1 GNU Wget NEWS -- history of user-visible changes.
3 Copyright (C) 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005,
4 2006, 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5 See the end for copying conditions.
7 Please send GNU Wget bug reports to <bug-wget@gnu.org>.
9 * Changes in Wget (MAINLINE).
11 ** Gnulib is now used to provide code for certain portability aspects in
14 ** Wget uses Automake now as part of its build infrastructure.
16 * Changes in Wget 1.11.
18 ** The source code has been migrated to Mercurial. The repositories are
19 available at http://hg.addictivecode.org/. Prior to this, the source
20 code was hosted on Subversion (migrated from the original CVS); you can
21 still get access to older tags and branches for Wget in the Subversion
22 repository at http://addictivecode.org/svn/wget/.
24 ** PATCH file removed; see http://wget.addictivecode.org/PatchGuidelines
25 for current information about producing patches for GNU Wget.
27 ** TODO file removed: we use a bugtracker now; see
28 http://wget.addictivecode.org/BugTracker. Also,
29 http://wget.addictivecode.org/FeatureSpecifications.
31 ** Timestamping now uses the value from the most recent HTTP response,
32 rather than the first one it got.
34 ** configure.in now requires autoconf >= 2.61, rather than 2.59.
36 ** Authentication information is no longer sent as part of the Referer
37 header in recursive fetches.
39 ** No authentication credentials are sent until a challenge is issued,
40 for improved security. Authentication handling is still not
41 RFC-compliant, as once a Basic challenge has been received, it will
42 assume it can send credentials to any URL at that same host, and not
43 just the ones at or below the original authenticated location.
44 Credentials for Digest authentication are still never saved or issued
45 automatically, and continue to require a challenge for each resource.
47 ** Added --max-redirect option, allowing the user to specify what should
48 be the maximum number of HTTP redirects to follow.
50 ** Wget now saves HTTP downloads using file names specified by the
51 `Content-Disposition' header. This is a standard way of specifying the
52 file name used by many web dynamically generated pages. For the time
53 being, Content-Disposition is not used by default, to avoid the extra
54 round-trips incurred (must specify "-e contentdisposition=yes"); this
55 may change in a future version. NOTE: This functionality is currently
56 considered "experimental", and may not be fully functional.
58 ** The GnuTLS library is now also experimentally supported for https
59 downloads. This is still work-in-progress. OpenSSL is still used by
60 default; use --with-ssl=gnutls to build with GnuTLS. OpenSSL is still
61 required for NTLM authorization to work, but this should eventually
62 change. NOTE: Certificate verification is _not_ currently supported:
63 this means that you can currently only use GnuTLS to encrypt
64 connections, but _not_ to verify that a host is who it claims to be. Use
65 of OpenSSL is suggested until this missing feature is implemented.
67 ** The new option `--ignore-case' makes Wget ignore case when
68 matching files, directories, and wildcards. This affects the -X, -I,
69 -A, and -R options, as well as globbing in FTP URLs.
71 ** ETA projection is now displayed in "dot" progress output as well as
72 in the default progress bar. (The dot progress is used by default when
73 logging Wget's output to file using the `-o' option.)
75 ** The "lockable boolean" argument type is no longer supported. It
76 was only used by the passive_ftp .wgetrc setting. If you're running
77 broken scripts or Perl modules that unconditionally specify
78 `--passive-ftp' and your firewall disallows it, you can override them
79 by replacing wget with a script that execs wget "$@" --no-passive-ftp.
81 * Changes in Wget 1.10.
83 ** Downloading files larger than 2GB, sometimes referred to as "large
84 files", now works on systems that support them. This includes the
85 majority of modern Unixes, as well as MS Windows.
87 ** IPv6 is now supported by Wget. Unlike the experimental code in
88 1.9, this version supports dual-family systems. The new flags
89 `--inet4' and `--inet6' (or `-4' and `-6' for short) force the use of
90 IPv4 and IPv6 respectively. Note that IPv6 support has not yet been
93 ** Microsoft's proprietary "NTLM" method of HTTP authentication is now
94 supported. This authentication method is undocumented and only used
95 by IIS. Note that *proxy* authentication is not supported in this
96 release; you can only authenticate to the target web site.
