1 GNU Wget NEWS -- history of user-visible changes.
3 Copyright (C) 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005,
4 2006, 2007, 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5 See the end for copying conditions.
7 Please send GNU Wget bug reports to <bug-wget@gnu.org>.
9 * Changes in Wget (MAINLINE).
11 ** Gnulib is now used to provide code for certain portability aspects in
14 ** Wget uses Automake now as part of its build infrastructure.
16 * Changes in Wget 1.11.1.
18 ** Progress bar now displays correctly in non-English locales (and a
19 related assertion failure was fixed).
21 ** Wget no longer issues a GET request over HTTP for files it should
22 know it's not going to download (regression in 1.11 over 1.10.2).
24 ** Interrupted downloads no longer result in renaming the file
25 (regression in 1.11 over 1.10.2).
27 ** Added option --auth-no-challenge, to support broken pre-1.11
28 authentication-before-server-challenge, which turns out to still be
29 useful for some limited cases.
31 * Changes in Wget 1.11.
33 ** Timestamping now uses the value from the most recent HTTP response,
34 rather than the first one it got.
36 ** Authentication information is no longer sent as part of the Referer
37 header in recursive fetches.
39 ** No authentication credentials are sent until a challenge is issued,
40 for improved security. Authentication handling is still not
41 RFC-compliant, as once a Basic challenge has been received, it will
42 assume it can send credentials to any URL at that same host, and not
43 just the ones at or below the original authenticated location.
44 Credentials for Digest authentication are still never saved or issued
45 automatically, and continue to require a challenge for each resource.
47 ** Added --max-redirect option, allowing the user to specify what should
48 be the maximum number of HTTP redirects to follow.
50 ** Wget now supports saving HTTP downloads using file names specified by
51 the `Content-Disposition' header. This is a standard way of specifying
52 the file name used by many web dynamically generated pages. However, the
53 current implementation is inefficient, and known to have bugs. It is
54 EXPERIMENTAL only, and not enabled by default. Use --content-disposition
57 ** The new option `--ignore-case' makes Wget ignore case when
58 matching files, directories, and wildcards. This affects the -X, -I,
59 -A, and -R options, as well as globbing in FTP URLs.
61 ** ETA projection is now displayed in "dot" progress output as well as
62 in the default progress bar. (The dot progress is used by default when
63 logging Wget's output to file using the `-o' option.)
65 ** The "lockable boolean" argument type is no longer supported. It
66 was only used by the passive_ftp .wgetrc setting. If you're running
67 broken scripts or Perl modules that unconditionally specify
68 `--passive-ftp' and your firewall disallows it, you can override them
69 by replacing wget with a script that execs wget "$@" --no-passive-ftp.
71 ** The source code has been migrated to Mercurial. The repositories are
72 available at http://hg.addictivecode.org/. Prior to this, the source
73 code was hosted on Subversion (migrated from the original CVS); you can
74 still get access to older tags and branches for Wget in the Subversion
75 repository at http://addictivecode.org/svn/wget/.
77 * Changes in Wget 1.10.
79 ** Downloading files larger than 2GB, sometimes referred to as "large
80 files", now works on systems that support them. This includes the
81 majority of modern Unixes, as well as MS Windows.
83 ** IPv6 is now supported by Wget. Unlike the experimental code in
84 1.9, this version supports dual-family systems. The new flags
85 `--inet4' and `--inet6' (or `-4' and `-6' for short) force the use of
86 IPv4 and IPv6 respectively. Note that IPv6 support has not yet been
89 ** Microsoft's proprietary "NTLM" method of HTTP authentication is now
90 supported. This authentication method is undocumented and only used
91 by IIS. Note that *proxy* authentication is not supported in this
92 release; you can only authenticate to the target web site.
94 ** Wget no longer truncates partially downloaded files when download
95 has to start over because the server doesn't support Range. Instead,
96 with such servers Wget now simply ignores the data up to the byte
97 where the last attempt left off, and only then continues appending to
98 the file. That way the downloaded file never shrinks, and download
99 retries from servers without support for partial downloads work even
100 when downloading to stdout.
