1 GNU Wget NEWS -- history of user-visible changes.
3 Copyright (C) 1997-2005 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 ** The new function `--ignore-case' makes Wget ignore case when
11 matching files, directories, and wildcards. This affects the -X, -I,
12 -A, and -R options, as well as globbing in FTP URLs.
14 ** ETA projection is now displayed in "dot" progress output as well as
15 in the default progress bar. (The dot progress is used by default when
16 logging Wget's output to file using the `-o' option.)
18 ** The "lockable boolean" argument type is no longer supported. It
19 was only used by the passive_ftp .wgetrc setting. If you're running
20 broken scripts or Perl modules that unconditionally specify
21 `--passive-ftp' and your firewall disallows it, you can override them
22 by replacing wget with a script that execs wget "$@" --no-passive-ftp.
24 ** The source code has migrated from CVS to Subversion. The
25 repository is available at http://svn.dotsrc.org/repo/wget/; to
26 checkout the trunk to a directory named `wget', use something like
27 `svn checkout http://svn.dotsrc.org/repo/wget/trunk/ wget'.
29 * Changes in Wget 1.10.
31 ** Downloading files larger than 2GB, sometimes referred to as "large
32 files", now works on systems that support them. This includes the
33 majority of modern Unixes, as well as MS Windows.
35 ** IPv6 is now supported by Wget. Unlike the experimental code in
36 1.9, this version supports dual-family systems. The new flags
37 `--inet4' and `--inet6' (or `-4' and `-6' for short) force the use of
38 IPv4 and IPv6 respectively. Note that IPv6 support has not yet been
41 ** Microsoft's proprietary "NTLM" method of HTTP authentication is now
42 supported. This authentication method is undocumented and only used
43 by IIS. Note that *proxy* authentication is not supported in this
44 release; you can only authenticate to the target web site.
46 ** Wget no longer truncates partially downloaded files when download
47 has to start over because the server doesn't support Range. Instead,
48 with such servers Wget now simply ignores the data up to the byte
49 where the last attempt left off, and only then continues appending to
50 the file. That way the downloaded file never shrinks, and download
51 retries from servers without support for partial downloads work even
52 when downloading to stdout.
56 *** SSL/TLS downloads now attempt to verify the server's certificate
57 against the recognized certificate authorities. This requires CA
58 certificates to have been installed in a location visible to the
59 OpenSSL library. If this is not the case, you can get the bundle
60 yourself from a source you trust (for example, the bundle extracted
61 from Mozilla available at http://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html),
62 and point Wget to the PEM file using the `--ca-certificate'
63 command-line option or the corresponding `.wgetrc' command.
65 *** Secure downloads now verify that the host name in the URL matches
66 the "common name" in the certificate presented by the server.
68 *** Although the above checks provide more secure downloads, they
69 unavoidably break interoperability with some sites that worked with
70 previous versions, particularly those using self-signed, expired, or
71 otherwise invalid certificates. If you encounter "certificate
72 verification" errors or complaints that "common name doesn't match
73 requested host name" and are convinced of the site's authenticity, you
74 can use `--no-check-certificate' to bypass both checks.
76 *** Talking to SSL/TLS servers over proxies now actually works.
77 Previous versions of Wget erroneously sent GET requests for https
78 URLs. Wget 1.10 utilizes the CONNECT method designed for this
81 *** The SSL/TLS-related options have been redesigned and, for the
82 first time, documented in the manual. The old, undocumented, options
83 are no longer supported.
85 ** Passive FTP is now the default FTP transfer mode. Use
86 `--no-passive-ftp' or specify `passive_ftp = off' in your init file to
87 revert to the old behavior.
89 ** The `--header' option can now be used to override generated
90 headers. For example, `wget --header="Host: foo.bar"
91 http://127.0.0.1' tells Wget to connect to localhost, but to specify
92 "foo.bar" in the `Host' header. In previous versions such use of
93 `--header' lead to duplicate headers in HTTP requests.
95 ** The responses without headers, aka "HTTP 0.9" responses, are
96 detected and handled. Although HTTP 0.9 has long been obsolete, it is
97 still occasionally used, sometimes by accident.
99 ** The progress bar is now updated regularly even when the data does
100 not arrive from the network.
102 ** Wget no longer preserves permissions of files retrieved by FTP by
103 default. Anonymous FTP servers frequently use permissions like "664",
104 which might not be what the user wants. The new option
105 `--preserve-permissions' and the corresponding `.wgetrc' variable can
106 be used to revert to the old behavior.
108 ** The new option `--protocol-directories' instructs Wget to also use
109 the protocol name as a directory component of local file names.
