1 GNU Wget NEWS -- history of user-visible changes.
3 Copyright (C) 1997-2006 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 ** TODO file removed: we use a bugtracker now; see
11 http://wget.addictivecode.org/BugTracker. Also,
12 http://wget.addictivecode.org/FeatureSpecifications.
14 ** Timestamping now uses the value from the most recent HTTP response,
15 rather than the first one it got.
17 ** configure.in now requires autoconf >= 2.61, rather than 2.59.
19 ** Authentication information is no longer sent as part of the Referer
20 header in recursive fetches.
22 ** No authentication credentials are sent until a challenge is issued,
23 for improved security. Authentication handling is still not
24 RFC-compliant, as once a Basic challenge has been received, it will
25 assume it can send credentials to any URL at that same host, and not
26 just the ones at or below the original authenticated location.
27 Credentials for Digest authentication are still never saved or issued
28 automatically, and continue to require a challenge for each resource.
30 ** Added --max-redirect option, allowing the user to specify what should
31 be the maximum number of HTTP redirects to follow.
33 ** Wget now saves HTTP downloads using file names specified by the
34 `Content-Disposition' header. This is a standard way of specifying the
35 file name used by many web dynamically generated pages. For the time
36 being, Content-Disposition is not used by default, to avoid the extra
37 round-trips incurred (must specify "-e contentdisposition=yes"); this
38 may change in a future version.
40 ** The GnuTLS library is now also supported for https downloads.
41 This is still work-in-progress. OpenSSL is still used by default; use
42 --with-ssl=gnutls to build with GnuTLS. OpenSSL is still required for
43 NTLM authorization to work, but this should eventually change.
45 ** The new option `--ignore-case' makes Wget ignore case when
46 matching files, directories, and wildcards. This affects the -X, -I,
47 -A, and -R options, as well as globbing in FTP URLs.
49 ** ETA projection is now displayed in "dot" progress output as well as
50 in the default progress bar. (The dot progress is used by default when
51 logging Wget's output to file using the `-o' option.)
53 ** The "lockable boolean" argument type is no longer supported. It
54 was only used by the passive_ftp .wgetrc setting. If you're running
55 broken scripts or Perl modules that unconditionally specify
56 `--passive-ftp' and your firewall disallows it, you can override them
57 by replacing wget with a script that execs wget "$@" --no-passive-ftp.
59 ** The source code has migrated from CVS to Subversion. The
60 repository is available at http://svn.dotsrc.org/repo/wget/; to
61 checkout the trunk to a directory named `wget', use something like
62 `svn checkout http://svn.dotsrc.org/repo/wget/trunk/ wget'.
64 * Changes in Wget 1.10.
66 ** Downloading files larger than 2GB, sometimes referred to as "large
67 files", now works on systems that support them. This includes the
68 majority of modern Unixes, as well as MS Windows.
70 ** IPv6 is now supported by Wget. Unlike the experimental code in
71 1.9, this version supports dual-family systems. The new flags
72 `--inet4' and `--inet6' (or `-4' and `-6' for short) force the use of
73 IPv4 and IPv6 respectively. Note that IPv6 support has not yet been
76 ** Microsoft's proprietary "NTLM" method of HTTP authentication is now
77 supported. This authentication method is undocumented and only used
78 by IIS. Note that *proxy* authentication is not supported in this
79 release; you can only authenticate to the target web site.
81 ** Wget no longer truncates partially downloaded files when download
82 has to start over because the server doesn't support Range. Instead,
83 with such servers Wget now simply ignores the data up to the byte
84 where the last attempt left off, and only then continues appending to
85 the file. That way the downloaded file never shrinks, and download
86 retries from servers without support for partial downloads work even
87 when downloading to stdout.
91 *** SSL/TLS downloads now attempt to verify the server's certificate
92 against the recognized certificate authorities. This requires CA
93 certificates to have been installed in a location visible to the
94 OpenSSL library. If this is not the case, you can get the bundle
95 yourself from a source you trust (for example, the bundle extracted
96 from Mozilla available at http://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html),
97 and point Wget to the PEM file using the `--ca-certificate'
98 command-line option or the corresponding `.wgetrc' command.
