1 GNU Wget NEWS -- history of user-visible changes.
3 Copyright (C) 1997, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 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 1.9+.
10 ** IPv6 is now supported by Wget. Unlike the experimental code in
11 1.9, this version has no problems with dual-family systems. The new
12 flags `--inet4' and `--inet6' (or `-4' and `-6' for short) force the
13 use of IPv4 and IPv6 respectively.
15 ** Wget no longer preserves permissions of files retrieved by FTP by
16 default. Anonymous FTP servers frequently use permissions like "664",
17 which might not be what the user wants. The new option
18 `--preserve-permissions' and the corresponding `.wgetrc' variable can
19 be used to revert to the old behavior.
21 ** Many options that previously unconditionally set or unset various
22 flags are now boolean options that can be invoked as either `--OPTION'
23 or `--no-OPTION'. Options that required an argument "on" or "off"
24 have also been changed this way, but they still accept the old syntax
25 for backward compatibility. For example, instead of `--glob=off' you
26 can write `--no-glob'.
28 Allowing `--no-OPTION' for every `--OPTION' is useful because it
29 allows the user to override non-default behavior specified via
32 ** The new option `--keep-session-cookies' causes `--save-cookies' to
33 save session cookies along with the permanent ones. This is useful on
34 sites that require you to log in before you can access some pages.
35 With this option, multiple Wget runs will be treated as a single
38 * Changes in Wget 1.9.
40 ** It is now possible to specify that POST method be used for HTTP
41 requests. For example, `wget --post-data="id=foo&data=bar" URL' will
42 send a POST request with the specified contents.
44 ** IPv6 support is available, although it's still experimental.
46 ** The `--timeout' option now also affects DNS lookup and establishing
47 the TCP connection. Previously it only affected reading and writing
48 data. Those three timeouts can be set separately using
49 `--dns-timeout', `--connection-timeout', and `--read-timeout',
52 ** Download speed shown by the progress bar is based on the data
53 recently read, rather than the average speed of the entire download.
54 The ETA projection is still based on the overall average.
56 ** It is now possible to connect to FTP servers through FWTK
57 firewalls. Set ftp_proxy to an FTP URL, and Wget will automatically
58 log on to the proxy as "username@host".
60 ** The new option `--retry-connrefused' makes Wget retry downloads
61 even in the face of refused connections, which are otherwise
62 considered a fatal error.
64 ** The new option `--dns-cache=off' may be used to prevent Wget from
67 ** Wget no longer escapes characters in local file names based on
68 whether they're appropriate in URLs. Escaping can still occur for
69 nonprintable characters or for '/', but no longer for frequent
70 characters such as space. You can use the new option
71 --restrict-file-names to relax or strengthen these rules, which can be
72 useful if you dislike the default or if you're downloading to
73 non-native partitions.
75 ** Handling of HTML comments has been dumbed down to conform to what
76 users expect and other browsers do: instead of being treated as SGML
77 declaration, a comment is terminated at the first occurrence of "-->".
78 Use `--strict-comments' to revert to the old behavior.
80 ** Wget now correctly handles relative URIs that begin with "//", such
81 as "//img.foo.com/foo.jpg".
83 ** Boolean options in `.wgetrc' and on the command line now accept
84 values "yes" and "no" along with the traditional "on" and "off".
86 ** It is now possible to specify decimal values for timeouts, waiting
87 periods, and download rate. For instance, `--wait=0.5' now works as
88 expected, as does `--dns-timeout=0.5' and even `--limit-rate=2.5k'.
90 * Wget 1.8.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
92 * Wget 1.8.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
94 * Changes in Wget 1.8.
96 ** A new progress indicator is now available and used by default.
97 You can choose the progress bar type with `--progress=TYPE'. Two
98 types are available, "bar" (the new default), and "dot" (the old
99 dotted indicator). You can permanently revert to the old progress
100 indicator by putting `progress = dot' in your `.wgetrc'.
102 ** You can limit the download rate of the retrieval using the
103 `--limit-rate' option. For example, `wget --limit-rate=15k URL' will
104 tell Wget not to download the body of the URL faster than 15 kilobytes
107 ** Recursive retrieval and link conversion have been revamped:
109 *** Wget now traverses links breadth-first. This makes the
110 calculation of depth much more reliable than before. Also, recursive
111 downloads are faster and consume *significantly* less memory than
114 *** Links are converted only when the entire retrieval is complete.
115 This is the only safe thing to do, as only then is it known what URLs
116 have been downloaded.
118 *** BASE tags are handled correctly when converting links. Since Wget
119 already resolves <base href="..."> when resolving handling URLs, link
120 conversion now makes the BASE tags point to an empty string.
