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 1.11.
10 ** ETA projection is now displayed in "dot" progress output as well as
11 in the default progress bar. The dot progress is used by default when
12 logging Wget's output to file using the `-o' option.
14 ** The "lockable boolean" argument type is no longer supported. It
15 was only used by the passive_ftp .wgetrc setting. If you're running
16 broken scripts or Perl modules that unconditionally specify
17 `--passive-ftp' and your firewall disallows it, you can override them
18 by replacing wget with a script that execs wget "$@" --no-passive-ftp.
20 ** The source code has migrated from CVS to Subversion. The
21 repository is available at http://svn.dotsrc.org/repo/wget/; to
22 checkout the trunk to a directory named `wget', use something like
23 `svn checkout http://svn.dotsrc.org/repo/wget/trunk/ wget'.
25 * Changes in Wget 1.10.
27 ** Downloading files larger than 2GB, sometimes referred to as "large
28 files", now works on systems that support them. This includes the
29 majority of modern Unixes, as well as MS Windows.
31 ** IPv6 is now supported by Wget. Unlike the experimental code in
32 1.9, this version supports dual-family systems. The new flags
33 `--inet4' and `--inet6' (or `-4' and `-6' for short) force the use of
34 IPv4 and IPv6 respectively. Note that IPv6 support has not yet been
37 ** Microsoft's proprietary "NTLM" method of HTTP authentication is now
38 supported. This authentication method is undocumented and only used
39 by IIS. Note that *proxy* authentication is not supported in this
40 release; you can only authenticate to the target web site.
42 ** Wget no longer truncates partially downloaded files when download
43 has to start over because the server doesn't support Range. Instead,
44 with such servers Wget now simply ignores the data up to the byte
45 where the last attempt left off, and only then continues appending to
46 the file. That way the downloaded file never shrinks, and download
47 retries from servers without support for partial downloads work even
48 when downloading to stdout.
52 *** SSL/TLS downloads now attempt to verify the server's certificate
53 against the recognized certificate authorities. This requires CA
54 certificates to have been installed in a location visible to the
55 OpenSSL library. If this is not the case, you can get the bundle
56 yourself from a source you trust (for example, the bundle extracted
57 from Mozilla available at http://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html),
58 and point Wget to the PEM file using the `--ca-certificate'
59 command-line option or the corresponding `.wgetrc' command.
61 *** Secure downloads now verify that the host name in the URL matches
62 the "common name" in the certificate presented by the server.
64 *** Although the above checks provide more secure downloads, they
65 unavoidably break interoperability with some sites that worked with
66 previous versions, particularly those using self-signed, expired, or
67 otherwise invalid certificates. If you encounter "certificate
68 verification" errors or complaints that "common name doesn't match
69 requested host name" and are convinced of the site's authenticity, you
70 can use `--no-check-certificate' to bypass both checks.
72 *** Talking to SSL/TLS servers over proxies now actually works.
73 Previous versions of Wget erroneously sent GET requests for https
74 URLs. Wget 1.10 utilizes the CONNECT method designed for this
77 *** The SSL/TLS-related options have been redesigned and, for the
78 first time, documented in the manual. The old, undocumented, options
79 are no longer supported.
81 ** Passive FTP is now the default FTP transfer mode. Use
82 `--no-passive-ftp' or specify `passive_ftp = off' in your init file to
83 revert to the old behavior.
85 ** The `--header' option can now be used to override generated
86 headers. For example, `wget --header="Host: foo.bar"
87 http://127.0.0.1' tells Wget to connect to localhost, but to specify
88 "foo.bar" in the `Host' header. In previous versions such use of
89 `--header' lead to duplicate headers in HTTP requests.
91 ** The responses without headers, aka "HTTP 0.9" responses, are
92 detected and handled. Although HTTP 0.9 has long been obsolete, it is
93 still occasionally used, sometimes by accident.
95 ** The progress bar is now updated regularly even when the data does
96 not arrive from the network.
98 ** Wget no longer preserves permissions of files retrieved by FTP by
99 default. Anonymous FTP servers frequently use permissions like "664",
100 which might not be what the user wants. The new option
101 `--preserve-permissions' and the corresponding `.wgetrc' variable can
102 be used to revert to the old behavior.
104 ** The new option `--protocol-directories' instructs Wget to also use
105 the protocol name as a directory component of local file names.
