1 GNU Wget NEWS -- history of user-visible changes.
3 Copyright (C) 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005,
4 2006, 2007, 2008 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 1.11.1.
18 ** Interrupted downloads no longer result in renaming the file
19 (regression in 1.11 over 1.10.2).
21 ** Progress bar now displays correctly in non-English locales (and a
22 related assertion failure was fixed).
24 ** Wget no longer issues a GET request over HTTP for files it should
25 know it's not going to download (regression in 1.11 over 1.10.2).
27 ** Added option --auth-no-challenge, to support broken pre-1.11
28 authentication-before-server-challenge, which turns out to still be
29 useful for some limited cases.
31 ** Documentation of accept/reject lists in the manual's "Types of
32 Files" section now explains various aspects of their behavior that may
33 be surprising, and notes that they may change in the future.
35 ** Documentation of --no-parents now explains how a trailing slash, or
36 lack thereof, in the specified URL, will affect behavior.
38 * Changes in Wget 1.11.
40 ** Timestamping now uses the value from the most recent HTTP response,
41 rather than the first one it got.
43 ** Authentication information is no longer sent as part of the Referer
44 header in recursive fetches.
46 ** No authentication credentials are sent until a challenge is issued,
47 for improved security. Authentication handling is still not
48 RFC-compliant, as once a Basic challenge has been received, it will
49 assume it can send credentials to any URL at that same host, and not
50 just the ones at or below the original authenticated location.
51 Credentials for Digest authentication are still never saved or issued
52 automatically, and continue to require a challenge for each resource.
54 ** Added --max-redirect option, allowing the user to specify what should
55 be the maximum number of HTTP redirects to follow.
57 ** Wget now supports saving HTTP downloads using file names specified by
58 the `Content-Disposition' header. This is a standard way of specifying
59 the file name used by many web dynamically generated pages. However, the
60 current implementation is inefficient, and known to have bugs. It is
61 EXPERIMENTAL only, and not enabled by default. Use --content-disposition
64 ** The new option `--ignore-case' makes Wget ignore case when
65 matching files, directories, and wildcards. This affects the -X, -I,
66 -A, and -R options, as well as globbing in FTP URLs.
68 ** ETA projection is now displayed in "dot" progress output as well as
69 in the default progress bar. (The dot progress is used by default when
70 logging Wget's output to file using the `-o' option.)
72 ** The "lockable boolean" argument type is no longer supported. It
73 was only used by the passive_ftp .wgetrc setting. If you're running
74 broken scripts or Perl modules that unconditionally specify
75 `--passive-ftp' and your firewall disallows it, you can override them
76 by replacing wget with a script that execs wget "$@" --no-passive-ftp.
78 ** The source code has been migrated to Mercurial. The repositories are
79 available at http://hg.addictivecode.org/. Prior to this, the source
80 code was hosted on Subversion (migrated from the original CVS); you can
81 still get access to older tags and branches for Wget in the Subversion
82 repository at http://addictivecode.org/svn/wget/.
84 * Changes in Wget 1.10.
86 ** Downloading files larger than 2GB, sometimes referred to as "large
87 files", now works on systems that support them. This includes the
88 majority of modern Unixes, as well as MS Windows.
90 ** IPv6 is now supported by Wget. Unlike the experimental code in
91 1.9, this version supports dual-family systems. The new flags
92 `--inet4' and `--inet6' (or `-4' and `-6' for short) force the use of
93 IPv4 and IPv6 respectively. Note that IPv6 support has not yet been
96 ** Microsoft's proprietary "NTLM" method of HTTP authentication is now
97 supported. This authentication method is undocumented and only used
98 by IIS. Note that *proxy* authentication is not supported in this
99 release; you can only authenticate to the target web site.
101 ** Wget no longer truncates partially downloaded files when download
102 has to start over because the server doesn't support Range. Instead,
103 with such servers Wget now simply ignores the data up to the byte
104 where the last attempt left off, and only then continues appending to
105 the file. That way the downloaded file never shrinks, and download
106 retries from servers without support for partial downloads work even
107 when downloading to stdout.
111 *** SSL/TLS downloads now attempt to verify the server's certificate
112 against the recognized certificate authorities. This requires CA
113 certificates to have been installed in a location visible to the
114 OpenSSL library. If this is not the case, you can get the bundle
115 yourself from a source you trust (for example, the bundle extracted
116 from Mozilla available at http://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html),
117 and point Wget to the PEM file using the `--ca-certificate'
118 command-line option or the corresponding `.wgetrc' command.
120 *** Secure downloads now verify that the host name in the URL matches
121 the "common name" in the certificate presented by the server.
123 *** Although the above checks provide more secure downloads, they
124 unavoidably break interoperability with some sites that worked with
125 previous versions, particularly those using self-signed, expired, or
126 otherwise invalid certificates. If you encounter "certificate
127 verification" errors or complaints that "common name doesn't match
128 requested host name" and are convinced of the site's authenticity, you
129 can use `--no-check-certificate' to bypass both checks.
131 *** Talking to SSL/TLS servers over proxies now actually works.
132 Previous versions of Wget erroneously sent GET requests for https
133 URLs. Wget 1.10 utilizes the CONNECT method designed for this
136 *** The SSL/TLS-related options have been redesigned and, for the
137 first time, documented in the manual. The old, undocumented, options
138 are no longer supported.
