1 GNU Wget NEWS -- history of user-visible changes.
3 Copyright (C) 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005,
4 2006, 2007 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 1.11.
11 ** TODO file removed: we use a bugtracker now; see
12 http://wget.addictivecode.org/BugTracker. Also,
13 http://wget.addictivecode.org/FeatureSpecifications.
15 ** Timestamping now uses the value from the most recent HTTP response,
16 rather than the first one it got.
18 ** configure.in now requires autoconf >= 2.61, rather than 2.59.
20 ** Authentication information is no longer sent as part of the Referer
21 header in recursive fetches.
23 ** No authentication credentials are sent until a challenge is issued,
24 for improved security. Authentication handling is still not
25 RFC-compliant, as once a Basic challenge has been received, it will
26 assume it can send credentials to any URL at that same host, and not
27 just the ones at or below the original authenticated location.
28 Credentials for Digest authentication are still never saved or issued
29 automatically, and continue to require a challenge for each resource.
31 ** Added --max-redirect option, allowing the user to specify what should
32 be the maximum number of HTTP redirects to follow.
34 ** Wget now saves HTTP downloads using file names specified by the
35 `Content-Disposition' header. This is a standard way of specifying the
36 file name used by many web dynamically generated pages. For the time
37 being, Content-Disposition is not used by default, to avoid the extra
38 round-trips incurred (must specify "-e contentdisposition=yes"); this
39 may change in a future version. NOTE: This functionality is currently
40 considered "experimental", and may not be fully functional.
42 ** The GnuTLS library is now also experimentally supported for https
43 downloads. This is still work-in-progress. OpenSSL is still used by
44 default; use --with-ssl=gnutls to build with GnuTLS. OpenSSL is still
45 required for NTLM authorization to work, but this should eventually
46 change. NOTE: Certificate verification is _not_ currently supported:
47 this means that you can currently only use GnuTLS to encrypt
48 connections, but _not_ to verify that a host is who it claims to be. Use
49 of OpenSSL is suggested until this missing feature is implemented.
51 ** The new option `--ignore-case' makes Wget ignore case when
52 matching files, directories, and wildcards. This affects the -X, -I,
53 -A, and -R options, as well as globbing in FTP URLs.
55 ** ETA projection is now displayed in "dot" progress output as well as
56 in the default progress bar. (The dot progress is used by default when
57 logging Wget's output to file using the `-o' option.)
59 ** The "lockable boolean" argument type is no longer supported. It
60 was only used by the passive_ftp .wgetrc setting. If you're running
61 broken scripts or Perl modules that unconditionally specify
62 `--passive-ftp' and your firewall disallows it, you can override them
63 by replacing wget with a script that execs wget "$@" --no-passive-ftp.
65 ** The source code has migrated from CVS to Subversion. The
66 repository is available at http://svn.dotsrc.org/repo/wget/; to
67 checkout the trunk to a directory named `wget', use something like
68 `svn checkout http://svn.dotsrc.org/repo/wget/trunk/ wget'.
70 * Changes in Wget 1.10.
72 ** Downloading files larger than 2GB, sometimes referred to as "large
73 files", now works on systems that support them. This includes the
74 majority of modern Unixes, as well as MS Windows.
76 ** IPv6 is now supported by Wget. Unlike the experimental code in
77 1.9, this version supports dual-family systems. The new flags
78 `--inet4' and `--inet6' (or `-4' and `-6' for short) force the use of
79 IPv4 and IPv6 respectively. Note that IPv6 support has not yet been
82 ** Microsoft's proprietary "NTLM" method of HTTP authentication is now
83 supported. This authentication method is undocumented and only used
84 by IIS. Note that *proxy* authentication is not supported in this
85 release; you can only authenticate to the target web site.
87 ** Wget no longer truncates partially downloaded files when download
88 has to start over because the server doesn't support Range. Instead,
89 with such servers Wget now simply ignores the data up to the byte
90 where the last attempt left off, and only then continues appending to
91 the file. That way the downloaded file never shrinks, and download
92 retries from servers without support for partial downloads work even
93 when downloading to stdout.