107 ** Options that previously unconditionally set or unset various flags
108 are now boolean options that can be invoked as either `--OPTION' or
109 `--no-OPTION'. Options that required an argument "on" or "off" have
110 also been changed this way, but they still accept the old syntax for
111 backward compatibility. For example, instead of `--glob=off' you can
114 Allowing `--no-OPTION' for every `--OPTION' and the other way around
115 is useful because it allows the user to override non-default behavior
116 specified via `.wgetrc'.
118 ** The new option `--keep-session-cookies' causes `--save-cookies' to
119 save session cookies (normally only kept in memory) along with the
120 permanent ones. This is useful because many sites track important
121 information, such as whether the user has authenticated, in session
122 cookies. With this option multiple Wget runs are treated as a single
125 ** Wget now supports the --ftp-user and --ftp-password command
126 switches to set username and password for FTP, and the --user and
127 --password command switches to set username and password for both FTP
128 and HTTP. The --http-passwd and --proxy-passwd command switches have
129 been renamed to --http-password and --proxy-password respectively, and
130 the related http_passwd and proxy_passwd .wgetrc commands to
131 http_password and proxy_password respectively. The login and passwd
132 .wgetrc commands have been deprecated.
134 * `wget -b' now works correctly under Windows.
136 * Wget 1.9.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
138 * Changes in Wget 1.9.
140 ** It is now possible to specify that POST method be used for HTTP
141 requests. For example, `wget --post-data="id=foo&data=bar" URL' will
142 send a POST request with the specified contents.
144 ** IPv6 support is available, although it's still experimental.
146 ** The `--timeout' option now also affects DNS lookup and establishing
147 the TCP connection. Previously it only affected reading and writing
148 data. Those three timeouts can be set separately using
149 `--dns-timeout', `--connection-timeout', and `--read-timeout',
152 ** Download speed shown by the progress bar is based on the data
153 recently read, rather than the average speed of the entire download.
154 The ETA projection is still based on the overall average.
156 ** It is now possible to connect to FTP servers through FWTK
157 firewalls. Set ftp_proxy to an FTP URL, and Wget will automatically
158 log on to the proxy as "username@host".
160 ** The new option `--retry-connrefused' makes Wget retry downloads
161 even in the face of refused connections, which are otherwise
162 considered a fatal error.
164 ** The new option `--no-dns-cache' may be used to prevent Wget from
167 ** Wget no longer escapes characters in local file names based on
168 whether they're appropriate in URLs. Escaping can still occur for
169 nonprintable characters or for '/', but no longer for frequent
170 characters such as space. You can use the new option
171 --restrict-file-names to relax or strengthen these rules, which can be
172 useful if you dislike the default or if you're downloading to
173 non-native partitions.
175 ** Handling of HTML comments has been dumbed down to conform to what
176 users expect and other browsers do: instead of being treated as SGML
177 declaration, a comment is terminated at the first occurrence of "-->".
178 Use `--strict-comments' to revert to the old behavior.
180 ** Wget now correctly handles relative URIs that begin with "//", such
181 as "//img.foo.com/foo.jpg".
183 ** Boolean options in `.wgetrc' and on the command line now accept
184 values "yes" and "no" along with the traditional "on" and "off".
186 ** It is now possible to specify decimal values for timeouts, waiting
187 periods, and download rate. For instance, `--wait=0.5' now works as
188 expected, as does `--dns-timeout=0.5' and even `--limit-rate=2.5k'.
190 * Wget 1.8.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
192 * Wget 1.8.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
194 * Changes in Wget 1.8.
196 ** A new progress indicator is now available and used by default.
197 You can choose the progress bar type with `--progress=TYPE'. Two
198 types are available, "bar" (the new default), and "dot" (the old
199 dotted indicator). You can permanently revert to the old progress
200 indicator by putting `progress = dot' in your `.wgetrc'.
202 ** You can limit the download rate of the retrieval using the
203 `--limit-rate' option. For example, `wget --limit-rate=15k URL' will
204 tell Wget not to download the body of the URL faster than 15 kilobytes
207 ** Recursive retrieval and link conversion have been revamped:
209 *** Wget now traverses links breadth-first. This makes the
210 calculation of depth much more reliable than before. Also, recursive
211 downloads are faster and consume *significantly* less memory than
214 *** Links are converted only when the entire retrieval is complete.
215 This is the only safe thing to do, as only then is it known what URLs
216 have been downloaded.
218 *** BASE tags are handled correctly when converting links. Since Wget
219 already resolves <base href="..."> when resolving handling URLs, link
220 conversion now makes the BASE tags point to an empty string.
222 *** HTML anchors are now handled correctly. Links to an anchor in the
223 same document (<a href="#anchorname">), which used to confuse Wget,
224 are now converted correctly.
