now easier to debug, maintain and,
436 most importantly, use.
438 ** Recursive HTTP should now work without glitches, even with Location
439 changes, server-generated directory listings and other naughty stuff.
441 ** HTTP regetting is supported on servers that support Range
442 specification. WWW authorization is supported -- try
443 wget http://user:password@hostname/
445 ** FTP support was rewritten and widely enhanced. Globbing should now
446 work flawlessly. Symbolic links are created locally. All the
447 information the Unix-style ls listing can give is now recognized.
449 ** Recursive FTP is supported, e.g.
450 wget -r ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/
452 ** You can specify "rejected" directories, to which you do not want to
453 enter, e.g. with wget -X /pub
455 ** Time-stamping is supported, with both HTTP and FTP. Try wget -N URL.
457 ** A new texinfo reference manual is provided. It can be read with
458 Emacs, standalone info, or converted to HTML, dvi or postscript.
460 ** Fixed a long-standing bug, so that Wget now works over SLIP
463 ** You can have a system-wide wgetrc (/usr/local/lib/wgetrc by
464 default). Settings in $HOME/.wgetrc override the global ones, of
467 ** You can set up quota in .wgetrc to prevent sucking too much
468 data. Try `quota = 5M' in .wgetrc (or quota = 100K if you want your
469 sysadmin to like you).
471 ** Download rate is printed after retrieval.
473 ** Wget now sends the `Referer' header when retrieving
476 ** With the new --no-parent option Wget can retrieve FTP recursively
477 through a proxy server.
479 ** HTML parser, as well as the whole of Wget was rewritten to be much
480 faster and less memory-consuming (yes, both).
482 ** Absolute links can be converted to relative links locally. Check
485 ** Wget catches hangup, filtering the output to a log file and
486 resuming work. Try kill -HUP %?wget.
488 ** User-defined headers can be sent. Try
490 wget http://fly.cc.her.hr/ --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2'
492 ** Acceptance/Rejection lists may contain wildcards.
494 ** Wget can display HTTP headers and/or FTP server response with the
495 new `-S' option. It can save the original HTTP headers with `-s'.
497 ** socks library is now supported (thanks to Antonio Rosella
498 <Antonio.Rosella@agip.it>). Configure with --with-socks.
500 ** There is a nicer display of REST-ed output.
502 ** Many new options (like -x to force directory hierarchy, or -m to
503 turn on mirroring options).
505 ** Wget is now distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
507 ** Lots of small features I can't remember. :-)
509 ** A host of bugfixes.
511 * Changes in Geturl 1.3
513 ** Added FTP globbing support (ftp://fly.cc.fer.hr/*)
515 ** Added support for no_proxy
517 ** Added support for ftp://user:password@host/
519 ** Added support for %xx in URL syntax
521 ** More natural command-line options
523 ** Added -e switch to execute .geturlrc commands from the command-line
525 ** Added support for robots.txt
527 ** Fixed some minor bugs
529 * Geturl 1.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
531 * Changes in Geturl 1.1
533 ** REST supported in FTP
535 ** Proxy servers supported
537 ** GNU getopt used, which enables command-line arguments to be ordered
538 as you wish, e.g. geturl http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -vo log is the same as
539 geturl -vo log http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
541 ** Netscape-compatible URL syntax for HTTP supported: host[:port]/dir/file
543 ** NcFTP-compatible colon URL syntax for FTP supported: host:/dir/file
545 ** <base href="xxx"> supported
547 ** autoconf supported
549 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
550 Copyright information:
552 Copyright (C) 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
554 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
555 copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that
556 the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus
557 giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
559 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this
560 document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions,
561 provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last