100 *** Secure downloads now verify that the host name in the URL matches
101 the "common name" in the certificate presented by the server.
103 *** Although the above checks provide more secure downloads, they
104 unavoidably break interoperability with some sites that worked with
105 previous versions, particularly those using self-signed, expired, or
106 otherwise invalid certificates. If you encounter "certificate
107 verification" errors or complaints that "common name doesn't match
108 requested host name" and are convinced of the site's authenticity, you
109 can use `--no-check-certificate' to bypass both checks.
111 *** Talking to SSL/TLS servers over proxies now actually works.
112 Previous versions of Wget erroneously sent GET requests for https
113 URLs. Wget 1.10 utilizes the CONNECT method designed for this
116 *** The SSL/TLS-related options have been redesigned and, for the
117 first time, documented in the manual. The old, undocumented, options
118 are no longer supported.
120 ** Passive FTP is now the default FTP transfer mode. Use
121 `--no-passive-ftp' or specify `passive_ftp = off' in your init file to
122 revert to the old behavior.
124 ** The `--header' option can now be used to override generated
125 headers. For example, `wget --header="Host: foo.bar"
126 http://127.0.0.1' tells Wget to connect to localhost, but to specify
127 "foo.bar" in the `Host' header. In previous versions such use of
128 `--header' lead to duplicate headers in HTTP requests.
130 ** The responses without headers, aka "HTTP 0.9" responses, are
131 detected and handled. Although HTTP 0.9 has long been obsolete, it is
132 still occasionally used, sometimes by accident.
134 ** The progress bar is now updated regularly even when the data does
135 not arrive from the network.
137 ** Wget no longer preserves permissions of files retrieved by FTP by
138 default. Anonymous FTP servers frequently use permissions like "664",
139 which might not be what the user wants. The new option
140 `--preserve-permissions' and the corresponding `.wgetrc' variable can
141 be used to revert to the old behavior.
143 ** The new option `--protocol-directories' instructs Wget to also use
144 the protocol name as a directory component of local file names.
146 ** Options that previously unconditionally set or unset various flags
147 are now boolean options that can be invoked as either `--OPTION' or
148 `--no-OPTION'. Options that required an argument "on" or "off" have
149 also been changed this way, but they still accept the old syntax for
150 backward compatibility. For example, instead of `--glob=off' you can
153 Allowing `--no-OPTION' for every `--OPTION' and the other way around
154 is useful because it allows the user to override non-default behavior
155 specified via `.wgetrc'.
157 ** The new option `--keep-session-cookies' causes `--save-cookies' to
158 save session cookies (normally only kept in memory) along with the
159 permanent ones. This is useful because many sites track important
160 information, such as whether the user has authenticated, in session
161 cookies. With this option multiple Wget runs are treated as a single
164 ** Wget now supports the --ftp-user and --ftp-password command
165 switches to set username and password for FTP, and the --user and
166 --password command switches to set username and password for both FTP
167 and HTTP. The --http-passwd and --proxy-passwd command switches have
168 been renamed to --http-password and --proxy-password respectively, and
169 the related http_passwd and proxy_passwd .wgetrc commands to
170 http_password and proxy_password respectively. The login and passwd
171 .wgetrc commands have been deprecated.
173 * `wget -b' now works correctly under Windows.
175 * Wget 1.9.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
177 * Changes in Wget 1.9.
179 ** It is now possible to specify that POST method be used for HTTP
180 requests. For example, `wget --post-data="id=foo&data=bar" URL' will
181 send a POST request with the specified contents.
183 ** IPv6 support is available, although it's still experimental.
185 ** The `--timeout' option now also affects DNS lookup and establishing
186 the TCP connection. Previously it only affected reading and writing
187 data. Those three timeouts can be set separately using
188 `--dns-timeout', `--connection-timeout', and `--read-timeout',
191 ** Download speed shown by the progress bar is based on the data
192 recently read, rather than the average speed of the entire download.
