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 larger than 2GB, sometimes referred to as "large
11 files", now works on systems that support them. This includes the
12 majority of modern Unixes, as well as MS Windows.
14 ** IPv6 is now supported by Wget. Unlike the experimental code in
15 1.9, this version supports dual-family systems. The new flags
16 `--inet4' and `--inet6' (or `-4' and `-6' for short) force the use of
17 IPv4 and IPv6 respectively. Note that IPv6 support has not yet been
20 ** Talking to SSL servers over proxies now actually works. Previous
21 versions of Wget erroneously sent GET requests for SSL URLs. Wget
22 1.10 utilizes the CONNECT method designed for this purpose.
24 ** SSL/TLS downloads now attempt to verify the server's certificate
25 against the recognized certificate authorities. The CA certificates
26 are searched for at the default locations compiled into the OpenSSL
27 library, and can be overridden with the `--ca-certificate' and
28 `--ca-directory' options. Wget now also checks that the common name
29 presented by the certificate corresponds to the host name in the URL.
31 Although verifying the certificates provides more secure downloads, it
32 *will* break interoperability with some sites that worked with
33 previous versions, particularly those using self-signed, expired, or
34 otherwise invalid certificates. If you encounter "certificate
35 verification" errors or ones saying that "common name doesn't match
36 requested host name" and are convinced of the site's authenticity, you
37 can use `--no-check-certificate' to bypass the verification.
39 ** Microsoft's proprietary "NTLM" method of HTTP authentication is now
40 supported. This authentication method is undocumented and only used
41 by IIS. Note that *proxy* authentication is not supported in this
42 release; you can only authenticate to the target web site.
44 ** Wget no longer truncates partially downloaded files when download
45 has to start over because the server doesn't support Range. Instead,
46 with such servers Wget now simply ignores the data up to the byte
47 where the last attempt left off, and only then continues appending to
48 the file. That way the downloaded file never shrinks, and download
49 retries from servers without support for partial downloads work even
50 when downloading to stdout.
52 ** Passive FTP is now the default FTP transfer mode. Use
53 `--no-passive-ftp' or specify `passive_ftp = off' in your init file to
54 revert to the old behavior.
56 ** The `--header' option can now be used to override generated
57 headers. For example, `wget --header="Host: foo.bar"
58 http://127.0.0.1' tells Wget to connect to localhost, but to specify
59 "foo.bar" in the `Host' header. In previous versions such use of
60 `--header' lead to duplicate headers in HTTP requests.
62 ** The responses without headers, aka "HTTP 0.9" responses, are
63 detected and handled. Although HTTP 0.9 has long been obsolete, it is
64 still occasionally used, sometimes by accident.
66 ** The progress bar is now updated regularly even when the data does
67 not arrive from the network.
69 ** Wget no longer preserves permissions of files retrieved by FTP by
70 default. Anonymous FTP servers frequently use permissions like "664",
71 which might not be what the user wants. The new option
72 `--preserve-permissions' and the corresponding `.wgetrc' variable can
73 be used to revert to the old behavior.
75 ** The new option `--protocol-directories' instructs Wget to also use
76 the protocol name as a directory component of local file names.
78 ** Many options that previously unconditionally set or unset various
79 flags are now boolean options that can be invoked as either `--OPTION'
80 or `--no-OPTION'. Options that required an argument "on" or "off"
81 have also been changed this way, but they still accept the old syntax
82 for backward compatibility. For example, instead of `--glob=off' you
83 can write `--no-glob'.
85 Allowing `--no-OPTION' for every `--OPTION' and the other way around
86 is useful because it allows the user to override non-default behavior
87 specified via `.wgetrc'.
89 ** The new option `--keep-session-cookies' causes `--save-cookies' to
90 save session cookies (normally only kept in memory) along with the
91 permanent ones. This is useful because many sites track important
92 information, such as whether the user has authenticated, in session
93 cookies. With this option multiple Wget runs are treated as a single
96 ** SSL/TLS-related options have been redesigned and documented. Refer
97 to the manual for details. The old, undocumented, options are no
100 ** Wget now supports the --ftp-user and --ftp-password command
101 switches to set username and password for FTP, and the --user and
102 --password command switches to set username and password for both FTP
103 and HTTP. The --http-passwd and --proxy-passwd command switches have
104 been renamed to --http-password and --proxy-password respectively, and
105 the related http_passwd and proxy_passwd .wgetrc commands to
106 http_password and proxy_password respectively. The login and passwd
107 .wgetrc commands have been deprecated.
