1 GNU Wget NEWS -- history of user-visible changes.
3 Copyright (C) 2005 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 1.10.
10 ** Downloading files greater than 2GB, also known as "large files",
11 now works on systems that support them. This includes most modern
12 Unix variants, as well as Windows.
14 ** IPv6 is now supported by Wget. Unlike the experimental code in
15 1.9, this version has no problems with dual-family systems. The new
16 flags `--inet4' and `--inet6' (or `-4' and `-6' for short) force the
17 use of IPv4 and IPv6 respectively.
19 ** Talking to SSL servers over proxies now actually works.
21 ** Wget no longer truncates partially downloaded files when download
22 has to start over because the server doesn't support Range. Instead,
23 with such servers Wget now simply ignores the data up to the byte
24 where the last attempt left off, and only then continues appending to
25 the file. That way the downloaded file never shrinks, and "start
26 over" retries work correctly even when downloading to stdout.
28 ** Passive FTP is now the default FTP transfer mode. Use
29 `--no-passive-ftp' or specify `passive_ftp = off' in your init file to
30 revert to the old behavior.
32 ** The `--header' option can now be used to override generated
33 headers. For example, `wget --header="Host: foo.bar"
34 http://127.0.0.1' tells Wget to connect to localhost, but to specify
35 "foo.bar" in the `Host' header. In previous versions such use of
36 `--header' lead to duplicate headers in HTTP requests.
38 ** The responses without headers, aka "HTTP 0.9" responses, are
39 detected and handled. Although HTTP 0.9 has long been obsolete, it is
40 still occasionally used, sometimes by accident.
42 ** The progress bar is now updated regularly even when the data does
43 not arrive from the network.
45 ** Wget no longer preserves permissions of files retrieved by FTP by
46 default. Anonymous FTP servers frequently use permissions like "664",
47 which might not be what the user wants. The new option
48 `--preserve-permissions' and the corresponding `.wgetrc' variable can
49 be used to revert to the old behavior.
51 ** The new option `--protocol-directories' instructs Wget to also use
52 the protocol name as a directory component of local file names.
54 ** Many options that previously unconditionally set or unset various
55 flags are now boolean options that can be invoked as either `--OPTION'
56 or `--no-OPTION'. Options that required an argument "on" or "off"
57 have also been changed this way, but they still accept the old syntax
58 for backward compatibility. For example, instead of `--glob=off' you
59 can write `--no-glob'.
61 Allowing `--no-OPTION' for every `--OPTION' and the other way around
62 is useful because it allows the user to override non-default behavior
63 specified via `.wgetrc'.
65 ** The new option `--keep-session-cookies' causes `--save-cookies' to
66 save session cookies along with the permanent ones. This is useful on
67 sites that require you to log in before you can access some pages.
68 With this option, multiple Wget runs will be treated as a single
71 * `wget -b' now works correctly under Windows.
73 * Wget 1.9.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
75 * Changes in Wget 1.9.
77 ** It is now possible to specify that POST method be used for HTTP
78 requests. For example, `wget --post-data="id=foo&data=bar" URL' will
79 send a POST request with the specified contents.
81 ** IPv6 support is available, although it's still experimental.
83 ** The `--timeout' option now also affects DNS lookup and establishing
84 the TCP connection. Previously it only affected reading and writing
85 data. Those three timeouts can be set separately using
86 `--dns-timeout', `--connection-timeout', and `--read-timeout',
89 ** Download speed shown by the progress bar is based on the data
90 recently read, rather than the average speed of the entire download.
91 The ETA projection is still based on the overall average.
93 ** It is now possible to connect to FTP servers through FWTK
94 firewalls. Set ftp_proxy to an FTP URL, and Wget will automatically
95 log on to the proxy as "username@host".
97 ** The new option `--retry-connrefused' makes Wget retry downloads
98 even in the face of refused connections, which are otherwise
99 considered a fatal error.
101 ** The new option `--dns-cache=off' may be used to prevent Wget from
104 ** Wget no longer escapes characters in local file names based on
105 whether they're appropriate in URLs. Escaping can still occur for
106 nonprintable characters or for '/', but no longer for frequent
107 characters such as space. You can use the new option
108 --restrict-file-names to relax or strengthen these rules, which can be
109 useful if you dislike the default or if you're downloading to
110 non-native partitions.
112 ** Handling of HTML comments has been dumbed down to conform to what
113 users expect and other browsers do: instead of being treated as SGML
114 declaration, a comment is terminated at the first occurrence of "-->".
115 Use `--strict-comments' to revert to the old behavior.
117 ** Wget now correctly handles relative URIs that begin with "//", such
118 as "//img.foo.com/foo.jpg".
120 ** Boolean options in `.wgetrc' and on the command line now accept
121 values "yes" and "no" along with the traditional "on" and "off".
123 ** It is now possible to specify decimal values for timeouts, waiting
124 periods, and download rate. For instance, `--wait=0.5' now works as
125 expected, as does `--dns-timeout=0.5' and even `--limit-rate=2.5k'.
127 * Wget 1.8.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
129 * Wget 1.8.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
131 * Changes in Wget 1.8.