193 The ETA projection is still based on the overall average.
195 ** It is now possible to connect to FTP servers through FWTK
196 firewalls. Set ftp_proxy to an FTP URL, and Wget will automatically
197 log on to the proxy as "username@host".
199 ** The new option `--retry-connrefused' makes Wget retry downloads
200 even in the face of refused connections, which are otherwise
201 considered a fatal error.
203 ** The new option `--no-dns-cache' may be used to prevent Wget from
206 ** Wget no longer escapes characters in local file names based on
207 whether they're appropriate in URLs. Escaping can still occur for
208 nonprintable characters or for '/', but no longer for frequent
209 characters such as space. You can use the new option
210 --restrict-file-names to relax or strengthen these rules, which can be
211 useful if you dislike the default or if you're downloading to
212 non-native partitions.
214 ** Handling of HTML comments has been dumbed down to conform to what
215 users expect and other browsers do: instead of being treated as SGML
216 declaration, a comment is terminated at the first occurrence of "-->".
217 Use `--strict-comments' to revert to the old behavior.
219 ** Wget now correctly handles relative URIs that begin with "//", such
220 as "//img.foo.com/foo.jpg".
222 ** Boolean options in `.wgetrc' and on the command line now accept
223 values "yes" and "no" along with the traditional "on" and "off".
225 ** It is now possible to specify decimal values for timeouts, waiting
226 periods, and download rate. For instance, `--wait=0.5' now works as
227 expected, as does `--dns-timeout=0.5' and even `--limit-rate=2.5k'.
229 * Wget 1.8.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
231 * Wget 1.8.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
233 * Changes in Wget 1.8.
235 ** A new progress indicator is now available and used by default.
236 You can choose the progress bar type with `--progress=TYPE'. Two
237 types are available, "bar" (the new default), and "dot" (the old
238 dotted indicator). You can permanently revert to the old progress
239 indicator by putting `progress = dot' in your `.wgetrc'.
241 ** You can limit the download rate of the retrieval using the
242 `--limit-rate' option. For example, `wget --limit-rate=15k URL' will
243 tell Wget not to download the body of the URL faster than 15 kilobytes
246 ** Recursive retrieval and link conversion have been revamped:
248 *** Wget now traverses links breadth-first. This makes the
249 calculation of depth much more reliable than before. Also, recursive
250 downloads are faster and consume *significantly* less memory than
253 *** Links are converted only when the entire retrieval is complete.
254 This is the only safe thing to do, as only then is it known what URLs
255 have been downloaded.
257 *** BASE tags are handled correctly when converting links. Since Wget
258 already resolves <base href="..."> when resolving handling URLs, link
259 conversion now makes the BASE tags point to an empty string.
261 *** HTML anchors are now handled correctly. Links to an anchor in the
262 same document (<a href="#anchorname">), which used to confuse Wget,
263 are now converted correctly.
265 *** When in page-requisites (-p) mode, no-parent (-np) is ignored when
266 retrieving for inline images, stylesheets, and other documents needed
269 *** Page-requisites (-p) mode now works with frames. In other words,
270 `wget -p URL-THAT-USES-FRAMES' will now download the frame HTML files,
271 and all the files that they need to be displayed properly.
273 ** `--base' now works conjunction with `--input-file', providing a
274 base for each URL and thereby allowing the URLs in the file to be
277 ** If a host has more than one IP address, Wget uses the other
278 addresses when accessing the first one fails.
280 ** Host directories now contain port information if the URL is at a
283 ** Wget now supports the robots.txt directives specified in
284 <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt>.
286 ** URL parser has been fixed, especially the infamous overzealous
287 quoting. Wget no longer dequotes reserved characters, e.g. `%3F' is
288 no longer translated to `?', nor `%2B' to `+'. Unsafe characters
289 which are not reserved are still escaped, of course.
291 ** No more than 20 successive redirections are allowed.