104 *** SSL/TLS downloads now attempt to verify the server's certificate
105 against the recognized certificate authorities. This requires CA
106 certificates to have been installed in a location visible to the
107 OpenSSL library. If this is not the case, you can get the bundle
108 yourself from a source you trust (for example, the bundle extracted
109 from Mozilla available at http://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html),
110 and point Wget to the PEM file using the `--ca-certificate'
111 command-line option or the corresponding `.wgetrc' command.
113 *** Secure downloads now verify that the host name in the URL matches
114 the "common name" in the certificate presented by the server.
116 *** Although the above checks provide more secure downloads, they
117 unavoidably break interoperability with some sites that worked with
118 previous versions, particularly those using self-signed, expired, or
119 otherwise invalid certificates. If you encounter "certificate
120 verification" errors or complaints that "common name doesn't match
121 requested host name" and are convinced of the site's authenticity, you
122 can use `--no-check-certificate' to bypass both checks.
124 *** Talking to SSL/TLS servers over proxies now actually works.
125 Previous versions of Wget erroneously sent GET requests for https
126 URLs. Wget 1.10 utilizes the CONNECT method designed for this
129 *** The SSL/TLS-related options have been redesigned and, for the
130 first time, documented in the manual. The old, undocumented, options
131 are no longer supported.
133 ** Passive FTP is now the default FTP transfer mode. Use
134 `--no-passive-ftp' or specify `passive_ftp = off' in your init file to
135 revert to the old behavior.
137 ** The `--header' option can now be used to override generated
138 headers. For example, `wget --header="Host: foo.bar"
139 http://127.0.0.1' tells Wget to connect to localhost, but to specify
140 "foo.bar" in the `Host' header. In previous versions such use of
141 `--header' lead to duplicate headers in HTTP requests.
143 ** The responses without headers, aka "HTTP 0.9" responses, are
144 detected and handled. Although HTTP 0.9 has long been obsolete, it is
145 still occasionally used, sometimes by accident.
147 ** The progress bar is now updated regularly even when the data does
148 not arrive from the network.
150 ** Wget no longer preserves permissions of files retrieved by FTP by
151 default. Anonymous FTP servers frequently use permissions like "664",
152 which might not be what the user wants. The new option
153 `--preserve-permissions' and the corresponding `.wgetrc' variable can
154 be used to revert to the old behavior.
156 ** The new option `--protocol-directories' instructs Wget to also use
157 the protocol name as a directory component of local file names.
159 ** Options that previously unconditionally set or unset various flags
160 are now boolean options that can be invoked as either `--OPTION' or
161 `--no-OPTION'. Options that required an argument "on" or "off" have
162 also been changed this way, but they still accept the old syntax for
163 backward compatibility. For example, instead of `--glob=off' you can
166 Allowing `--no-OPTION' for every `--OPTION' and the other way around
167 is useful because it allows the user to override non-default behavior
168 specified via `.wgetrc'.
170 ** The new option `--keep-session-cookies' causes `--save-cookies' to
171 save session cookies (normally only kept in memory) along with the
172 permanent ones. This is useful because many sites track important
173 information, such as whether the user has authenticated, in session
174 cookies. With this option multiple Wget runs are treated as a single
177 ** Wget now supports the --ftp-user and --ftp-password command
178 switches to set username and password for FTP, and the --user and
179 --password command switches to set username and password for both FTP
180 and HTTP. The --http-passwd and --proxy-passwd command switches have
181 been renamed to --http-password and --proxy-password respectively, and
182 the related http_passwd and proxy_passwd .wgetrc commands to
183 http_password and proxy_password respectively. The login and passwd
184 .wgetrc commands have been deprecated.
186 * `wget -b' now works correctly under Windows.
188 * Wget 1.9.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
190 * Changes in Wget 1.9.
192 ** It is now possible to specify that POST method be used for HTTP
193 requests. For example, `wget --post-data="id=foo&data=bar" URL' will
194 send a POST request with the specified contents.
196 ** IPv6 support is available, although it's still experimental.
