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 1.11.
10 ** The "lockable boolean" argument type is no longer supported. It
11 was only used by the passive_ftp .wgetrc setting. If you're running
12 broken scripts or Perl modules that unconditionally specify
13 `--passive-ftp' and your firewall disallows it, you can override them
14 by replacing wget with a script that execs wget "$@" --no-passive-ftp.
16 ** The source code has migrated from CVS to Subversion. The
17 repository is available at http://svn.dotsrc.org/repo/wget/; to
18 checkout the trunk to a directory named `wget', use something like
19 `svn checkout http://svn.dotsrc.org/repo/wget/trunk/ wget'.
21 * Changes in Wget 1.10.
23 ** Downloading files larger than 2GB, sometimes referred to as "large
24 files", now works on systems that support them. This includes the
25 majority of modern Unixes, as well as MS Windows.
27 ** IPv6 is now supported by Wget. Unlike the experimental code in
28 1.9, this version supports dual-family systems. The new flags
29 `--inet4' and `--inet6' (or `-4' and `-6' for short) force the use of
30 IPv4 and IPv6 respectively. Note that IPv6 support has not yet been
33 ** Microsoft's proprietary "NTLM" method of HTTP authentication is now
34 supported. This authentication method is undocumented and only used
35 by IIS. Note that *proxy* authentication is not supported in this
36 release; you can only authenticate to the target web site.
38 ** Wget no longer truncates partially downloaded files when download
39 has to start over because the server doesn't support Range. Instead,
40 with such servers Wget now simply ignores the data up to the byte
41 where the last attempt left off, and only then continues appending to
42 the file. That way the downloaded file never shrinks, and download
43 retries from servers without support for partial downloads work even
44 when downloading to stdout.
48 *** SSL/TLS downloads now attempt to verify the server's certificate
49 against the recognized certificate authorities. This requires CA
50 certificates to have been installed in a location visible to the
51 OpenSSL library. If this is not the case, you can get the bundle
52 yourself from a source you trust (for example, the bundle extracted
53 from Mozilla available at http://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html),
54 and point Wget to the PEM file using the `--ca-certificate'
55 command-line option or the corresponding `.wgetrc' command.
57 *** Secure downloads now verify that the host name in the URL matches
58 the "common name" in the certificate presented by the server.
60 *** Although the above checks provide more secure downloads, they
61 unavoidably break interoperability with some sites that worked with
62 previous versions, particularly those using self-signed, expired, or
63 otherwise invalid certificates. If you encounter "certificate
64 verification" errors or complaints that "common name doesn't match
65 requested host name" and are convinced of the site's authenticity, you
66 can use `--no-check-certificate' to bypass both checks.
68 *** Talking to SSL/TLS servers over proxies now actually works.
69 Previous versions of Wget erroneously sent GET requests for https
70 URLs. Wget 1.10 utilizes the CONNECT method designed for this
73 *** The SSL/TLS-related options have been redesigned and, for the
74 first time, documented in the manual. The old, undocumented, options
75 are no longer supported.
77 ** Passive FTP is now the default FTP transfer mode. Use
78 `--no-passive-ftp' or specify `passive_ftp = off' in your init file to
79 revert to the old behavior.
81 ** The `--header' option can now be used to override generated
82 headers. For example, `wget --header="Host: foo.bar"
83 http://127.0.0.1' tells Wget to connect to localhost, but to specify
84 "foo.bar" in the `Host' header. In previous versions such use of
85 `--header' lead to duplicate headers in HTTP requests.
87 ** The responses without headers, aka "HTTP 0.9" responses, are
88 detected and handled. Although HTTP 0.9 has long been obsolete, it is
89 still occasionally used, sometimes by accident.
91 ** The progress bar is now updated regularly even when the data does
92 not arrive from the network.
94 ** Wget no longer preserves permissions of files retrieved by FTP by
95 default. Anonymous FTP servers frequently use permissions like "664",
96 which might not be what the user wants. The new option
97 `--preserve-permissions' and the corresponding `.wgetrc' variable can
98 be used to revert to the old behavior.
100 ** The new option `--protocol-directories' instructs Wget to also use
101 the protocol name as a directory component of local file names.
103 ** Options that previously unconditionally set or unset various flags
104 are now boolean options that can be invoked as either `--OPTION' or
105 `--no-OPTION'. Options that required an argument "on" or "off" have
106 also been changed this way, but they still accept the old syntax for
107 backward compatibility. For example, instead of `--glob=off' you can
110 Allowing `--no-OPTION' for every `--OPTION' and the other way around
111 is useful because it allows the user to override non-default behavior
112 specified via `.wgetrc'.