97 *** SSL/TLS downloads now attempt to verify the server's certificate
98 against the recognized certificate authorities. This requires CA
99 certificates to have been installed in a location visible to the
100 OpenSSL library. If this is not the case, you can get the bundle
101 yourself from a source you trust (for example, the bundle extracted
102 from Mozilla available at http://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html),
103 and point Wget to the PEM file using the `--ca-certificate'
104 command-line option or the corresponding `.wgetrc' command.
106 *** Secure downloads now verify that the host name in the URL matches
107 the "common name" in the certificate presented by the server.
109 *** Although the above checks provide more secure downloads, they
110 unavoidably break interoperability with some sites that worked with
111 previous versions, particularly those using self-signed, expired, or
112 otherwise invalid certificates. If you encounter "certificate
113 verification" errors or complaints that "common name doesn't match
114 requested host name" and are convinced of the site's authenticity, you
115 can use `--no-check-certificate' to bypass both checks.
117 *** Talking to SSL/TLS servers over proxies now actually works.
118 Previous versions of Wget erroneously sent GET requests for https
119 URLs. Wget 1.10 utilizes the CONNECT method designed for this
122 *** The SSL/TLS-related options have been redesigned and, for the
123 first time, documented in the manual. The old, undocumented, options
124 are no longer supported.
126 ** Passive FTP is now the default FTP transfer mode. Use
127 `--no-passive-ftp' or specify `passive_ftp = off' in your init file to
128 revert to the old behavior.
130 ** The `--header' option can now be used to override generated
131 headers. For example, `wget --header="Host: foo.bar"
132 http://127.0.0.1' tells Wget to connect to localhost, but to specify
133 "foo.bar" in the `Host' header. In previous versions such use of
134 `--header' lead to duplicate headers in HTTP requests.
136 ** The responses without headers, aka "HTTP 0.9" responses, are
137 detected and handled. Although HTTP 0.9 has long been obsolete, it is
138 still occasionally used, sometimes by accident.
140 ** The progress bar is now updated regularly even when the data does
141 not arrive from the network.
143 ** Wget no longer preserves permissions of files retrieved by FTP by
144 default. Anonymous FTP servers frequently use permissions like "664",
145 which might not be what the user wants. The new option
146 `--preserve-permissions' and the corresponding `.wgetrc' variable can
147 be used to revert to the old behavior.
149 ** The new option `--protocol-directories' instructs Wget to also use
150 the protocol name as a directory component of local file names.
152 ** Options that previously unconditionally set or unset various flags
153 are now boolean options that can be invoked as either `--OPTION' or
154 `--no-OPTION'. Options that required an argument "on" or "off" have
155 also been changed this way, but they still accept the old syntax for
156 backward compatibility. For example, instead of `--glob=off' you can
159 Allowing `--no-OPTION' for every `--OPTION' and the other way around
160 is useful because it allows the user to override non-default behavior
161 specified via `.wgetrc'.
163 ** The new option `--keep-session-cookies' causes `--save-cookies' to
164 save session cookies (normally only kept in memory) along with the
165 permanent ones. This is useful because many sites track important
166 information, such as whether the user has authenticated, in session
167 cookies. With this option multiple Wget runs are treated as a single
170 ** Wget now supports the --ftp-user and --ftp-password command
171 switches to set username and password for FTP, and the --user and
172 --password command switches to set username and password for both FTP
173 and HTTP. The --http-passwd and --proxy-passwd command switches have
174 been renamed to --http-password and --proxy-password respectively, and
175 the related http_passwd and proxy_passwd .wgetrc commands to
176 http_password and proxy_password respectively. The login and passwd
177 .wgetrc commands have been deprecated.
179 * `wget -b' now works correctly under Windows.
181 * Wget 1.9.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
183 * Changes in Wget 1.9.
185 ** It is now possible to specify that POST method be used for HTTP
186 requests. For example, `wget --post-data="id=foo&data=bar" URL' will
187 send a POST request with the specified contents.
189 ** IPv6 support is available, although it's still experimental.