198 ** The `--timeout' option now also affects DNS lookup and establishing
199 the TCP connection. Previously it only affected reading and writing
200 data. Those three timeouts can be set separately using
201 `--dns-timeout', `--connection-timeout', and `--read-timeout',
204 ** Download speed shown by the progress bar is based on the data
205 recently read, rather than the average speed of the entire download.
206 The ETA projection is still based on the overall average.
208 ** It is now possible to connect to FTP servers through FWTK
209 firewalls. Set ftp_proxy to an FTP URL, and Wget will automatically
210 log on to the proxy as "username@host".
212 ** The new option `--retry-connrefused' makes Wget retry downloads
213 even in the face of refused connections, which are otherwise
214 considered a fatal error.
216 ** The new option `--no-dns-cache' may be used to prevent Wget from
219 ** Wget no longer escapes characters in local file names based on
220 whether they're appropriate in URLs. Escaping can still occur for
221 nonprintable characters or for '/', but no longer for frequent
222 characters such as space. You can use the new option
223 --restrict-file-names to relax or strengthen these rules, which can be
224 useful if you dislike the default or if you're downloading to
225 non-native partitions.
227 ** Handling of HTML comments has been dumbed down to conform to what
228 users expect and other browsers do: instead of being treated as SGML
229 declaration, a comment is terminated at the first occurrence of "-->".
230 Use `--strict-comments' to revert to the old behavior.
232 ** Wget now correctly handles relative URIs that begin with "//", such
233 as "//img.foo.com/foo.jpg".
235 ** Boolean options in `.wgetrc' and on the command line now accept
236 values "yes" and "no" along with the traditional "on" and "off".
238 ** It is now possible to specify decimal values for timeouts, waiting
239 periods, and download rate. For instance, `--wait=0.5' now works as
240 expected, as does `--dns-timeout=0.5' and even `--limit-rate=2.5k'.
242 * Wget 1.8.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
244 * Wget 1.8.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
246 * Changes in Wget 1.8.
248 ** A new progress indicator is now available and used by default.
249 You can choose the progress bar type with `--progress=TYPE'. Two
250 types are available, "bar" (the new default), and "dot" (the old
251 dotted indicator). You can permanently revert to the old progress
252 indicator by putting `progress = dot' in your `.wgetrc'.
254 ** You can limit the download rate of the retrieval using the
255 `--limit-rate' option. For example, `wget --limit-rate=15k URL' will
256 tell Wget not to download the body of the URL faster than 15 kilobytes
259 ** Recursive retrieval and link conversion have been revamped:
261 *** Wget now traverses links breadth-first. This makes the
262 calculation of depth much more reliable than before. Also, recursive
263 downloads are faster and consume *significantly* less memory than
266 *** Links are converted only when the entire retrieval is complete.
267 This is the only safe thing to do, as only then is it known what URLs
268 have been downloaded.
270 *** BASE tags are handled correctly when converting links. Since Wget
271 already resolves <base href="..."> when resolving handling URLs, link
272 conversion now makes the BASE tags point to an empty string.
274 *** HTML anchors are now handled correctly. Links to an anchor in the
275 same document (<a href="#anchorname">), which used to confuse Wget,
276 are now converted correctly.
278 *** When in page-requisites (-p) mode, no-parent (-np) is ignored when
279 retrieving for inline images, stylesheets, and other documents needed
282 *** Page-requisites (-p) mode now works with frames. In other words,
283 `wget -p URL-THAT-USES-FRAMES' will now download the frame HTML files,
284 and all the files that they need to be displayed properly.
286 ** `--base' now works conjunction with `--input-file', providing a
287 base for each URL and thereby allowing the URLs in the file to be
290 ** If a host has more than one IP address, Wget uses the other
291 addresses when accessing the first one fails.
293 ** Host directories now contain port information if the URL is at a
296 ** Wget now supports the robots.txt directives specified in
297 <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt>.
299 ** URL parser has been fixed, especially the infamous overzealous
300 quoting. Wget no longer dequotes reserved characters, e.g. `%3F' is
301 no longer translated to `?', nor `%2B' to `+'. Unsafe characters
302 which are not reserved are still escaped, of course.