122 *** HTML anchors are now handled correctly. Links to an anchor in the
123 same document (<a href="#anchorname">), which used to confuse Wget,
124 are now converted correctly.
126 *** When in page-requisites (-p) mode, no-parent (-np) is ignored when
127 retrieving for inline images, stylesheets, and other documents needed
130 *** Page-requisites (-p) mode now works with frames. In other words,
131 `wget -p URL-THAT-USES-FRAMES' will now download the frame HTML files,
132 and all the files that they need to be displayed properly.
134 ** `--base' now works conjunction with `--input-file', providing a
135 base for each URL and thereby allowing the URLs in the file to be
138 ** If a host has more than one IP address, Wget uses the other
139 addresses when accessing the first one fails.
141 ** Host directories now contain port information if the URL is at a
144 ** Wget now supports the robots.txt directives specified in
145 <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt>.
147 ** URL parser has been fixed, especially the infamous overzealous
148 quoting. Wget no longer dequotes reserved characters, e.g. `%3F' is
149 no longer translated to `?', nor `%2B' to `+'. Unsafe characters
150 which are not reserved are still escaped, of course.
152 ** No more than 20 successive redirections are allowed.
154 * Wget 1.7.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
156 * Changes in Wget 1.7.
158 ** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
159 use the `--with-ssl' configure flag. You need to have OpenSSL
162 ** Cookies are now supported. Wget will accept cookies sent by the
163 server and return them in later requests. Additionally, it can load
164 and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.
166 ** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
167 Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
168 many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
169 stressing for the server and the network.
171 ** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
174 ** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
175 puts you in some directory other than '/'.
177 ** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'. For
178 example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
181 ** The HTML parser has been rewritten. The new one works more
182 reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
183 are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
184 skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc. It is
187 ** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.
189 ** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
190 where appropriate. This results in huge speedups when retrieving
191 large sites (thousands of documents).
193 ** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
194 documentation. (The last version that shipped with a man page was
195 1.4.5). To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
196 distribution installed on your system.
198 * Changes in Wget 1.6
200 ** Administrative changes.
202 *** Maintainership. Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
203 Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
204 real job as well). Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
205 are being helped by many other people.
207 *** Web page. Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
210 http://sunsite.dk/wget/
212 *** Anonymous CVS. Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
213 sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server. Take a look at
214 the web page for downloading instructions.
216 ** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
217 modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed. When
218 using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.
220 ** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
221 Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
222 retrieval. -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
223 opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.
225 ** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
226 of failed downloads. Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
227 first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS. waitretry is set to 10 by
228 default in the system wgetrc.
230 ** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
231 Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
232 page properly (e.g. inlined images).
234 ** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
235 to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
236 "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".
238 ** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean". Can be set to on, off,
239 always, or never. This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline. So far,
240 passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.
242 ** A number of new translation files have been added.
244 ** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts
245 bound to multiple IP addresses.
247 ** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.
249 * Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
251 * Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
253 * Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
255 * Changes in Wget 1.5.0
257 ** Wget speaks many languages!
259 On systems with gettext(), Wget will output messages in the language
260 set by the current locale, if available. At this time we support
261 Czech, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
263 ** Opie (Skey) is now supported with FTP.
265 ** HTTP Digest Access Authentication (RFC2069) is now supported.
267 ** The new `-b' option makes Wget go to background automatically.
269 ** The `-I' and `-X' options now accept wildcard arguments.
271 ** The `-w' option now accepts suffixes `s' for seconds, `m' for
272 minutes, `h' for hours, `d' for days and `w' for weeks.
274 ** Upon getting SIGHUP, the whole previous log is now copied to
277 ** Wget now understands proxy settings with explicit usernames and
278 passwords, e.g. `http://user:password@proxy.foo.com/'.
280 ** You can use the new `--cut-dirs' option to make Wget create less
283 ** The `;type=a' appendix to FTP URLs is now recognized. For
284 instance, the following command will retrieve the welcoming message in
287 wget "ftp://ftp.somewhere.com/welcome.msg;type=a"
289 ** `--help' and `--version' options have been redone to to conform to
290 standards set by other GNU utilities.
292 ** Wget should now be compilable under MS Windows environment. MS
293 Visual C++ and Watcom C have been used successfully.
295 ** If the file length is known, percentages are displayed during
298 ** The manual page, now hopelessly out of date, is no longer
299 distributed with Wget.
301 * Wget 1.4.5 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
303 * Wget 1.4.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
305 * Changes in Wget 1.4.3
307 ** Wget is now a GNU utility.
309 ** Can do passive FTP.
313 ** Info documentation expanded.