114 ** The new option `--keep-session-cookies' causes `--save-cookies' to
115 save session cookies (normally only kept in memory) along with the
116 permanent ones. This is useful because many sites track important
117 information, such as whether the user has authenticated, in session
118 cookies. With this option multiple Wget runs are treated as a single
121 ** Wget now supports the --ftp-user and --ftp-password command
122 switches to set username and password for FTP, and the --user and
123 --password command switches to set username and password for both FTP
124 and HTTP. The --http-passwd and --proxy-passwd command switches have
125 been renamed to --http-password and --proxy-password respectively, and
126 the related http_passwd and proxy_passwd .wgetrc commands to
127 http_password and proxy_password respectively. The login and passwd
128 .wgetrc commands have been deprecated.
130 * `wget -b' now works correctly under Windows.
132 * Wget 1.9.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
134 * Changes in Wget 1.9.
136 ** It is now possible to specify that POST method be used for HTTP
137 requests. For example, `wget --post-data="id=foo&data=bar" URL' will
138 send a POST request with the specified contents.
140 ** IPv6 support is available, although it's still experimental.
142 ** The `--timeout' option now also affects DNS lookup and establishing
143 the TCP connection. Previously it only affected reading and writing
144 data. Those three timeouts can be set separately using
145 `--dns-timeout', `--connection-timeout', and `--read-timeout',
148 ** Download speed shown by the progress bar is based on the data
149 recently read, rather than the average speed of the entire download.
150 The ETA projection is still based on the overall average.
152 ** It is now possible to connect to FTP servers through FWTK
153 firewalls. Set ftp_proxy to an FTP URL, and Wget will automatically
154 log on to the proxy as "username@host".
156 ** The new option `--retry-connrefused' makes Wget retry downloads
157 even in the face of refused connections, which are otherwise
158 considered a fatal error.
160 ** The new option `--no-dns-cache' may be used to prevent Wget from
163 ** Wget no longer escapes characters in local file names based on
164 whether they're appropriate in URLs. Escaping can still occur for
165 nonprintable characters or for '/', but no longer for frequent
166 characters such as space. You can use the new option
167 --restrict-file-names to relax or strengthen these rules, which can be
168 useful if you dislike the default or if you're downloading to
169 non-native partitions.
171 ** Handling of HTML comments has been dumbed down to conform to what
172 users expect and other browsers do: instead of being treated as SGML
173 declaration, a comment is terminated at the first occurrence of "-->".
174 Use `--strict-comments' to revert to the old behavior.
176 ** Wget now correctly handles relative URIs that begin with "//", such
177 as "//img.foo.com/foo.jpg".
179 ** Boolean options in `.wgetrc' and on the command line now accept
180 values "yes" and "no" along with the traditional "on" and "off".
182 ** It is now possible to specify decimal values for timeouts, waiting
183 periods, and download rate. For instance, `--wait=0.5' now works as
184 expected, as does `--dns-timeout=0.5' and even `--limit-rate=2.5k'.
186 * Wget 1.8.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
188 * Wget 1.8.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
190 * Changes in Wget 1.8.
192 ** A new progress indicator is now available and used by default.
193 You can choose the progress bar type with `--progress=TYPE'. Two
194 types are available, "bar" (the new default), and "dot" (the old
195 dotted indicator). You can permanently revert to the old progress
196 indicator by putting `progress = dot' in your `.wgetrc'.
198 ** You can limit the download rate of the retrieval using the
199 `--limit-rate' option. For example, `wget --limit-rate=15k URL' will
200 tell Wget not to download the body of the URL faster than 15 kilobytes
203 ** Recursive retrieval and link conversion have been revamped:
205 *** Wget now traverses links breadth-first. This makes the
206 calculation of depth much more reliable than before. Also, recursive
207 downloads are faster and consume *significantly* less memory than
210 *** Links are converted only when the entire retrieval is complete.
211 This is the only safe thing to do, as only then is it known what URLs
212 have been downloaded.
214 *** BASE tags are handled correctly when converting links. Since Wget
215 already resolves <base href="..."> when resolving handling URLs, link
216 conversion now makes the BASE tags point to an empty string.
218 *** HTML anchors are now handled correctly. Links to an anchor in the
219 same document (<a href="#anchorname">), which used to confuse Wget,
220 are now converted correctly.