304 ** No more than 20 successive redirections are allowed.
306 * Wget 1.7.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
308 * Changes in Wget 1.7.
310 ** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
311 use the `--with-ssl' configure flag. You need to have OpenSSL
314 ** Cookies are now supported. Wget will accept cookies sent by the
315 server and return them in later requests. Additionally, it can load
316 and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.
318 ** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
319 Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
320 many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
321 stressing for the server and the network.
323 ** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
326 ** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
327 puts you in some directory other than '/'.
329 ** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'. For
330 example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
333 ** The HTML parser has been rewritten. The new one works more
334 reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
335 are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
336 skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc. It is
339 ** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.
341 ** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
342 where appropriate. This results in huge speedups when retrieving
343 large sites (thousands of documents).
345 ** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
346 documentation. (The last version that shipped with a man page was
347 1.4.5). To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
348 distribution installed on your system.
350 * Changes in Wget 1.6
352 ** Administrative changes.
354 *** Maintainership. Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
355 Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
356 real job as well). Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
357 are being helped by many other people.
359 *** Web page. Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
362 http://sunsite.dk/wget/
364 *** Anonymous CVS. Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
365 sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server. Take a look at
366 the web page for downloading instructions.
368 ** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
369 modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed. When
370 using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.
372 ** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
373 Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
374 retrieval. -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
375 opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.
377 ** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
378 of failed downloads. Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
379 first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS. waitretry is set to 10 by
380 default in the system wgetrc.
382 ** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
383 Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
384 page properly (e.g. inlined images).
386 ** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
387 to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
388 "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".
390 ** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean". Can be set to on, off,
391 always, or never. This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline. So far,
392 passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.
394 ** A number of new translation files have been added.
396 ** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts
397 bound to multiple IP addresses.
399 ** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.
401 * Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
403 * Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
405 * Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
407 * Changes in Wget 1.5.0
409 ** Wget speaks many languages!
411 On systems with gettext(), Wget will output messages in the language
412 set by the current locale, if available. At this time we support
413 Czech, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
415 ** Opie (Skey) is now supported with FTP.
417 ** HTTP Digest Access Authentication (RFC2069) is now supported.
419 ** The new `-b' option makes Wget go to background automatically.
421 ** The `-I' and `-X' options now accept wildcard arguments.
423 ** The `-w' option now accepts suffixes `s' for seconds, `m' for
424 minutes, `h' for hours, `d' for days and `w' for weeks.
426 ** Upon getting SIGHUP, the whole previous log is now copied to
429 ** Wget now understands proxy settings with explicit usernames and
430 passwords, e.g. `http://user:password@proxy.foo.com/'.
432 ** You can use the new `--cut-dirs' option to make Wget create less
435 ** The `;type=a' appendix to FTP URLs is now recognized. For
436 instance, the following command will retrieve the welcoming message in
439 wget "ftp://ftp.somewhere.com/welcome.msg;type=a"
441 ** `--help' and `--version' options have been redone to to conform to
442 standards set by other GNU utilities.
444 ** Wget should now be compilable under MS Windows environment. MS
445 Visual C++ and Watcom C have been used successfully.
447 ** If the file length is known, percentages are displayed during
450 ** The manual page, now hopelessly out of date, is no longer
451 distributed with Wget.
453 * Wget 1.4.5 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
455 * Wget 1.4.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
457 * Changes in Wget 1.4.3
459 ** Wget is now a GNU utility.
461 ** Can do passive FTP.
465 ** Info documentation expanded.
467 ** Compiles on pre-ANSI compilers.
469 ** Global wgetrc now goes to /usr/local/etc (i.e. $sysconfdir).
473 * Changes in Wget 1.4.2
475 ** New mirror site at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/,
476 thanks to Karsten Thygesen.
478 ** Mailing list! Mail to wget-request@sunsite.auc.dk to subscribe.
480 ** New option --delete-after for proxy prefetching.
482 ** New option --retr-symlinks to retrieve symbolic links like plain
485 ** rmold.pl -- script to remove files deleted on the remote server
487 ** --convert-links should work now.