226 *** When in page-requisites (-p) mode, no-parent (-np) is ignored when
227 retrieving for inline images, stylesheets, and other documents needed
230 *** Page-requisites (-p) mode now works with frames. In other words,
231 `wget -p URL-THAT-USES-FRAMES' will now download the frame HTML files,
232 and all the files that they need to be displayed properly.
234 ** `--base' now works conjunction with `--input-file', providing a
235 base for each URL and thereby allowing the URLs in the file to be
238 ** If a host has more than one IP address, Wget uses the other
239 addresses when accessing the first one fails.
241 ** Host directories now contain port information if the URL is at a
244 ** Wget now supports the robots.txt directives specified in
245 <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt>.
247 ** URL parser has been fixed, especially the infamous overzealous
248 quoting. Wget no longer dequotes reserved characters, e.g. `%3F' is
249 no longer translated to `?', nor `%2B' to `+'. Unsafe characters
250 which are not reserved are still escaped, of course.
252 ** No more than 20 successive redirections are allowed.
254 * Wget 1.7.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
256 * Changes in Wget 1.7.
258 ** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
259 use the `--with-ssl' configure flag. You need to have OpenSSL
262 ** Cookies are now supported. Wget will accept cookies sent by the
263 server and return them in later requests. Additionally, it can load
264 and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.
266 ** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
267 Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
268 many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
269 stressing for the server and the network.
271 ** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
274 ** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
275 puts you in some directory other than '/'.
277 ** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'. For
278 example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
281 ** The HTML parser has been rewritten. The new one works more
282 reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
283 are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
284 skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc. It is
287 ** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.
289 ** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
290 where appropriate. This results in huge speedups when retrieving
291 large sites (thousands of documents).
293 ** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
294 documentation. (The last version that shipped with a man page was
295 1.4.5). To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
296 distribution installed on your system.
298 * Changes in Wget 1.6
300 ** Administrative changes.
302 *** Maintainership. Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
303 Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
304 real job as well). Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
305 are being helped by many other people.
307 *** Web page. Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
310 http://sunsite.dk/wget/
312 *** Anonymous CVS. Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
313 sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server. Take a look at
314 the web page for downloading instructions.
316 ** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
317 modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed. When
318 using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.
320 ** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
321 Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
322 retrieval. -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
323 opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.
325 ** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
326 of failed downloads. Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
327 first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS. waitretry is set to 10 by
328 default in the system wgetrc.
330 ** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
331 Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
332 page properly (e.g. inlined images).
334 ** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
335 to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
336 "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".
338 ** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean". Can be set to on, off,
339 always, or never. This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline. So far,
340 passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.
342 ** A number of new translation files have been added.
344 ** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts
345 bound to multiple IP addresses.
347 ** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.
349 * Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
351 * Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
353 * Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
355 * Changes in Wget 1.5.0
357 ** Wget speaks many languages!
359 On systems with gettext(), Wget will output messages in the language
360 set by the current locale, if available. At this time we support
361 Czech, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
363 ** Opie (Skey) is now supported with FTP.
365 ** HTTP Digest Access Authentication (RFC2069) is now supported.
367 ** The new `-b' option makes Wget go to background automatically.
369 ** The `-I' and `-X' options now accept wildcard arguments.
371 ** The `-w' option now accepts suffixes `s' for seconds, `m' for
372 minutes, `h' for hours, `d' for days and `w' for weeks.
374 ** Upon getting SIGHUP, the whole previous log is now copied to
377 ** Wget now understands proxy settings with explicit usernames and
378 passwords, e.g. `http://user:password@proxy.foo.com/'.
380 ** You can use the new `--cut-dirs' option to make Wget create less
383 ** The `;type=a' appendix to FTP URLs is now recognized. For
384 instance, the following command will retrieve the welcoming message in
387 wget "ftp://ftp.somewhere.com/welcome.msg;type=a"
389 ** `--help' and `--version' options have been redone to to conform to
390 standards set by other GNU utilities.
392 ** Wget should now be compilable under MS Windows environment. MS
393 Visual C++ and Watcom C have been used successfully.
395 ** If the file length is known, percentages are displayed during
398 ** The manual page, now hopelessly out of date, is no longer
399 distributed with Wget.
401 * Wget 1.4.5 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
403 * Wget 1.4.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
405 * Changes in Wget 1.4.3
407 ** Wget is now a GNU utility.
409 ** Can do passive FTP.
413 ** Info documentation expanded.
415 ** Compiles on pre-ANSI compilers.