98 ** Wget no longer truncates partially downloaded files when download
99 has to start over because the server doesn't support Range. Instead,
100 with such servers Wget now simply ignores the data up to the byte
101 where the last attempt left off, and only then continues appending to
102 the file. That way the downloaded file never shrinks, and download
103 retries from servers without support for partial downloads work even
104 when downloading to stdout.
108 *** SSL/TLS downloads now attempt to verify the server's certificate
109 against the recognized certificate authorities. This requires CA
110 certificates to have been installed in a location visible to the
111 OpenSSL library. If this is not the case, you can get the bundle
112 yourself from a source you trust (for example, the bundle extracted
113 from Mozilla available at http://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html),
114 and point Wget to the PEM file using the `--ca-certificate'
115 command-line option or the corresponding `.wgetrc' command.
117 *** Secure downloads now verify that the host name in the URL matches
118 the "common name" in the certificate presented by the server.
120 *** Although the above checks provide more secure downloads, they
121 unavoidably break interoperability with some sites that worked with
122 previous versions, particularly those using self-signed, expired, or
123 otherwise invalid certificates. If you encounter "certificate
124 verification" errors or complaints that "common name doesn't match
125 requested host name" and are convinced of the site's authenticity, you
126 can use `--no-check-certificate' to bypass both checks.
128 *** Talking to SSL/TLS servers over proxies now actually works.
129 Previous versions of Wget erroneously sent GET requests for https
130 URLs. Wget 1.10 utilizes the CONNECT method designed for this
133 *** The SSL/TLS-related options have been redesigned and, for the
134 first time, documented in the manual. The old, undocumented, options
135 are no longer supported.
137 ** Passive FTP is now the default FTP transfer mode. Use
138 `--no-passive-ftp' or specify `passive_ftp = off' in your init file to
139 revert to the old behavior.
141 ** The `--header' option can now be used to override generated
142 headers. For example, `wget --header="Host: foo.bar"
143 http://127.0.0.1' tells Wget to connect to localhost, but to specify
144 "foo.bar" in the `Host' header. In previous versions such use of
145 `--header' lead to duplicate headers in HTTP requests.
147 ** The responses without headers, aka "HTTP 0.9" responses, are
148 detected and handled. Although HTTP 0.9 has long been obsolete, it is
149 still occasionally used, sometimes by accident.
151 ** The progress bar is now updated regularly even when the data does
152 not arrive from the network.
154 ** Wget no longer preserves permissions of files retrieved by FTP by
155 default. Anonymous FTP servers frequently use permissions like "664",
156 which might not be what the user wants. The new option
157 `--preserve-permissions' and the corresponding `.wgetrc' variable can
158 be used to revert to the old behavior.
160 ** The new option `--protocol-directories' instructs Wget to also use
161 the protocol name as a directory component of local file names.
163 ** Options that previously unconditionally set or unset various flags
164 are now boolean options that can be invoked as either `--OPTION' or
165 `--no-OPTION'. Options that required an argument "on" or "off" have
166 also been changed this way, but they still accept the old syntax for
167 backward compatibility. For example, instead of `--glob=off' you can
170 Allowing `--no-OPTION' for every `--OPTION' and the other way around
171 is useful because it allows the user to override non-default behavior
172 specified via `.wgetrc'.
174 ** The new option `--keep-session-cookies' causes `--save-cookies' to
175 save session cookies (normally only kept in memory) along with the
176 permanent ones. This is useful because many sites track important
177 information, such as whether the user has authenticated, in session
178 cookies. With this option multiple Wget runs are treated as a single
181 ** Wget now supports the --ftp-user and --ftp-password command
182 switches to set username and password for FTP, and the --user and
183 --password command switches to set username and password for both FTP
184 and HTTP. The --http-passwd and --proxy-passwd command switches have
185 been renamed to --http-password and --proxy-password respectively, and
186 the related http_passwd and proxy_passwd .wgetrc commands to
187 http_password and proxy_password respectively. The login and passwd
188 .wgetrc commands have been deprecated.
190 * `wget -b' now works correctly under Windows.
192 * Wget 1.9.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
194 * Changes in Wget 1.9.