222 *** When in page-requisites (-p) mode, no-parent (-np) is ignored when
223 retrieving for inline images, stylesheets, and other documents needed
226 *** Page-requisites (-p) mode now works with frames. In other words,
227 `wget -p URL-THAT-USES-FRAMES' will now download the frame HTML files,
228 and all the files that they need to be displayed properly.
230 ** `--base' now works conjunction with `--input-file', providing a
231 base for each URL and thereby allowing the URLs in the file to be
234 ** If a host has more than one IP address, Wget uses the other
235 addresses when accessing the first one fails.
237 ** Host directories now contain port information if the URL is at a
240 ** Wget now supports the robots.txt directives specified in
241 <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt>.
243 ** URL parser has been fixed, especially the infamous overzealous
244 quoting. Wget no longer dequotes reserved characters, e.g. `%3F' is
245 no longer translated to `?', nor `%2B' to `+'. Unsafe characters
246 which are not reserved are still escaped, of course.
248 ** No more than 20 successive redirections are allowed.
250 * Wget 1.7.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
252 * Changes in Wget 1.7.
254 ** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
255 use the `--with-ssl' configure flag. You need to have OpenSSL
258 ** Cookies are now supported. Wget will accept cookies sent by the
259 server and return them in later requests. Additionally, it can load
260 and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.
262 ** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
263 Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
264 many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
265 stressing for the server and the network.
267 ** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
270 ** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
271 puts you in some directory other than '/'.
273 ** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'. For
274 example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
277 ** The HTML parser has been rewritten. The new one works more
278 reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
279 are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
280 skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc. It is
283 ** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.
285 ** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
286 where appropriate. This results in huge speedups when retrieving
287 large sites (thousands of documents).
289 ** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
290 documentation. (The last version that shipped with a man page was
291 1.4.5). To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
292 distribution installed on your system.
294 * Changes in Wget 1.6
296 ** Administrative changes.
298 *** Maintainership. Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
299 Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
300 real job as well). Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
301 are being helped by many other people.
303 *** Web page. Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
306 http://sunsite.dk/wget/
308 *** Anonymous CVS. Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
309 sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server. Take a look at
310 the web page for downloading instructions.
312 ** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
313 modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed. When
314 using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.
316 ** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
317 Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
318 retrieval. -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
319 opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.
321 ** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
322 of failed downloads. Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
323 first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS. waitretry is set to 10 by
324 default in the system wgetrc.
326 ** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
327 Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
328 page properly (e.g. inlined images).
330 ** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
331 to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
332 "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".
334 ** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean". Can be set to on, off,
335 always, or never. This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline. So far,
336 passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.
338 ** A number of new translation files have been added.
340 ** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts
341 bound to multiple IP addresses.
343 ** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.
345 * Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
347 * Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
349 * Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
351 * Changes in Wget 1.5.0
353 ** Wget speaks many languages!
355 On systems with gettext(), Wget will output messages in the language
356 set by the current locale, if available. At this time we support
357 Czech, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
359 ** Opie (Skey) is now supported with FTP.
361 ** HTTP Digest Access Authentication (RFC2069) is now supported.
363 ** The new `-b' option makes Wget go to background automatically.
365 ** The `-I' and `-X' options now accept wildcard arguments.
367 ** The `-w' option now accepts suffixes `s' for seconds, `m' for
368 minutes, `h' for hours, `d' for days and `w' for weeks.
370 ** Upon getting SIGHUP, the whole previous log is now copied to
373 ** Wget now understands proxy settings with explicit usernames and
374 passwords, e.g. `http://user:password@proxy.foo.com/'.
376 ** You can use the new `--cut-dirs' option to make Wget create less
379 ** The `;type=a' appendix to FTP URLs is now recognized. For
380 instance, the following command will retrieve the welcoming message in
383 wget "ftp://ftp.somewhere.com/welcome.msg;type=a"
385 ** `--help' and `--version' options have been redone to to conform to
386 standards set by other GNU utilities.
388 ** Wget should now be compilable under MS Windows environment. MS
389 Visual C++ and Watcom C have been used successfully.
391 ** If the file length is known, percentages are displayed during
394 ** The manual page, now hopelessly out of date, is no longer
395 distributed with Wget.
397 * Wget 1.4.5 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
399 * Wget 1.4.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
401 * Changes in Wget 1.4.3
403 ** Wget is now a GNU utility.
405 ** Can do passive FTP.
409 ** Info documentation expanded.
411 ** Compiles on pre-ANSI compilers.
413 ** Global wgetrc now goes to /usr/local/etc (i.e. $sysconfdir).