417 ** Global wgetrc now goes to /usr/local/etc (i.e. $sysconfdir).
421 * Changes in Wget 1.4.2
423 ** New mirror site at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/,
424 thanks to Karsten Thygesen.
426 ** Mailing list! Mail to wget-request@sunsite.auc.dk to subscribe.
428 ** New option --delete-after for proxy prefetching.
430 ** New option --retr-symlinks to retrieve symbolic links like plain
433 ** rmold.pl -- script to remove files deleted on the remote server
435 ** --convert-links should work now.
439 * Changes in Wget 1.4.1
443 ** Added -I (the opposite of -X).
445 ** Dot tracing is now customizable; try wget --dot-style=binary
447 * Changes in Wget 1.4.0
449 ** Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of
450 Geturl. Although many things look suspiciously similar, most of the
451 stuff was rewritten, like recursive retrieval, HTTP, FTP and mostly
452 everything else. Wget should be now easier to debug, maintain and,
453 most importantly, use.
455 ** Recursive HTTP should now work without glitches, even with Location
456 changes, server-generated directory listings and other naughty stuff.
458 ** HTTP regetting is supported on servers that support Range
459 specification. WWW authorization is supported -- try
460 wget http://user:password@hostname/
462 ** FTP support was rewritten and widely enhanced. Globbing should now
463 work flawlessly. Symbolic links are created locally. All the
464 information the Unix-style ls listing can give is now recognized.
466 ** Recursive FTP is supported, e.g.
467 wget -r ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/
469 ** You can specify "rejected" directories, to which you do not want to
470 enter, e.g. with wget -X /pub
472 ** Time-stamping is supported, with both HTTP and FTP. Try wget -N URL.
474 ** A new texinfo reference manual is provided. It can be read with
475 Emacs, standalone info, or converted to HTML, dvi or postscript.
477 ** Fixed a long-standing bug, so that Wget now works over SLIP
480 ** You can have a system-wide wgetrc (/usr/local/lib/wgetrc by
481 default). Settings in $HOME/.wgetrc override the global ones, of
484 ** You can set up quota in .wgetrc to prevent sucking too much
485 data. Try `quota = 5M' in .wgetrc (or quota = 100K if you want your
486 sysadmin to like you).
488 ** Download rate is printed after retrieval.
490 ** Wget now sends the `Referer' header when retrieving
493 ** With the new --no-parent option Wget can retrieve FTP recursively
494 through a proxy server.
496 ** HTML parser, as well as the whole of Wget was rewritten to be much
497 faster and less memory-consuming (yes, both).
499 ** Absolute links can be converted to relative links locally. Check
502 ** Wget catches hangup, filtering the output to a log file and
503 resuming work. Try kill -HUP %?wget.
505 ** User-defined headers can be sent. Try
507 wget http://fly.cc.her.hr/ --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2'
509 ** Acceptance/Rejection lists may contain wildcards.
511 ** Wget can display HTTP headers and/or FTP server response with the
512 new `-S' option. It can save the original HTTP headers with `-s'.
514 ** socks library is now supported (thanks to Antonio Rosella
515 <Antonio.Rosella@agip.it>). Configure with --with-socks.
517 ** There is a nicer display of REST-ed output.
519 ** Many new options (like -x to force directory hierarchy, or -m to
520 turn on mirroring options).
522 ** Wget is now distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
524 ** Lots of small features I can't remember. :-)
526 ** A host of bugfixes.
528 * Changes in Geturl 1.3
530 ** Added FTP globbing support (ftp://fly.cc.fer.hr/*)
532 ** Added support for no_proxy
534 ** Added support for ftp://user:password@host/
536 ** Added support for %xx in URL syntax
538 ** More natural command-line options
540 ** Added -e switch to execute .geturlrc commands from the command-line
542 ** Added support for robots.txt
544 ** Fixed some minor bugs
546 * Geturl 1.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
548 * Changes in Geturl 1.1
550 ** REST supported in FTP
552 ** Proxy servers supported
554 ** GNU getopt used, which enables command-line arguments to be ordered
555 as you wish, e.g. geturl http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -vo log is the same as
556 geturl -vo log http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
558 ** Netscape-compatible URL syntax for HTTP supported: host[:port]/dir/file
560 ** NcFTP-compatible colon URL syntax for FTP supported: host:/dir/file
562 ** <base href="xxx"> supported
564 ** autoconf supported
566 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
567 Copyright information:
569 Copyright (C) 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
571 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
572 copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that
573 the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus
574 giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
576 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this
577 document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions,
578 provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last