133 ** A new progress indicator is now available and used by default.
134 You can choose the progress bar type with `--progress=TYPE'. Two
135 types are available, "bar" (the new default), and "dot" (the old
136 dotted indicator). You can permanently revert to the old progress
137 indicator by putting `progress = dot' in your `.wgetrc'.
139 ** You can limit the download rate of the retrieval using the
140 `--limit-rate' option. For example, `wget --limit-rate=15k URL' will
141 tell Wget not to download the body of the URL faster than 15 kilobytes
144 ** Recursive retrieval and link conversion have been revamped:
146 *** Wget now traverses links breadth-first. This makes the
147 calculation of depth much more reliable than before. Also, recursive
148 downloads are faster and consume *significantly* less memory than
151 *** Links are converted only when the entire retrieval is complete.
152 This is the only safe thing to do, as only then is it known what URLs
153 have been downloaded.
155 *** BASE tags are handled correctly when converting links. Since Wget
156 already resolves <base href="..."> when resolving handling URLs, link
157 conversion now makes the BASE tags point to an empty string.
159 *** HTML anchors are now handled correctly. Links to an anchor in the
160 same document (<a href="#anchorname">), which used to confuse Wget,
161 are now converted correctly.
163 *** When in page-requisites (-p) mode, no-parent (-np) is ignored when
164 retrieving for inline images, stylesheets, and other documents needed
167 *** Page-requisites (-p) mode now works with frames. In other words,
168 `wget -p URL-THAT-USES-FRAMES' will now download the frame HTML files,
169 and all the files that they need to be displayed properly.
171 ** `--base' now works conjunction with `--input-file', providing a
172 base for each URL and thereby allowing the URLs in the file to be
175 ** If a host has more than one IP address, Wget uses the other
176 addresses when accessing the first one fails.
178 ** Host directories now contain port information if the URL is at a
181 ** Wget now supports the robots.txt directives specified in
182 <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt>.
184 ** URL parser has been fixed, especially the infamous overzealous
185 quoting. Wget no longer dequotes reserved characters, e.g. `%3F' is
186 no longer translated to `?', nor `%2B' to `+'. Unsafe characters
187 which are not reserved are still escaped, of course.
189 ** No more than 20 successive redirections are allowed.
191 * Wget 1.7.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
193 * Changes in Wget 1.7.
195 ** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
196 use the `--with-ssl' configure flag. You need to have OpenSSL
199 ** Cookies are now supported. Wget will accept cookies sent by the
200 server and return them in later requests. Additionally, it can load
201 and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.
203 ** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
204 Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
205 many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
206 stressing for the server and the network.
208 ** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
211 ** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
212 puts you in some directory other than '/'.
214 ** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'. For
215 example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
218 ** The HTML parser has been rewritten. The new one works more
219 reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
220 are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
221 skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc. It is
224 ** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.
226 ** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
227 where appropriate. This results in huge speedups when retrieving
228 large sites (thousands of documents).
230 ** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
231 documentation. (The last version that shipped with a man page was
232 1.4.5). To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
233 distribution installed on your system.
235 * Changes in Wget 1.6
237 ** Administrative changes.
239 *** Maintainership. Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
240 Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
241 real job as well). Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
242 are being helped by many other people.
244 *** Web page. Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
247 http://sunsite.dk/wget/
249 *** Anonymous CVS. Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
250 sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server. Take a look at
251 the web page for downloading instructions.
253 ** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
254 modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed. When
255 using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.
257 ** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
258 Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
259 retrieval. -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
260 opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.
262 ** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
263 of failed downloads. Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
264 first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS. waitretry is set to 10 by
265 default in the system wgetrc.
267 ** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
268 Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
269 page properly (e.g. inlined images).
271 ** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
272 to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
273 "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".
275 ** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean". Can be set to on, off,
276 always, or never. This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline. So far,
277 passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.
279 ** A number of new translation files have been added.
281 ** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts
282 bound to multiple IP addresses.
284 ** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.
286 * Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
288 * Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
290 * Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
292 * Changes in Wget 1.5.0
294 ** Wget speaks many languages!
296 On systems with gettext(), Wget will output messages in the language
297 set by the current locale, if available. At this time we support
298 Czech, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
300 ** Opie (Skey) is now supported with FTP.
302 ** HTTP Digest Access Authentication (RFC2069) is now supported.
304 ** The new `-b' option makes Wget go to background automatically.
306 ** The `-I' and `-X' options now accept wildcard arguments.
308 ** The `-w' option now accepts suffixes `s' for seconds, `m' for
309 minutes, `h' for hours, `d' for days and `w' for weeks.
311 ** Upon getting SIGHUP, the whole previous log is now copied to
314 ** Wget now understands proxy settings with explicit usernames and
315 passwords, e.g. `http://user:password@proxy.foo.com/'.
317 ** You can use the new `--cut-dirs' option to make Wget create less
320 ** The `;type=a' appendix to FTP URLs is now recognized. For
321 instance, the following command will retrieve the welcoming message in
324 wget "ftp://ftp.somewhere.com/welcome.msg;type=a"
326 ** `--help' and `--version' options have been redone to to conform to
327 standards set by other GNU utilities.