196 ** It is now possible to specify that POST method be used for HTTP
197 requests. For example, `wget --post-data="id=foo&data=bar" URL' will
198 send a POST request with the specified contents.
200 ** IPv6 support is available, although it's still experimental.
202 ** The `--timeout' option now also affects DNS lookup and establishing
203 the TCP connection. Previously it only affected reading and writing
204 data. Those three timeouts can be set separately using
205 `--dns-timeout', `--connection-timeout', and `--read-timeout',
208 ** Download speed shown by the progress bar is based on the data
209 recently read, rather than the average speed of the entire download.
210 The ETA projection is still based on the overall average.
212 ** It is now possible to connect to FTP servers through FWTK
213 firewalls. Set ftp_proxy to an FTP URL, and Wget will automatically
214 log on to the proxy as "username@host".
216 ** The new option `--retry-connrefused' makes Wget retry downloads
217 even in the face of refused connections, which are otherwise
218 considered a fatal error.
220 ** The new option `--no-dns-cache' may be used to prevent Wget from
223 ** Wget no longer escapes characters in local file names based on
224 whether they're appropriate in URLs. Escaping can still occur for
225 nonprintable characters or for '/', but no longer for frequent
226 characters such as space. You can use the new option
227 --restrict-file-names to relax or strengthen these rules, which can be
228 useful if you dislike the default or if you're downloading to
229 non-native partitions.
231 ** Handling of HTML comments has been dumbed down to conform to what
232 users expect and other browsers do: instead of being treated as SGML
233 declaration, a comment is terminated at the first occurrence of "-->".
234 Use `--strict-comments' to revert to the old behavior.
236 ** Wget now correctly handles relative URIs that begin with "//", such
237 as "//img.foo.com/foo.jpg".
239 ** Boolean options in `.wgetrc' and on the command line now accept
240 values "yes" and "no" along with the traditional "on" and "off".
242 ** It is now possible to specify decimal values for timeouts, waiting
243 periods, and download rate. For instance, `--wait=0.5' now works as
244 expected, as does `--dns-timeout=0.5' and even `--limit-rate=2.5k'.
246 * Wget 1.8.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
248 * Wget 1.8.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
250 * Changes in Wget 1.8.
252 ** A new progress indicator is now available and used by default.
253 You can choose the progress bar type with `--progress=TYPE'. Two
254 types are available, "bar" (the new default), and "dot" (the old
255 dotted indicator). You can permanently revert to the old progress
256 indicator by putting `progress = dot' in your `.wgetrc'.
258 ** You can limit the download rate of the retrieval using the
259 `--limit-rate' option. For example, `wget --limit-rate=15k URL' will
260 tell Wget not to download the body of the URL faster than 15 kilobytes
263 ** Recursive retrieval and link conversion have been revamped:
265 *** Wget now traverses links breadth-first. This makes the
266 calculation of depth much more reliable than before. Also, recursive
267 downloads are faster and consume *significantly* less memory than
270 *** Links are converted only when the entire retrieval is complete.
271 This is the only safe thing to do, as only then is it known what URLs
272 have been downloaded.
274 *** BASE tags are handled correctly when converting links. Since Wget
275 already resolves <base href="..."> when resolving handling URLs, link
276 conversion now makes the BASE tags point to an empty string.
278 *** HTML anchors are now handled correctly. Links to an anchor in the
279 same document (<a href="#anchorname">), which used to confuse Wget,
280 are now converted correctly.
282 *** When in page-requisites (-p) mode, no-parent (-np) is ignored when
283 retrieving for inline images, stylesheets, and other documents needed
286 *** Page-requisites (-p) mode now works with frames. In other words,
287 `wget -p URL-THAT-USES-FRAMES' will now download the frame HTML files,
288 and all the files that they need to be displayed properly.
290 ** `--base' now works conjunction with `--input-file', providing a
291 base for each URL and thereby allowing the URLs in the file to be
294 ** If a host has more than one IP address, Wget uses the other
295 addresses when accessing the first one fails.
297 ** Host directories now contain port information if the URL is at a
300 ** Wget now supports the robots.txt directives specified in
301 <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt>.