109 * `wget -b' now works correctly under Windows.
111 * Wget 1.9.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
113 * Changes in Wget 1.9.
115 ** It is now possible to specify that POST method be used for HTTP
116 requests. For example, `wget --post-data="id=foo&data=bar" URL' will
117 send a POST request with the specified contents.
119 ** IPv6 support is available, although it's still experimental.
121 ** The `--timeout' option now also affects DNS lookup and establishing
122 the TCP connection. Previously it only affected reading and writing
123 data. Those three timeouts can be set separately using
124 `--dns-timeout', `--connection-timeout', and `--read-timeout',
127 ** Download speed shown by the progress bar is based on the data
128 recently read, rather than the average speed of the entire download.
129 The ETA projection is still based on the overall average.
131 ** It is now possible to connect to FTP servers through FWTK
132 firewalls. Set ftp_proxy to an FTP URL, and Wget will automatically
133 log on to the proxy as "username@host".
135 ** The new option `--retry-connrefused' makes Wget retry downloads
136 even in the face of refused connections, which are otherwise
137 considered a fatal error.
139 ** The new option `--no-dns-cache' may be used to prevent Wget from
142 ** Wget no longer escapes characters in local file names based on
143 whether they're appropriate in URLs. Escaping can still occur for
144 nonprintable characters or for '/', but no longer for frequent
145 characters such as space. You can use the new option
146 --restrict-file-names to relax or strengthen these rules, which can be
147 useful if you dislike the default or if you're downloading to
148 non-native partitions.
150 ** Handling of HTML comments has been dumbed down to conform to what
151 users expect and other browsers do: instead of being treated as SGML
152 declaration, a comment is terminated at the first occurrence of "-->".
153 Use `--strict-comments' to revert to the old behavior.
155 ** Wget now correctly handles relative URIs that begin with "//", such
156 as "//img.foo.com/foo.jpg".
158 ** Boolean options in `.wgetrc' and on the command line now accept
159 values "yes" and "no" along with the traditional "on" and "off".
161 ** It is now possible to specify decimal values for timeouts, waiting
162 periods, and download rate. For instance, `--wait=0.5' now works as
163 expected, as does `--dns-timeout=0.5' and even `--limit-rate=2.5k'.
165 * Wget 1.8.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
167 * Wget 1.8.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
169 * Changes in Wget 1.8.
171 ** A new progress indicator is now available and used by default.
172 You can choose the progress bar type with `--progress=TYPE'. Two
173 types are available, "bar" (the new default), and "dot" (the old
174 dotted indicator). You can permanently revert to the old progress
175 indicator by putting `progress = dot' in your `.wgetrc'.
177 ** You can limit the download rate of the retrieval using the
178 `--limit-rate' option. For example, `wget --limit-rate=15k URL' will
179 tell Wget not to download the body of the URL faster than 15 kilobytes
182 ** Recursive retrieval and link conversion have been revamped:
184 *** Wget now traverses links breadth-first. This makes the
185 calculation of depth much more reliable than before. Also, recursive
186 downloads are faster and consume *significantly* less memory than
189 *** Links are converted only when the entire retrieval is complete.
190 This is the only safe thing to do, as only then is it known what URLs
191 have been downloaded.
193 *** BASE tags are handled correctly when converting links. Since Wget
194 already resolves <base href="..."> when resolving handling URLs, link
195 conversion now makes the BASE tags point to an empty string.
197 *** HTML anchors are now handled correctly. Links to an anchor in the
198 same document (<a href="#anchorname">), which used to confuse Wget,
199 are now converted correctly.
201 *** When in page-requisites (-p) mode, no-parent (-np) is ignored when
202 retrieving for inline images, stylesheets, and other documents needed
205 *** Page-requisites (-p) mode now works with frames. In other words,
206 `wget -p URL-THAT-USES-FRAMES' will now download the frame HTML files,
207 and all the files that they need to be displayed properly.
209 ** `--base' now works conjunction with `--input-file', providing a
210 base for each URL and thereby allowing the URLs in the file to be
213 ** If a host has more than one IP address, Wget uses the other
214 addresses when accessing the first one fails.