329 ** Wget should now be compilable under MS Windows environment. MS
330 Visual C++ and Watcom C have been used successfully.
332 ** If the file length is known, percentages are displayed during
335 ** The manual page, now hopelessly out of date, is no longer
336 distributed with Wget.
338 * Wget 1.4.5 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
340 * Wget 1.4.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
342 * Changes in Wget 1.4.3
344 ** Wget is now a GNU utility.
346 ** Can do passive FTP.
350 ** Info documentation expanded.
352 ** Compiles on pre-ANSI compilers.
354 ** Global wgetrc now goes to /usr/local/etc (i.e. $sysconfdir).
358 * Changes in Wget 1.4.2
360 ** New mirror site at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/,
361 thanks to Karsten Thygesen.
363 ** Mailing list! Mail to wget-request@sunsite.auc.dk to subscribe.
365 ** New option --delete-after for proxy prefetching.
367 ** New option --retr-symlinks to retrieve symbolic links like plain
370 ** rmold.pl -- script to remove files deleted on the remote server
372 ** --convert-links should work now.
376 * Changes in Wget 1.4.1
380 ** Added -I (the opposite of -X).
382 ** Dot tracing is now customizable; try wget --dot-style=binary
384 * Changes in Wget 1.4.0
386 ** Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of
387 Geturl. Although many things look suspiciously similar, most of the
388 stuff was rewritten, like recursive retrieval, HTTP, FTP and mostly
389 everything else. Wget should be now easier to debug, maintain and,
390 most importantly, use.
392 ** Recursive HTTP should now work without glitches, even with Location
393 changes, server-generated directory listings and other naughty stuff.
395 ** HTTP regetting is supported on servers that support Range
396 specification. WWW authorization is supported -- try
397 wget http://user:password@hostname/
399 ** FTP support was rewritten and widely enhanced. Globbing should now
400 work flawlessly. Symbolic links are created locally. All the
401 information the Unix-style ls listing can give is now recognized.
403 ** Recursive FTP is supported, e.g.
404 wget -r ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/
406 ** You can specify "rejected" directories, to which you do not want to
407 enter, e.g. with wget -X /pub
409 ** Time-stamping is supported, with both HTTP and FTP. Try wget -N URL.
411 ** A new texinfo reference manual is provided. It can be read with
412 Emacs, standalone info, or converted to HTML, dvi or postscript.
414 ** Fixed a long-standing bug, so that Wget now works over SLIP
417 ** You can have a system-wide wgetrc (/usr/local/lib/wgetrc by
418 default). Settings in $HOME/.wgetrc override the global ones, of
421 ** You can set up quota in .wgetrc to prevent sucking too much
422 data. Try `quota = 5M' in .wgetrc (or quota = 100K if you want your
423 sysadmin to like you).
425 ** Download rate is printed after retrieval.
427 ** Wget now sends the `Referer' header when retrieving
430 ** With the new --no-parent option Wget can retrieve FTP recursively
431 through a proxy server.
433 ** HTML parser, as well as the whole of Wget was rewritten to be much
434 faster and less memory-consuming (yes, both).
436 ** Absolute links can be converted to relative links locally. Check
439 ** Wget catches hangup, filtering the output to a log file and
440 resuming work. Try kill -HUP %?wget.
442 ** User-defined headers can be sent. Try
444 wget http://fly.cc.her.hr/ --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2'
446 ** Acceptance/Rejection lists may contain wildcards.
448 ** Wget can display HTTP headers and/or FTP server response with the
449 new `-S' option. It can save the original HTTP headers with `-s'.
451 ** socks library is now supported (thanks to Antonio Rosella
452 <Antonio.Rosella@agip.it>). Configure with --with-socks.
454 ** There is a nicer display of REST-ed output.
456 ** Many new options (like -x to force directory hierarchy, or -m to
457 turn on mirroring options).
459 ** Wget is now distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
461 ** Lots of small features I can't remember. :-)
463 ** A host of bugfixes.
465 * Changes in Geturl 1.3
467 ** Added FTP globbing support (ftp://fly.cc.fer.hr/*)
469 ** Added support for no_proxy
471 ** Added support for ftp://user:password@host/
473 ** Added support for %xx in URL syntax
475 ** More natural command-line options
477 ** Added -e switch to execute .geturlrc commands from the command-line
479 ** Added support for robots.txt
481 ** Fixed some minor bugs
483 * Geturl 1.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
485 * Changes in Geturl 1.1
487 ** REST supported in FTP
489 ** Proxy servers supported
491 ** GNU getopt used, which enables command-line arguments to be ordered
492 as you wish, e.g. geturl http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -vo log is the same as
493 geturl -vo log http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
495 ** Netscape-compatible URL syntax for HTTP supported: host[:port]/dir/file
497 ** NcFTP-compatible colon URL syntax for FTP supported: host:/dir/file
499 ** <base href="xxx"> supported
501 ** autoconf supported
503 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
504 Copyright information:
506 Copyright (C) 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
508 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
509 copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that
510 the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus
511 giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
513 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this
514 document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions,
515 provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last