111 ** Options that previously unconditionally set or unset various flags
112 are now boolean options that can be invoked as either `--OPTION' or
113 `--no-OPTION'. Options that required an argument "on" or "off" have
114 also been changed this way, but they still accept the old syntax for
115 backward compatibility. For example, instead of `--glob=off' you can
118 Allowing `--no-OPTION' for every `--OPTION' and the other way around
119 is useful because it allows the user to override non-default behavior
120 specified via `.wgetrc'.
122 ** The new option `--keep-session-cookies' causes `--save-cookies' to
123 save session cookies (normally only kept in memory) along with the
124 permanent ones. This is useful because many sites track important
125 information, such as whether the user has authenticated, in session
126 cookies. With this option multiple Wget runs are treated as a single
129 ** Wget now supports the --ftp-user and --ftp-password command
130 switches to set username and password for FTP, and the --user and
131 --password command switches to set username and password for both FTP
132 and HTTP. The --http-passwd and --proxy-passwd command switches have
133 been renamed to --http-password and --proxy-password respectively, and
134 the related http_passwd and proxy_passwd .wgetrc commands to
135 http_password and proxy_password respectively. The login and passwd
136 .wgetrc commands have been deprecated.
138 * `wget -b' now works correctly under Windows.
140 * Wget 1.9.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
142 * Changes in Wget 1.9.
144 ** It is now possible to specify that POST method be used for HTTP
145 requests. For example, `wget --post-data="id=foo&data=bar" URL' will
146 send a POST request with the specified contents.
148 ** IPv6 support is available, although it's still experimental.
150 ** The `--timeout' option now also affects DNS lookup and establishing
151 the TCP connection. Previously it only affected reading and writing
152 data. Those three timeouts can be set separately using
153 `--dns-timeout', `--connection-timeout', and `--read-timeout',
156 ** Download speed shown by the progress bar is based on the data
157 recently read, rather than the average speed of the entire download.
158 The ETA projection is still based on the overall average.
160 ** It is now possible to connect to FTP servers through FWTK
161 firewalls. Set ftp_proxy to an FTP URL, and Wget will automatically
162 log on to the proxy as "username@host".
164 ** The new option `--retry-connrefused' makes Wget retry downloads
165 even in the face of refused connections, which are otherwise
166 considered a fatal error.
168 ** The new option `--no-dns-cache' may be used to prevent Wget from
171 ** Wget no longer escapes characters in local file names based on
172 whether they're appropriate in URLs. Escaping can still occur for
173 nonprintable characters or for '/', but no longer for frequent
174 characters such as space. You can use the new option
175 --restrict-file-names to relax or strengthen these rules, which can be
176 useful if you dislike the default or if you're downloading to
177 non-native partitions.
179 ** Handling of HTML comments has been dumbed down to conform to what
180 users expect and other browsers do: instead of being treated as SGML
181 declaration, a comment is terminated at the first occurrence of "-->".
182 Use `--strict-comments' to revert to the old behavior.
184 ** Wget now correctly handles relative URIs that begin with "//", such
185 as "//img.foo.com/foo.jpg".
187 ** Boolean options in `.wgetrc' and on the command line now accept
188 values "yes" and "no" along with the traditional "on" and "off".
190 ** It is now possible to specify decimal values for timeouts, waiting
191 periods, and download rate. For instance, `--wait=0.5' now works as
192 expected, as does `--dns-timeout=0.5' and even `--limit-rate=2.5k'.
194 * Wget 1.8.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
196 * Wget 1.8.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
198 * Changes in Wget 1.8.
200 ** A new progress indicator is now available and used by default.
201 You can choose the progress bar type with `--progress=TYPE'. Two
202 types are available, "bar" (the new default), and "dot" (the old
203 dotted indicator). You can permanently revert to the old progress
204 indicator by putting `progress = dot' in your `.wgetrc'.
206 ** You can limit the download rate of the retrieval using the
207 `--limit-rate' option. For example, `wget --limit-rate=15k URL' will
208 tell Wget not to download the body of the URL faster than 15 kilobytes
211 ** Recursive retrieval and link conversion have been revamped:
213 *** Wget now traverses links breadth-first. This makes the
214 calculation of depth much more reliable than before. Also, recursive
215 downloads are faster and consume *significantly* less memory than
218 *** Links are converted only when the entire retrieval is complete.
219 This is the only safe thing to do, as only then is it known what URLs
220 have been downloaded.
222 *** BASE tags are handled correctly when converting links. Since Wget
223 already resolves <base href="..."> when resolving handling URLs, link
224 conversion now makes the BASE tags point to an empty string.