491 * Changes in Wget 1.4.1
495 ** Added -I (the opposite of -X).
497 ** Dot tracing is now customizable; try wget --dot-style=binary
499 * Changes in Wget 1.4.0
501 ** Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of
502 Geturl. Although many things look suspiciously similar, most of the
503 stuff was rewritten, like recursive retrieval, HTTP, FTP and mostly
504 everything else. Wget should be now easier to debug, maintain and,
505 most importantly, use.
507 ** Recursive HTTP should now work without glitches, even with Location
508 changes, server-generated directory listings and other naughty stuff.
510 ** HTTP regetting is supported on servers that support Range
511 specification. WWW authorization is supported -- try
512 wget http://user:password@hostname/
514 ** FTP support was rewritten and widely enhanced. Globbing should now
515 work flawlessly. Symbolic links are created locally. All the
516 information the Unix-style ls listing can give is now recognized.
518 ** Recursive FTP is supported, e.g.
519 wget -r ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/
521 ** You can specify "rejected" directories, to which you do not want to
522 enter, e.g. with wget -X /pub
524 ** Time-stamping is supported, with both HTTP and FTP. Try wget -N URL.
526 ** A new texinfo reference manual is provided. It can be read with
527 Emacs, standalone info, or converted to HTML, dvi or postscript.
529 ** Fixed a long-standing bug, so that Wget now works over SLIP
532 ** You can have a system-wide wgetrc (/usr/local/lib/wgetrc by
533 default). Settings in $HOME/.wgetrc override the global ones, of
536 ** You can set up quota in .wgetrc to prevent sucking too much
537 data. Try `quota = 5M' in .wgetrc (or quota = 100K if you want your
538 sysadmin to like you).
540 ** Download rate is printed after retrieval.
542 ** Wget now sends the `Referer' header when retrieving
545 ** With the new --no-parent option Wget can retrieve FTP recursively
546 through a proxy server.
548 ** HTML parser, as well as the whole of Wget was rewritten to be much
549 faster and less memory-consuming (yes, both).
551 ** Absolute links can be converted to relative links locally. Check
554 ** Wget catches hangup, filtering the output to a log file and
555 resuming work. Try kill -HUP %?wget.
557 ** User-defined headers can be sent. Try
559 wget http://fly.cc.her.hr/ --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2'
561 ** Acceptance/Rejection lists may contain wildcards.
563 ** Wget can display HTTP headers and/or FTP server response with the
564 new `-S' option. It can save the original HTTP headers with `-s'.
566 ** socks library is now supported (thanks to Antonio Rosella
567 <Antonio.Rosella@agip.it>). Configure with --with-socks.
569 ** There is a nicer display of REST-ed output.
571 ** Many new options (like -x to force directory hierarchy, or -m to
572 turn on mirroring options).
574 ** Wget is now distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
576 ** Lots of small features I can't remember. :-)
578 ** A host of bugfixes.
580 * Changes in Geturl 1.3
582 ** Added FTP globbing support (ftp://fly.cc.fer.hr/*)
584 ** Added support for no_proxy
586 ** Added support for ftp://user:password@host/
588 ** Added support for %xx in URL syntax
590 ** More natural command-line options
592 ** Added -e switch to execute .geturlrc commands from the command-line
594 ** Added support for robots.txt
596 ** Fixed some minor bugs
598 * Geturl 1.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
600 * Changes in Geturl 1.1
602 ** REST supported in FTP
604 ** Proxy servers supported
606 ** GNU getopt used, which enables command-line arguments to be ordered
607 as you wish, e.g. geturl http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -vo log is the same as
608 geturl -vo log http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
610 ** Netscape-compatible URL syntax for HTTP supported: host[:port]/dir/file
612 ** NcFTP-compatible colon URL syntax for FTP supported: host:/dir/file
614 ** <base href="xxx"> supported
616 ** autoconf supported
618 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
619 Copyright information:
621 Copyright (C) 1997-2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
623 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
624 copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that
625 the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus
626 giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
628 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this
629 document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions,
630 provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last