191 ** The `--timeout' option now also affects DNS lookup and establishing
192 the TCP connection. Previously it only affected reading and writing
193 data. Those three timeouts can be set separately using
194 `--dns-timeout', `--connection-timeout', and `--read-timeout',
197 ** Download speed shown by the progress bar is based on the data
198 recently read, rather than the average speed of the entire download.
199 The ETA projection is still based on the overall average.
201 ** It is now possible to connect to FTP servers through FWTK
202 firewalls. Set ftp_proxy to an FTP URL, and Wget will automatically
203 log on to the proxy as "username@host".
205 ** The new option `--retry-connrefused' makes Wget retry downloads
206 even in the face of refused connections, which are otherwise
207 considered a fatal error.
209 ** The new option `--no-dns-cache' may be used to prevent Wget from
212 ** Wget no longer escapes characters in local file names based on
213 whether they're appropriate in URLs. Escaping can still occur for
214 nonprintable characters or for '/', but no longer for frequent
215 characters such as space. You can use the new option
216 --restrict-file-names to relax or strengthen these rules, which can be
217 useful if you dislike the default or if you're downloading to
218 non-native partitions.
220 ** Handling of HTML comments has been dumbed down to conform to what
221 users expect and other browsers do: instead of being treated as SGML
222 declaration, a comment is terminated at the first occurrence of "-->".
223 Use `--strict-comments' to revert to the old behavior.
225 ** Wget now correctly handles relative URIs that begin with "//", such
226 as "//img.foo.com/foo.jpg".
228 ** Boolean options in `.wgetrc' and on the command line now accept
229 values "yes" and "no" along with the traditional "on" and "off".
231 ** It is now possible to specify decimal values for timeouts, waiting
232 periods, and download rate. For instance, `--wait=0.5' now works as
233 expected, as does `--dns-timeout=0.5' and even `--limit-rate=2.5k'.
235 * Wget 1.8.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
237 * Wget 1.8.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
239 * Changes in Wget 1.8.
241 ** A new progress indicator is now available and used by default.
242 You can choose the progress bar type with `--progress=TYPE'. Two
243 types are available, "bar" (the new default), and "dot" (the old
244 dotted indicator). You can permanently revert to the old progress
245 indicator by putting `progress = dot' in your `.wgetrc'.
247 ** You can limit the download rate of the retrieval using the
248 `--limit-rate' option. For example, `wget --limit-rate=15k URL' will
249 tell Wget not to download the body of the URL faster than 15 kilobytes
252 ** Recursive retrieval and link conversion have been revamped:
254 *** Wget now traverses links breadth-first. This makes the
255 calculation of depth much more reliable than before. Also, recursive
256 downloads are faster and consume *significantly* less memory than
259 *** Links are converted only when the entire retrieval is complete.
260 This is the only safe thing to do, as only then is it known what URLs
261 have been downloaded.
263 *** BASE tags are handled correctly when converting links. Since Wget
264 already resolves <base href="..."> when resolving handling URLs, link
265 conversion now makes the BASE tags point to an empty string.
267 *** HTML anchors are now handled correctly. Links to an anchor in the
268 same document (<a href="#anchorname">), which used to confuse Wget,
269 are now converted correctly.
271 *** When in page-requisites (-p) mode, no-parent (-np) is ignored when
272 retrieving for inline images, stylesheets, and other documents needed
275 *** Page-requisites (-p) mode now works with frames. In other words,
276 `wget -p URL-THAT-USES-FRAMES' will now download the frame HTML files,
277 and all the files that they need to be displayed properly.
279 ** `--base' now works conjunction with `--input-file', providing a
280 base for each URL and thereby allowing the URLs in the file to be
283 ** If a host has more than one IP address, Wget uses the other
284 addresses when accessing the first one fails.
286 ** Host directories now contain port information if the URL is at a
289 ** Wget now supports the robots.txt directives specified in
290 <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt>.
292 ** URL parser has been fixed, especially the infamous overzealous
293 quoting. Wget no longer dequotes reserved characters, e.g. `%3F' is
294 no longer translated to `?', nor `%2B' to `+'. Unsafe characters
295 which are not reserved are still escaped, of course.