293 * Wget 1.7.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
295 * Changes in Wget 1.7.
297 ** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
298 use the `--with-ssl' configure flag. You need to have OpenSSL
301 ** Cookies are now supported. Wget will accept cookies sent by the
302 server and return them in later requests. Additionally, it can load
303 and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.
305 ** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
306 Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
307 many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
308 stressing for the server and the network.
310 ** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
313 ** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
314 puts you in some directory other than '/'.
316 ** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'. For
317 example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
320 ** The HTML parser has been rewritten. The new one works more
321 reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
322 are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
323 skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc. It is
326 ** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.
328 ** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
329 where appropriate. This results in huge speedups when retrieving
330 large sites (thousands of documents).
332 ** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
333 documentation. (The last version that shipped with a man page was
334 1.4.5). To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
335 distribution installed on your system.
337 * Changes in Wget 1.6
339 ** Administrative changes.
341 *** Maintainership. Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
342 Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
343 real job as well). Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
344 are being helped by many other people.
346 *** Web page. Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
349 http://sunsite.dk/wget/
351 *** Anonymous CVS. Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
352 sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server. Take a look at
353 the web page for downloading instructions.
355 ** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
356 modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed. When
357 using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.
359 ** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
360 Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
361 retrieval. -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
362 opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.
364 ** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
365 of failed downloads. Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
366 first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS. waitretry is set to 10 by
367 default in the system wgetrc.
369 ** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
370 Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
371 page properly (e.g. inlined images).
373 ** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
374 to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
375 "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".
377 ** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean". Can be set to on, off,
378 always, or never. This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline. So far,
379 passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.
381 ** A number of new translation files have been added.
383 ** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts
384 bound to multiple IP addresses.
386 ** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.
388 * Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
390 * Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
392 * Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
394 * Changes in Wget 1.5.0
396 ** Wget speaks many languages!
398 On systems with gettext(), Wget will output messages in the language
399 set by the current locale, if available. At this time we support
400 Czech, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
402 ** Opie (Skey) is now supported with FTP.
404 ** HTTP Digest Access Authentication (RFC2069) is now supported.
406 ** The new `-b' option makes Wget go to background automatically.
408 ** The `-I' and `-X' options now accept wildcard arguments.
410 ** The `-w' option now accepts suffixes `s' for seconds, `m' for
411 minutes, `h' for hours, `d' for days and `w' for weeks.
413 ** Upon getting SIGHUP, the whole previous log is now copied to
416 ** Wget now understands proxy settings with explicit usernames and
417 passwords, e.g. `http://user:password@proxy.foo.com/'.
419 ** You can use the new `--cut-dirs' option to make Wget create less
422 ** The `;type=a' appendix to FTP URLs is now recognized. For
423 instance, the following command will retrieve the welcoming message in
426 wget "ftp://ftp.somewhere.com/welcome.msg;type=a"
428 ** `--help' and `--version' options have been redone to to conform to
429 standards set by other GNU utilities.
431 ** Wget should now be compilable under MS Windows environment. MS
432 Visual C++ and Watcom C have been used successfully.
434 ** If the file length is known, percentages are displayed during
437 ** The manual page, now hopelessly out of date, is no longer
438 distributed with Wget.
440 * Wget 1.4.5 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
442 * Wget 1.4.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
444 * Changes in Wget 1.4.3
446 ** Wget is now a GNU utility.
448 ** Can do passive FTP.
452 ** Info documentation expanded.
454 ** Compiles on pre-ANSI compilers.
456 ** Global wgetrc now goes to /usr/local/etc (i.e. $sysconfdir).
460 * Changes in Wget 1.4.2
462 ** New mirror site at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/,
463 thanks to Karsten Thygesen.
465 ** Mailing list! Mail to wget-request@sunsite.auc.dk to subscribe.
467 ** New option --delete-after for proxy prefetching.
469 ** New option --retr-symlinks to retrieve symbolic links like plain
472 ** rmold.pl -- script to remove files deleted on the remote server
474 ** --convert-links should work now.
478 * Changes in Wget 1.4.1
482 ** Added -I (the opposite of -X).