303 ** URL parser has been fixed, especially the infamous overzealous
304 quoting. Wget no longer dequotes reserved characters, e.g. `%3F' is
305 no longer translated to `?', nor `%2B' to `+'. Unsafe characters
306 which are not reserved are still escaped, of course.
308 ** No more than 20 successive redirections are allowed.
310 * Wget 1.7.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
312 * Changes in Wget 1.7.
314 ** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
315 use the `--with-ssl' configure flag. You need to have OpenSSL
318 ** Cookies are now supported. Wget will accept cookies sent by the
319 server and return them in later requests. Additionally, it can load
320 and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.
322 ** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
323 Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
324 many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
325 stressing for the server and the network.
327 ** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
330 ** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
331 puts you in some directory other than '/'.
333 ** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'. For
334 example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
337 ** The HTML parser has been rewritten. The new one works more
338 reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
339 are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
340 skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc. It is
343 ** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.
345 ** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
346 where appropriate. This results in huge speedups when retrieving
347 large sites (thousands of documents).
349 ** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
350 documentation. (The last version that shipped with a man page was
351 1.4.5). To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
352 distribution installed on your system.
354 * Changes in Wget 1.6
356 ** Administrative changes.
358 *** Maintainership. Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
359 Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
360 real job as well). Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
361 are being helped by many other people.
363 *** Web page. Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
366 http://sunsite.dk/wget/
368 *** Anonymous CVS. Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
369 sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server. Take a look at
370 the web page for downloading instructions.
372 ** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
373 modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed. When
374 using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.
376 ** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
377 Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
378 retrieval. -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
379 opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.
381 ** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
382 of failed downloads. Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
383 first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS. waitretry is set to 10 by
384 default in the system wgetrc.
386 ** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
387 Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
388 page properly (e.g. inlined images).
390 ** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
391 to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
392 "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".
394 ** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean". Can be set to on, off,
395 always, or never. This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline. So far,
396 passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.
398 ** A number of new translation files have been added.
400 ** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts
401 bound to multiple IP addresses.
403 ** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.
405 * Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
407 * Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
409 * Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
411 * Changes in Wget 1.5.0
413 ** Wget speaks many languages!
415 On systems with gettext(), Wget will output messages in the language
416 set by the current locale, if available. At this time we support
417 Czech, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
419 ** Opie (Skey) is now supported with FTP.
421 ** HTTP Digest Access Authentication (RFC2069) is now supported.
423 ** The new `-b' option makes Wget go to background automatically.
425 ** The `-I' and `-X' options now accept wildcard arguments.
427 ** The `-w' option now accepts suffixes `s' for seconds, `m' for
428 minutes, `h' for hours, `d' for days and `w' for weeks.
430 ** Upon getting SIGHUP, the whole previous log is now copied to
433 ** Wget now understands proxy settings with explicit usernames and
434 passwords, e.g. `http://user:password@proxy.foo.com/'.
436 ** You can use the new `--cut-dirs' option to make Wget create less
439 ** The `;type=a' appendix to FTP URLs is now recognized. For
440 instance, the following command will retrieve the welcoming message in
443 wget "ftp://ftp.somewhere.com/welcome.msg;type=a"
445 ** `--help' and `--version' options have been redone to to conform to
446 standards set by other GNU utilities.
448 ** Wget should now be compilable under MS Windows environment. MS
449 Visual C++ and Watcom C have been used successfully.
451 ** If the file length is known, percentages are displayed during
454 ** The manual page, now hopelessly out of date, is no longer
455 distributed with Wget.
457 * Wget 1.4.5 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
459 * Wget 1.4.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
461 * Changes in Wget 1.4.3
463 ** Wget is now a GNU utility.
465 ** Can do passive FTP.
469 ** Info documentation expanded.
471 ** Compiles on pre-ANSI compilers.
473 ** Global wgetrc now goes to /usr/local/etc (i.e. $sysconfdir).
477 * Changes in Wget 1.4.2
479 ** New mirror site at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/,
480 thanks to Karsten Thygesen.
482 ** Mailing list! Mail to wget-request@sunsite.auc.dk to subscribe.
484 ** New option --delete-after for proxy prefetching.