297 ** No more than 20 successive redirections are allowed.
299 * Wget 1.7.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
301 * Changes in Wget 1.7.
303 ** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
304 use the `--with-ssl' configure flag. You need to have OpenSSL
307 ** Cookies are now supported. Wget will accept cookies sent by the
308 server and return them in later requests. Additionally, it can load
309 and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.
311 ** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
312 Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
313 many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
314 stressing for the server and the network.
316 ** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
319 ** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
320 puts you in some directory other than '/'.
322 ** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'. For
323 example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
326 ** The HTML parser has been rewritten. The new one works more
327 reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
328 are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
329 skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc. It is
332 ** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.
334 ** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
335 where appropriate. This results in huge speedups when retrieving
336 large sites (thousands of documents).
338 ** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
339 documentation. (The last version that shipped with a man page was
340 1.4.5). To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
341 distribution installed on your system.
343 * Changes in Wget 1.6
345 ** Administrative changes.
347 *** Maintainership. Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
348 Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
349 real job as well). Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
350 are being helped by many other people.
352 *** Web page. Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
355 http://sunsite.dk/wget/
357 *** Anonymous CVS. Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
358 sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server. Take a look at
359 the web page for downloading instructions.
361 ** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
362 modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed. When
363 using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.
365 ** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
366 Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
367 retrieval. -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
368 opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.
370 ** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
371 of failed downloads. Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
372 first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS. waitretry is set to 10 by
373 default in the system wgetrc.
375 ** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
376 Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
377 page properly (e.g. inlined images).
379 ** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
380 to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
381 "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".
383 ** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean". Can be set to on, off,
384 always, or never. This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline. So far,
385 passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.
387 ** A number of new translation files have been added.
389 ** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts
390 bound to multiple IP addresses.
392 ** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.
394 * Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
396 * Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
398 * Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
400 * Changes in Wget 1.5.0
402 ** Wget speaks many languages!
404 On systems with gettext(), Wget will output messages in the language
405 set by the current locale, if available. At this time we support
406 Czech, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
408 ** Opie (Skey) is now supported with FTP.
410 ** HTTP Digest Access Authentication (RFC2069) is now supported.
412 ** The new `-b' option makes Wget go to background automatically.
414 ** The `-I' and `-X' options now accept wildcard arguments.
416 ** The `-w' option now accepts suffixes `s' for seconds, `m' for
417 minutes, `h' for hours, `d' for days and `w' for weeks.
419 ** Upon getting SIGHUP, the whole previous log is now copied to
422 ** Wget now understands proxy settings with explicit usernames and
423 passwords, e.g. `http://user:password@proxy.foo.com/'.
425 ** You can use the new `--cut-dirs' option to make Wget create less
428 ** The `;type=a' appendix to FTP URLs is now recognized. For
429 instance, the following command will retrieve the welcoming message in
432 wget "ftp://ftp.somewhere.com/welcome.msg;type=a"
434 ** `--help' and `--version' options have been redone to to conform to
435 standards set by other GNU utilities.
437 ** Wget should now be compilable under MS Windows environment. MS
438 Visual C++ and Watcom C have been used successfully.
440 ** If the file length is known, percentages are displayed during
443 ** The manual page, now hopelessly out of date, is no longer
444 distributed with Wget.
446 * Wget 1.4.5 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
448 * Wget 1.4.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
450 * Changes in Wget 1.4.3
452 ** Wget is now a GNU utility.
454 ** Can do passive FTP.
458 ** Info documentation expanded.
460 ** Compiles on pre-ANSI compilers.
462 ** Global wgetrc now goes to /usr/local/etc (i.e. $sysconfdir).
466 * Changes in Wget 1.4.2
468 ** New mirror site at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/,
469 thanks to Karsten Thygesen.
471 ** Mailing list! Mail to wget-request@sunsite.auc.dk to subscribe.
473 ** New option --delete-after for proxy prefetching.
475 ** New option --retr-symlinks to retrieve symbolic links like plain
478 ** rmold.pl -- script to remove files deleted on the remote server
480 ** --convert-links should work now.
