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