417 * Changes in Wget 1.4.2
419 ** New mirror site at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/,
420 thanks to Karsten Thygesen.
422 ** Mailing list! Mail to wget-request@sunsite.auc.dk to subscribe.
424 ** New option --delete-after for proxy prefetching.
426 ** New option --retr-symlinks to retrieve symbolic links like plain
429 ** rmold.pl -- script to remove files deleted on the remote server
431 ** --convert-links should work now.
435 * Changes in Wget 1.4.1
439 ** Added -I (the opposite of -X).
441 ** Dot tracing is now customizable; try wget --dot-style=binary
443 * Changes in Wget 1.4.0
445 ** Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of
446 Geturl. Although many things look suspiciously similar, most of the
447 stuff was rewritten, like recursive retrieval, HTTP, FTP and mostly
448 everything else. Wget should be now easier to debug, maintain and,
449 most importantly, use.
451 ** Recursive HTTP should now work without glitches, even with Location
452 changes, server-generated directory listings and other naughty stuff.
454 ** HTTP regetting is supported on servers that support Range
455 specification. WWW authorization is supported -- try
456 wget http://user:password@hostname/
458 ** FTP support was rewritten and widely enhanced. Globbing should now
459 work flawlessly. Symbolic links are created locally. All the
460 information the Unix-style ls listing can give is now recognized.
462 ** Recursive FTP is supported, e.g.
463 wget -r ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/
465 ** You can specify "rejected" directories, to which you do not want to
466 enter, e.g. with wget -X /pub
468 ** Time-stamping is supported, with both HTTP and FTP. Try wget -N URL.
470 ** A new texinfo reference manual is provided. It can be read with
471 Emacs, standalone info, or converted to HTML, dvi or postscript.
473 ** Fixed a long-standing bug, so that Wget now works over SLIP
476 ** You can have a system-wide wgetrc (/usr/local/lib/wgetrc by
477 default). Settings in $HOME/.wgetrc override the global ones, of
480 ** You can set up quota in .wgetrc to prevent sucking too much
481 data. Try `quota = 5M' in .wgetrc (or quota = 100K if you want your
482 sysadmin to like you).
484 ** Download rate is printed after retrieval.
486 ** Wget now sends the `Referer' header when retrieving
489 ** With the new --no-parent option Wget can retrieve FTP recursively
490 through a proxy server.
492 ** HTML parser, as well as the whole of Wget was rewritten to be much
493 faster and less memory-consuming (yes, both).
495 ** Absolute links can be converted to relative links locally. Check
498 ** Wget catches hangup, filtering the output to a log file and
499 resuming work. Try kill -HUP %?wget.
501 ** User-defined headers can be sent. Try
503 wget http://fly.cc.her.hr/ --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2'
505 ** Acceptance/Rejection lists may contain wildcards.
507 ** Wget can display HTTP headers and/or FTP server response with the
508 new `-S' option. It can save the original HTTP headers with `-s'.
510 ** socks library is now supported (thanks to Antonio Rosella
511 <Antonio.Rosella@agip.it>). Configure with --with-socks.
513 ** There is a nicer display of REST-ed output.
515 ** Many new options (like -x to force directory hierarchy, or -m to
516 turn on mirroring options).
518 ** Wget is now distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
520 ** Lots of small features I can't remember. :-)
522 ** A host of bugfixes.
524 * Changes in Geturl 1.3
526 ** Added FTP globbing support (ftp://fly.cc.fer.hr/*)
528 ** Added support for no_proxy
530 ** Added support for ftp://user:password@host/
532 ** Added support for %xx in URL syntax
534 ** More natural command-line options
536 ** Added -e switch to execute .geturlrc commands from the command-line
538 ** Added support for robots.txt
540 ** Fixed some minor bugs
542 * Geturl 1.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
544 * Changes in Geturl 1.1
546 ** REST supported in FTP
548 ** Proxy servers supported
550 ** GNU getopt used, which enables command-line arguments to be ordered
551 as you wish, e.g. geturl http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -vo log is the same as
552 geturl -vo log http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
554 ** Netscape-compatible URL syntax for HTTP supported: host[:port]/dir/file
556 ** NcFTP-compatible colon URL syntax for FTP supported: host:/dir/file
558 ** <base href="xxx"> supported
560 ** autoconf supported
562 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
563 Copyright information:
565 Copyright (C) 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
567 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
568 copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that
569 the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus
570 giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
572 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this
573 document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions,
574 provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last