486 ** New option --retr-symlinks to retrieve symbolic links like plain
489 ** rmold.pl -- script to remove files deleted on the remote server
491 ** --convert-links should work now.
495 * Changes in Wget 1.4.1
499 ** Added -I (the opposite of -X).
501 ** Dot tracing is now customizable; try wget --dot-style=binary
503 * Changes in Wget 1.4.0
505 ** Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of
506 Geturl. Although many things look suspiciously similar, most of the
507 stuff was rewritten, like recursive retrieval, HTTP, FTP and mostly
508 everything else. Wget should be now easier to debug, maintain and,
509 most importantly, use.
511 ** Recursive HTTP should now work without glitches, even with Location
512 changes, server-generated directory listings and other naughty stuff.
514 ** HTTP regetting is supported on servers that support Range
515 specification. WWW authorization is supported -- try
516 wget http://user:password@hostname/
518 ** FTP support was rewritten and widely enhanced. Globbing should now
519 work flawlessly. Symbolic links are created locally. All the
520 information the Unix-style ls listing can give is now recognized.
522 ** Recursive FTP is supported, e.g.
523 wget -r ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/
525 ** You can specify "rejected" directories, to which you do not want to
526 enter, e.g. with wget -X /pub
528 ** Time-stamping is supported, with both HTTP and FTP. Try wget -N URL.
530 ** A new texinfo reference manual is provided. It can be read with
531 Emacs, standalone info, or converted to HTML, dvi or postscript.
533 ** Fixed a long-standing bug, so that Wget now works over SLIP
536 ** You can have a system-wide wgetrc (/usr/local/lib/wgetrc by
537 default). Settings in $HOME/.wgetrc override the global ones, of
540 ** You can set up quota in .wgetrc to prevent sucking too much
541 data. Try `quota = 5M' in .wgetrc (or quota = 100K if you want your
542 sysadmin to like you).
544 ** Download rate is printed after retrieval.
546 ** Wget now sends the `Referer' header when retrieving
549 ** With the new --no-parent option Wget can retrieve FTP recursively
550 through a proxy server.
552 ** HTML parser, as well as the whole of Wget was rewritten to be much
553 faster and less memory-consuming (yes, both).
555 ** Absolute links can be converted to relative links locally. Check
558 ** Wget catches hangup, filtering the output to a log file and
559 resuming work. Try kill -HUP %?wget.
561 ** User-defined headers can be sent. Try
563 wget http://fly.cc.her.hr/ --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2'
565 ** Acceptance/Rejection lists may contain wildcards.
567 ** Wget can display HTTP headers and/or FTP server response with the
568 new `-S' option. It can save the original HTTP headers with `-s'.
570 ** socks library is now supported (thanks to Antonio Rosella
571 <Antonio.Rosella@agip.it>). Configure with --with-socks.
573 ** There is a nicer display of REST-ed output.
575 ** Many new options (like -x to force directory hierarchy, or -m to
576 turn on mirroring options).
578 ** Wget is now distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
580 ** Lots of small features I can't remember. :-)
582 ** A host of bugfixes.
584 * Changes in Geturl 1.3
586 ** Added FTP globbing support (ftp://fly.cc.fer.hr/*)
588 ** Added support for no_proxy
590 ** Added support for ftp://user:password@host/
592 ** Added support for %xx in URL syntax
594 ** More natural command-line options
596 ** Added -e switch to execute .geturlrc commands from the command-line
598 ** Added support for robots.txt
600 ** Fixed some minor bugs
602 * Geturl 1.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
604 * Changes in Geturl 1.1
606 ** REST supported in FTP
608 ** Proxy servers supported
610 ** GNU getopt used, which enables command-line arguments to be ordered
611 as you wish, e.g. geturl http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -vo log is the same as
612 geturl -vo log http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
614 ** Netscape-compatible URL syntax for HTTP supported: host[:port]/dir/file
616 ** NcFTP-compatible colon URL syntax for FTP supported: host:/dir/file
618 ** <base href="xxx"> supported
620 ** autoconf supported
622 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
623 Copyright information:
625 Copyright (C) 1997-2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
627 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
628 copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that
629 the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus
630 giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
632 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this
633 document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions,
634 provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last