216 ** Host directories now contain port information if the URL is at a
219 ** Wget now supports the robots.txt directives specified in
220 <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt>.
222 ** URL parser has been fixed, especially the infamous overzealous
223 quoting. Wget no longer dequotes reserved characters, e.g. `%3F' is
224 no longer translated to `?', nor `%2B' to `+'. Unsafe characters
225 which are not reserved are still escaped, of course.
227 ** No more than 20 successive redirections are allowed.
229 * Wget 1.7.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
231 * Changes in Wget 1.7.
233 ** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
234 use the `--with-ssl' configure flag. You need to have OpenSSL
237 ** Cookies are now supported. Wget will accept cookies sent by the
238 server and return them in later requests. Additionally, it can load
239 and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.
241 ** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
242 Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
243 many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
244 stressing for the server and the network.
246 ** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
249 ** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
250 puts you in some directory other than '/'.
252 ** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'. For
253 example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
256 ** The HTML parser has been rewritten. The new one works more
257 reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
258 are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
259 skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc. It is
262 ** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.
264 ** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
265 where appropriate. This results in huge speedups when retrieving
266 large sites (thousands of documents).
268 ** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
269 documentation. (The last version that shipped with a man page was
270 1.4.5). To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
271 distribution installed on your system.
273 * Changes in Wget 1.6
275 ** Administrative changes.
277 *** Maintainership. Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
278 Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
279 real job as well). Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
280 are being helped by many other people.
282 *** Web page. Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
285 http://sunsite.dk/wget/
287 *** Anonymous CVS. Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
288 sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server. Take a look at
289 the web page for downloading instructions.
291 ** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
292 modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed. When
293 using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.
295 ** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
296 Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
297 retrieval. -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
298 opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.
300 ** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
301 of failed downloads. Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
302 first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS. waitretry is set to 10 by
303 default in the system wgetrc.
305 ** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
306 Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
307 page properly (e.g. inlined images).
309 ** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
310 to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
311 "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".
313 ** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean". Can be set to on, off,
314 always, or never. This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline. So far,
315 passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.
317 ** A number of new translation files have been added.
319 ** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts
320 bound to multiple IP addresses.
322 ** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.
324 * Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
326 * Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
328 * Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
330 * Changes in Wget 1.5.0
332 ** Wget speaks many languages!
334 On systems with gettext(), Wget will output messages in the language
335 set by the current locale, if available. At this time we support
336 Czech, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
338 ** Opie (Skey) is now supported with FTP.
340 ** HTTP Digest Access Authentication (RFC2069) is now supported.
342 ** The new `-b' option makes Wget go to background automatically.
344 ** The `-I' and `-X' options now accept wildcard arguments.
346 ** The `-w' option now accepts suffixes `s' for seconds, `m' for
347 minutes, `h' for hours, `d' for days and `w' for weeks.
349 ** Upon getting SIGHUP, the whole previous log is now copied to
352 ** Wget now understands proxy settings with explicit usernames and
353 passwords, e.g. `http://user:password@proxy.foo.com/'.
355 ** You can use the new `--cut-dirs' option to make Wget create less
358 ** The `;type=a' appendix to FTP URLs is now recognized. For
359 instance, the following command will retrieve the welcoming message in
362 wget "ftp://ftp.somewhere.com/welcome.msg;type=a"
364 ** `--help' and `--version' options have been redone to to conform to
365 standards set by other GNU utilities.
367 ** Wget should now be compilable under MS Windows environment. MS
368 Visual C++ and Watcom C have been used successfully.
370 ** If the file length is known, percentages are displayed during
373 ** The manual page, now hopelessly out of date, is no longer
374 distributed with Wget.
376 * Wget 1.4.5 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
378 * Wget 1.4.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
380 * Changes in Wget 1.4.3
382 ** Wget is now a GNU utility.
384 ** Can do passive FTP.
388 ** Info documentation expanded.
390 ** Compiles on pre-ANSI compilers.
392 ** Global wgetrc now goes to /usr/local/etc (i.e. $sysconfdir).
396 * Changes in Wget 1.4.2
398 ** New mirror site at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/,
399 thanks to Karsten Thygesen.
401 ** Mailing list! Mail to wget-request@sunsite.auc.dk to subscribe.