484 ** Dot tracing is now customizable; try wget --dot-style=binary
486 * Changes in Wget 1.4.0
488 ** Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of
489 Geturl. Although many things look suspiciously similar, most of the
490 stuff was rewritten, like recursive retrieval, HTTP, FTP and mostly
491 everything else. Wget should be now easier to debug, maintain and,
492 most importantly, use.
494 ** Recursive HTTP should now work without glitches, even with Location
495 changes, server-generated directory listings and other naughty stuff.
497 ** HTTP regetting is supported on servers that support Range
498 specification. WWW authorization is supported -- try
499 wget http://user:password@hostname/
501 ** FTP support was rewritten and widely enhanced. Globbing should now
502 work flawlessly. Symbolic links are created locally. All the
503 information the Unix-style ls listing can give is now recognized.
505 ** Recursive FTP is supported, e.g.
506 wget -r ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/
508 ** You can specify "rejected" directories, to which you do not want to
509 enter, e.g. with wget -X /pub
511 ** Time-stamping is supported, with both HTTP and FTP. Try wget -N URL.
513 ** A new texinfo reference manual is provided. It can be read with
514 Emacs, standalone info, or converted to HTML, dvi or postscript.
516 ** Fixed a long-standing bug, so that Wget now works over SLIP
519 ** You can have a system-wide wgetrc (/usr/local/lib/wgetrc by
520 default). Settings in $HOME/.wgetrc override the global ones, of
523 ** You can set up quota in .wgetrc to prevent sucking too much
524 data. Try `quota = 5M' in .wgetrc (or quota = 100K if you want your
525 sysadmin to like you).
527 ** Download rate is printed after retrieval.
529 ** Wget now sends the `Referer' header when retrieving
532 ** With the new --no-parent option Wget can retrieve FTP recursively
533 through a proxy server.
535 ** HTML parser, as well as the whole of Wget was rewritten to be much
536 faster and less memory-consuming (yes, both).
538 ** Absolute links can be converted to relative links locally. Check
541 ** Wget catches hangup, filtering the output to a log file and
542 resuming work. Try kill -HUP %?wget.
544 ** User-defined headers can be sent. Try
546 wget http://fly.cc.her.hr/ --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2'
548 ** Acceptance/Rejection lists may contain wildcards.
550 ** Wget can display HTTP headers and/or FTP server response with the
551 new `-S' option. It can save the original HTTP headers with `-s'.
553 ** socks library is now supported (thanks to Antonio Rosella
554 <Antonio.Rosella@agip.it>). Configure with --with-socks.
556 ** There is a nicer display of REST-ed output.
558 ** Many new options (like -x to force directory hierarchy, or -m to
559 turn on mirroring options).
561 ** Wget is now distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
563 ** Lots of small features I can't remember. :-)
565 ** A host of bugfixes.
567 * Changes in Geturl 1.3
569 ** Added FTP globbing support (ftp://fly.cc.fer.hr/*)
571 ** Added support for no_proxy
573 ** Added support for ftp://user:password@host/
575 ** Added support for %xx in URL syntax
577 ** More natural command-line options
579 ** Added -e switch to execute .geturlrc commands from the command-line
581 ** Added support for robots.txt
583 ** Fixed some minor bugs
585 * Geturl 1.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
587 * Changes in Geturl 1.1
589 ** REST supported in FTP
591 ** Proxy servers supported
593 ** GNU getopt used, which enables command-line arguments to be ordered
594 as you wish, e.g. geturl http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -vo log is the same as
595 geturl -vo log http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
597 ** Netscape-compatible URL syntax for HTTP supported: host[:port]/dir/file
599 ** NcFTP-compatible colon URL syntax for FTP supported: host:/dir/file
601 ** <base href="xxx"> supported
603 ** autoconf supported
605 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
606 Copyright information:
608 Copyright (C) 1997-2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
610 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
611 copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that
612 the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus
613 giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
615 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this
616 document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions,
617 provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last