226 *** HTML anchors are now handled correctly. Links to an anchor in the
227 same document (<a href="#anchorname">), which used to confuse Wget,
228 are now converted correctly.
230 *** When in page-requisites (-p) mode, no-parent (-np) is ignored when
231 retrieving for inline images, stylesheets, and other documents needed
234 *** Page-requisites (-p) mode now works with frames. In other words,
235 `wget -p URL-THAT-USES-FRAMES' will now download the frame HTML files,
236 and all the files that they need to be displayed properly.
238 ** `--base' now works conjunction with `--input-file', providing a
239 base for each URL and thereby allowing the URLs in the file to be
242 ** If a host has more than one IP address, Wget uses the other
243 addresses when accessing the first one fails.
245 ** Host directories now contain port information if the URL is at a
248 ** Wget now supports the robots.txt directives specified in
249 <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt>.
251 ** URL parser has been fixed, especially the infamous overzealous
252 quoting. Wget no longer dequotes reserved characters, e.g. `%3F' is
253 no longer translated to `?', nor `%2B' to `+'. Unsafe characters
254 which are not reserved are still escaped, of course.
256 ** No more than 20 successive redirections are allowed.
258 * Wget 1.7.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
260 * Changes in Wget 1.7.
262 ** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
263 use the `--with-ssl' configure flag. You need to have OpenSSL
266 ** Cookies are now supported. Wget will accept cookies sent by the
267 server and return them in later requests. Additionally, it can load
268 and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.
270 ** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
271 Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
272 many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
273 stressing for the server and the network.
275 ** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
278 ** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
279 puts you in some directory other than '/'.
281 ** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'. For
282 example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
285 ** The HTML parser has been rewritten. The new one works more
286 reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
287 are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
288 skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc. It is
291 ** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.
293 ** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
294 where appropriate. This results in huge speedups when retrieving
295 large sites (thousands of documents).
297 ** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
298 documentation. (The last version that shipped with a man page was
299 1.4.5). To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
300 distribution installed on your system.
302 * Changes in Wget 1.6
304 ** Administrative changes.
306 *** Maintainership. Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
307 Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
308 real job as well). Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
309 are being helped by many other people.
311 *** Web page. Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
314 http://sunsite.dk/wget/
316 *** Anonymous CVS. Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
317 sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server. Take a look at
318 the web page for downloading instructions.
320 ** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
321 modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed. When
322 using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.
324 ** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
325 Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
326 retrieval. -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
327 opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.
329 ** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
330 of failed downloads. Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
331 first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS. waitretry is set to 10 by
332 default in the system wgetrc.
334 ** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
335 Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
336 page properly (e.g. inlined images).
338 ** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
339 to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
340 "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".
342 ** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean". Can be set to on, off,
343 always, or never. This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline. So far,
344 passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.
346 ** A number of new translation files have been added.
348 ** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts
349 bound to multiple IP addresses.
351 ** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.
353 * Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
355 * Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
357 * Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
359 * Changes in Wget 1.5.0
361 ** Wget speaks many languages!
363 On systems with gettext(), Wget will output messages in the language
364 set by the current locale, if available. At this time we support
365 Czech, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
367 ** Opie (Skey) is now supported with FTP.
369 ** HTTP Digest Access Authentication (RFC2069) is now supported.
371 ** The new `-b' option makes Wget go to background automatically.
373 ** The `-I' and `-X' options now accept wildcard arguments.
375 ** The `-w' option now accepts suffixes `s' for seconds, `m' for
376 minutes, `h' for hours, `d' for days and `w' for weeks.
378 ** Upon getting SIGHUP, the whole previous log is now copied to
381 ** Wget now understands proxy settings with explicit usernames and
382 passwords, e.g. `http://user:password@proxy.foo.com/'.
384 ** You can use the new `--cut-dirs' option to make Wget create less
387 ** The `;type=a' appendix to FTP URLs is now recognized. For
388 instance, the following command will retrieve the welcoming message in
391 wget "ftp://ftp.somewhere.com/welcome.msg;type=a"
393 ** `--help' and `--version' options have been redone to to conform to
394 standards set by other GNU utilities.
396 ** Wget should now be compilable under MS Windows environment. MS
397 Visual C++ and Watcom C have been used successfully.
399 ** If the file length is known, percentages are displayed during
402 ** The manual page, now hopelessly out of date, is no longer
403 distributed with Wget.
405 * Wget 1.4.5 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
407 * Wget 1.4.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
409 * Changes in Wget 1.4.3
411 ** Wget is now a GNU utility.
413 ** Can do passive FTP.
417 ** Info documentation expanded.