315 ** Compiles on pre-ANSI compilers.
317 ** Global wgetrc now goes to /usr/local/etc (i.e. $sysconfdir).
321 * Changes in Wget 1.4.2
323 ** New mirror site at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/,
324 thanks to Karsten Thygesen.
326 ** Mailing list! Mail to wget-request@sunsite.auc.dk to subscribe.
328 ** New option --delete-after for proxy prefetching.
330 ** New option --retr-symlinks to retrieve symbolic links like plain
333 ** rmold.pl -- script to remove files deleted on the remote server
335 ** --convert-links should work now.
339 * Changes in Wget 1.4.1
343 ** Added -I (the opposite of -X).
345 ** Dot tracing is now customizable; try wget --dot-style=binary
347 * Changes in Wget 1.4.0
349 ** Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of
350 Geturl. Although many things look suspiciously similar, most of the
351 stuff was rewritten, like recursive retrieval, HTTP, FTP and mostly
352 everything else. Wget should be now easier to debug, maintain and,
353 most importantly, use.
355 ** Recursive HTTP should now work without glitches, even with Location
356 changes, server-generated directory listings and other naughty stuff.
358 ** HTTP regetting is supported on servers that support Range
359 specification. WWW authorization is supported -- try
360 wget http://user:password@hostname/
362 ** FTP support was rewritten and widely enhanced. Globbing should now
363 work flawlessly. Symbolic links are created locally. All the
364 information the Unix-style ls listing can give is now recognized.
366 ** Recursive FTP is supported, e.g.
367 wget -r ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/
369 ** You can specify "rejected" directories, to which you do not want to
370 enter, e.g. with wget -X /pub
372 ** Time-stamping is supported, with both HTTP and FTP. Try wget -N URL.
374 ** A new texinfo reference manual is provided. It can be read with
375 Emacs, standalone info, or converted to HTML, dvi or postscript.
377 ** Fixed a long-standing bug, so that Wget now works over SLIP
380 ** You can have a system-wide wgetrc (/usr/local/lib/wgetrc by
381 default). Settings in $HOME/.wgetrc override the global ones, of
384 ** You can set up quota in .wgetrc to prevent sucking too much
385 data. Try `quota = 5M' in .wgetrc (or quota = 100K if you want your
386 sysadmin to like you).
388 ** Download rate is printed after retrieval.
390 ** Wget now sends the `Referer' header when retrieving
393 ** With the new --no-parent option Wget can retrieve FTP recursively
394 through a proxy server.
396 ** HTML parser, as well as the whole of Wget was rewritten to be much
397 faster and less memory-consuming (yes, both).
399 ** Absolute links can be converted to relative links locally. Check
402 ** Wget catches hangup, filtering the output to a log file and
403 resuming work. Try kill -HUP %?wget.
405 ** User-defined headers can be sent. Try
407 wget http://fly.cc.her.hr/ --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2'
409 ** Acceptance/Rejection lists may contain wildcards.
411 ** Wget can display HTTP headers and/or FTP server response with the
412 new `-S' option. It can save the original HTTP headers with `-s'.
414 ** socks library is now supported (thanks to Antonio Rosella
415 <Antonio.Rosella@agip.it>). Configure with --with-socks.
417 ** There is a nicer display of REST-ed output.
419 ** Many new options (like -x to force directory hierarchy, or -m to
420 turn on mirroring options).
422 ** Wget is now distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
424 ** Lots of small features I can't remember. :-)
426 ** A host of bugfixes.
428 * Changes in Geturl 1.3
430 ** Added FTP globbing support (ftp://fly.cc.fer.hr/*)
432 ** Added support for no_proxy
434 ** Added support for ftp://user:password@host/
436 ** Added support for %xx in URL syntax
438 ** More natural command-line options
440 ** Added -e switch to execute .geturlrc commands from the command-line
442 ** Added support for robots.txt
444 ** Fixed some minor bugs
446 * Geturl 1.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
448 * Changes in Geturl 1.1
450 ** REST supported in FTP
452 ** Proxy servers supported
454 ** GNU getopt used, which enables command-line arguments to be ordered
455 as you wish, e.g. geturl http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -vo log is the same as
456 geturl -vo log http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
458 ** Netscape-compatible URL syntax for HTTP supported: host[:port]/dir/file
460 ** NcFTP-compatible colon URL syntax for FTP supported: host:/dir/file
462 ** <base href="xxx"> supported
464 ** autoconf supported
466 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
467 Copyright information:
469 Copyright (C) 1997, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2003 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
471 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
472 copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that
473 the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus
474 giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
476 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this
477 document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions,
478 provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last