403 ** New option --delete-after for proxy prefetching.
405 ** New option --retr-symlinks to retrieve symbolic links like plain
408 ** rmold.pl -- script to remove files deleted on the remote server
410 ** --convert-links should work now.
414 * Changes in Wget 1.4.1
418 ** Added -I (the opposite of -X).
420 ** Dot tracing is now customizable; try wget --dot-style=binary
422 * Changes in Wget 1.4.0
424 ** Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of
425 Geturl. Although many things look suspiciously similar, most of the
426 stuff was rewritten, like recursive retrieval, HTTP, FTP and mostly
427 everything else. Wget should be now easier to debug, maintain and,
428 most importantly, use.
430 ** Recursive HTTP should now work without glitches, even with Location
431 changes, server-generated directory listings and other naughty stuff.
433 ** HTTP regetting is supported on servers that support Range
434 specification. WWW authorization is supported -- try
435 wget http://user:password@hostname/
437 ** FTP support was rewritten and widely enhanced. Globbing should now
438 work flawlessly. Symbolic links are created locally. All the
439 information the Unix-style ls listing can give is now recognized.
441 ** Recursive FTP is supported, e.g.
442 wget -r ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/
444 ** You can specify "rejected" directories, to which you do not want to
445 enter, e.g. with wget -X /pub
447 ** Time-stamping is supported, with both HTTP and FTP. Try wget -N URL.
449 ** A new texinfo reference manual is provided. It can be read with
450 Emacs, standalone info, or converted to HTML, dvi or postscript.
452 ** Fixed a long-standing bug, so that Wget now works over SLIP
455 ** You can have a system-wide wgetrc (/usr/local/lib/wgetrc by
456 default). Settings in $HOME/.wgetrc override the global ones, of
459 ** You can set up quota in .wgetrc to prevent sucking too much
460 data. Try `quota = 5M' in .wgetrc (or quota = 100K if you want your
461 sysadmin to like you).
463 ** Download rate is printed after retrieval.
465 ** Wget now sends the `Referer' header when retrieving
468 ** With the new --no-parent option Wget can retrieve FTP recursively
469 through a proxy server.
471 ** HTML parser, as well as the whole of Wget was rewritten to be much
472 faster and less memory-consuming (yes, both).
474 ** Absolute links can be converted to relative links locally. Check
477 ** Wget catches hangup, filtering the output to a log file and
478 resuming work. Try kill -HUP %?wget.
480 ** User-defined headers can be sent. Try
482 wget http://fly.cc.her.hr/ --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2'
484 ** Acceptance/Rejection lists may contain wildcards.
486 ** Wget can display HTTP headers and/or FTP server response with the
487 new `-S' option. It can save the original HTTP headers with `-s'.
489 ** socks library is now supported (thanks to Antonio Rosella
490 <Antonio.Rosella@agip.it>). Configure with --with-socks.
492 ** There is a nicer display of REST-ed output.
494 ** Many new options (like -x to force directory hierarchy, or -m to
495 turn on mirroring options).
497 ** Wget is now distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
499 ** Lots of small features I can't remember. :-)
501 ** A host of bugfixes.
503 * Changes in Geturl 1.3
505 ** Added FTP globbing support (ftp://fly.cc.fer.hr/*)
507 ** Added support for no_proxy
509 ** Added support for ftp://user:password@host/
511 ** Added support for %xx in URL syntax
513 ** More natural command-line options
515 ** Added -e switch to execute .geturlrc commands from the command-line
517 ** Added support for robots.txt
519 ** Fixed some minor bugs
521 * Geturl 1.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
523 * Changes in Geturl 1.1
525 ** REST supported in FTP
527 ** Proxy servers supported
529 ** GNU getopt used, which enables command-line arguments to be ordered
530 as you wish, e.g. geturl http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -vo log is the same as
531 geturl -vo log http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
533 ** Netscape-compatible URL syntax for HTTP supported: host[:port]/dir/file
535 ** NcFTP-compatible colon URL syntax for FTP supported: host:/dir/file
537 ** <base href="xxx"> supported
539 ** autoconf supported
541 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
542 Copyright information:
544 Copyright (C) 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
546 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
547 copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that
548 the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus
549 giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
551 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this
552 document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions,
553 provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last