484 * Changes in Wget 1.4.1
488 ** Added -I (the opposite of -X).
490 ** Dot tracing is now customizable; try wget --dot-style=binary
492 * Changes in Wget 1.4.0
494 ** Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of
495 Geturl. Although many things look suspiciously similar, most of the
496 stuff was rewritten, like recursive retrieval, HTTP, FTP and mostly
497 everything else. Wget should be now easier to debug, maintain and,
498 most importantly, use.
500 ** Recursive HTTP should now work without glitches, even with Location
501 changes, server-generated directory listings and other naughty stuff.
503 ** HTTP regetting is supported on servers that support Range
504 specification. WWW authorization is supported -- try
505 wget http://user:password@hostname/
507 ** FTP support was rewritten and widely enhanced. Globbing should now
508 work flawlessly. Symbolic links are created locally. All the
509 information the Unix-style ls listing can give is now recognized.
511 ** Recursive FTP is supported, e.g.
512 wget -r ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/
514 ** You can specify "rejected" directories, to which you do not want to
515 enter, e.g. with wget -X /pub
517 ** Time-stamping is supported, with both HTTP and FTP. Try wget -N URL.
519 ** A new texinfo reference manual is provided. It can be read with
520 Emacs, standalone info, or converted to HTML, dvi or postscript.
522 ** Fixed a long-standing bug, so that Wget now works over SLIP
525 ** You can have a system-wide wgetrc (/usr/local/lib/wgetrc by
526 default). Settings in $HOME/.wgetrc override the global ones, of
529 ** You can set up quota in .wgetrc to prevent sucking too much
530 data. Try `quota = 5M' in .wgetrc (or quota = 100K if you want your
531 sysadmin to like you).
533 ** Download rate is printed after retrieval.
535 ** Wget now sends the `Referer' header when retrieving
538 ** With the new --no-parent option Wget can retrieve FTP recursively
539 through a proxy server.
541 ** HTML parser, as well as the whole of Wget was rewritten to be much
542 faster and less memory-consuming (yes, both).
544 ** Absolute links can be converted to relative links locally. Check
547 ** Wget catches hangup, filtering the output to a log file and
548 resuming work. Try kill -HUP %?wget.
550 ** User-defined headers can be sent. Try
552 wget http://fly.cc.her.hr/ --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2'
554 ** Acceptance/Rejection lists may contain wildcards.
556 ** Wget can display HTTP headers and/or FTP server response with the
557 new `-S' option. It can save the original HTTP headers with `-s'.
559 ** socks library is now supported (thanks to Antonio Rosella
560 <Antonio.Rosella@agip.it>). Configure with --with-socks.
562 ** There is a nicer display of REST-ed output.
564 ** Many new options (like -x to force directory hierarchy, or -m to
565 turn on mirroring options).
567 ** Wget is now distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
569 ** Lots of small features I can't remember. :-)
571 ** A host of bugfixes.
573 * Changes in Geturl 1.3
575 ** Added FTP globbing support (ftp://fly.cc.fer.hr/*)
577 ** Added support for no_proxy
579 ** Added support for ftp://user:password@host/
581 ** Added support for %xx in URL syntax
583 ** More natural command-line options
585 ** Added -e switch to execute .geturlrc commands from the command-line
587 ** Added support for robots.txt
589 ** Fixed some minor bugs
591 * Geturl 1.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
593 * Changes in Geturl 1.1
595 ** REST supported in FTP
597 ** Proxy servers supported
599 ** GNU getopt used, which enables command-line arguments to be ordered
600 as you wish, e.g. geturl http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -vo log is the same as
601 geturl -vo log http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
603 ** Netscape-compatible URL syntax for HTTP supported: host[:port]/dir/file
605 ** NcFTP-compatible colon URL syntax for FTP supported: host:/dir/file
607 ** <base href="xxx"> supported
609 ** autoconf supported
611 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
612 Copyright information:
614 Copyright (C) 1997-2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
616 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
617 copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that
618 the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus
619 giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
621 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this
622 document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions,
623 provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last