419 ** Compiles on pre-ANSI compilers.
421 ** Global wgetrc now goes to /usr/local/etc (i.e. $sysconfdir).
425 * Changes in Wget 1.4.2
427 ** New mirror site at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/,
428 thanks to Karsten Thygesen.
430 ** Mailing list! Mail to wget-request@sunsite.auc.dk to subscribe.
432 ** New option --delete-after for proxy prefetching.
434 ** New option --retr-symlinks to retrieve symbolic links like plain
437 ** rmold.pl -- script to remove files deleted on the remote server
439 ** --convert-links should work now.
443 * Changes in Wget 1.4.1
447 ** Added -I (the opposite of -X).
449 ** Dot tracing is now customizable; try wget --dot-style=binary
451 * Changes in Wget 1.4.0
453 ** Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of
454 Geturl. Although many things look suspiciously similar, most of the
455 stuff was rewritten, like recursive retrieval, HTTP, FTP and mostly
456 everything else. Wget should be now easier to debug, maintain and,
457 most importantly, use.
459 ** Recursive HTTP should now work without glitches, even with Location
460 changes, server-generated directory listings and other naughty stuff.
462 ** HTTP regetting is supported on servers that support Range
463 specification. WWW authorization is supported -- try
464 wget http://user:password@hostname/
466 ** FTP support was rewritten and widely enhanced. Globbing should now
467 work flawlessly. Symbolic links are created locally. All the
468 information the Unix-style ls listing can give is now recognized.
470 ** Recursive FTP is supported, e.g.
471 wget -r ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/
473 ** You can specify "rejected" directories, to which you do not want to
474 enter, e.g. with wget -X /pub
476 ** Time-stamping is supported, with both HTTP and FTP. Try wget -N URL.
478 ** A new texinfo reference manual is provided. It can be read with
479 Emacs, standalone info, or converted to HTML, dvi or postscript.
481 ** Fixed a long-standing bug, so that Wget now works over SLIP
484 ** You can have a system-wide wgetrc (/usr/local/lib/wgetrc by
485 default). Settings in $HOME/.wgetrc override the global ones, of
488 ** You can set up quota in .wgetrc to prevent sucking too much
489 data. Try `quota = 5M' in .wgetrc (or quota = 100K if you want your
490 sysadmin to like you).
492 ** Download rate is printed after retrieval.
494 ** Wget now sends the `Referer' header when retrieving
497 ** With the new --no-parent option Wget can retrieve FTP recursively
498 through a proxy server.
500 ** HTML parser, as well as the whole of Wget was rewritten to be much
501 faster and less memory-consuming (yes, both).
503 ** Absolute links can be converted to relative links locally. Check
506 ** Wget catches hangup, filtering the output to a log file and
507 resuming work. Try kill -HUP %?wget.
509 ** User-defined headers can be sent. Try
511 wget http://fly.cc.her.hr/ --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2'
513 ** Acceptance/Rejection lists may contain wildcards.
515 ** Wget can display HTTP headers and/or FTP server response with the
516 new `-S' option. It can save the original HTTP headers with `-s'.
518 ** socks library is now supported (thanks to Antonio Rosella
519 <Antonio.Rosella@agip.it>). Configure with --with-socks.
521 ** There is a nicer display of REST-ed output.
523 ** Many new options (like -x to force directory hierarchy, or -m to
524 turn on mirroring options).
526 ** Wget is now distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
528 ** Lots of small features I can't remember. :-)
530 ** A host of bugfixes.
532 * Changes in Geturl 1.3
534 ** Added FTP globbing support (ftp://fly.cc.fer.hr/*)
536 ** Added support for no_proxy
538 ** Added support for ftp://user:password@host/
540 ** Added support for %xx in URL syntax
542 ** More natural command-line options
544 ** Added -e switch to execute .geturlrc commands from the command-line
546 ** Added support for robots.txt
548 ** Fixed some minor bugs
550 * Geturl 1.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
552 * Changes in Geturl 1.1
554 ** REST supported in FTP
556 ** Proxy servers supported
558 ** GNU getopt used, which enables command-line arguments to be ordered
559 as you wish, e.g. geturl http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -vo log is the same as
560 geturl -vo log http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
562 ** Netscape-compatible URL syntax for HTTP supported: host[:port]/dir/file
564 ** NcFTP-compatible colon URL syntax for FTP supported: host:/dir/file
566 ** <base href="xxx"> supported
568 ** autoconf supported
570 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
571 Copyright information:
573 Copyright (C) 1997-2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
575 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
576 copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that
577 the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus
578 giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
580 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this
581 document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions,
582 provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last