140 ** Passive FTP is now the default FTP transfer mode. Use
141 `--no-passive-ftp' or specify `passive_ftp = off' in your init file to
142 revert to the old behavior.
144 ** The `--header' option can now be used to override generated
145 headers. For example, `wget --header="Host: foo.bar"
146 http://127.0.0.1' tells Wget to connect to localhost, but to specify
147 "foo.bar" in the `Host' header. In previous versions such use of
148 `--header' lead to duplicate headers in HTTP requests.
150 ** The responses without headers, aka "HTTP 0.9" responses, are
151 detected and handled. Although HTTP 0.9 has long been obsolete, it is
152 still occasionally used, sometimes by accident.
154 ** The progress bar is now updated regularly even when the data does
155 not arrive from the network.
157 ** Wget no longer preserves permissions of files retrieved by FTP by
158 default. Anonymous FTP servers frequently use permissions like "664",
159 which might not be what the user wants. The new option
160 `--preserve-permissions' and the corresponding `.wgetrc' variable can
161 be used to revert to the old behavior.
163 ** The new option `--protocol-directories' instructs Wget to also use
164 the protocol name as a directory component of local file names.
166 ** Options that previously unconditionally set or unset various flags
167 are now boolean options that can be invoked as either `--OPTION' or
168 `--no-OPTION'. Options that required an argument "on" or "off" have
169 also been changed this way, but they still accept the old syntax for
170 backward compatibility. For example, instead of `--glob=off' you can
173 Allowing `--no-OPTION' for every `--OPTION' and the other way around
174 is useful because it allows the user to override non-default behavior
175 specified via `.wgetrc'.
177 ** The new option `--keep-session-cookies' causes `--save-cookies' to
178 save session cookies (normally only kept in memory) along with the
179 permanent ones. This is useful because many sites track important
180 information, such as whether the user has authenticated, in session
181 cookies. With this option multiple Wget runs are treated as a single
184 ** Wget now supports the --ftp-user and --ftp-password command
185 switches to set username and password for FTP, and the --user and
186 --password command switches to set username and password for both FTP
187 and HTTP. The --http-passwd and --proxy-passwd command switches have
188 been renamed to --http-password and --proxy-password respectively, and
189 the related http_passwd and proxy_passwd .wgetrc commands to
190 http_password and proxy_password respectively. The login and passwd
191 .wgetrc commands have been deprecated.
193 * `wget -b' now works correctly under Windows.
195 * Wget 1.9.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
197 * Changes in Wget 1.9.
199 ** It is now possible to specify that POST method be used for HTTP
200 requests. For example, `wget --post-data="id=foo&data=bar" URL' will
201 send a POST request with the specified contents.
203 ** IPv6 support is available, although it's still experimental.
205 ** The `--timeout' option now also affects DNS lookup and establishing
206 the TCP connection. Previously it only affected reading and writing
207 data. Those three timeouts can be set separately using
208 `--dns-timeout', `--connection-timeout', and `--read-timeout',
211 ** Download speed shown by the progress bar is based on the data
212 recently read, rather than the average speed of the entire download.
213 The ETA projection is still based on the overall average.
215 ** It is now possible to connect to FTP servers through FWTK
216 firewalls. Set ftp_proxy to an FTP URL, and Wget will automatically
217 log on to the proxy as "username@host".
219 ** The new option `--retry-connrefused' makes Wget retry downloads
220 even in the face of refused connections, which are otherwise
221 considered a fatal error.
223 ** The new option `--no-dns-cache' may be used to prevent Wget from
226 ** Wget no longer escapes characters in local file names based on
227 whether they're appropriate in URLs. Escaping can still occur for
228 nonprintable characters or for '/', but no longer for frequent
229 characters such as space. You can use the new option
230 --restrict-file-names to relax or strengthen these rules, which can be
231 useful if you dislike the default or if you're downloading to
232 non-native partitions.
234 ** Handling of HTML comments has been dumbed down to conform to what
235 users expect and other browsers do: instead of being treated as SGML
236 declaration, a comment is terminated at the first occurrence of "-->".
237 Use `--strict-comments' to revert to the old behavior.
239 ** Wget now correctly handles relative URIs that begin with "//", such
240 as "//img.foo.com/foo.jpg".
242 ** Boolean options in `.wgetrc' and on the command line now accept
243 values "yes" and "no" along with the traditional "on" and "off".
245 ** It is now possible to specify decimal values for timeouts, waiting
246 periods, and download rate. For instance, `--wait=0.5' now works as
247 expected, as does `--dns-timeout=0.5' and even `--limit-rate=2.5k'.
249 * Wget 1.8.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
251 * Wget 1.8.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
253 * Changes in Wget 1.8.
255 ** A new progress indicator is now available and used by default.
256 You can choose the progress bar type with `--progress=TYPE'. Two
257 types are available, "bar" (the new default), and "dot" (the old
258 dotted indicator). You can permanently revert to the old progress
259 indicator by putting `progress = dot' in your `.wgetrc'.
261 ** You can limit the download rate of the retrieval using the
262 `--limit-rate' option. For example, `wget --limit-rate=15k URL' will
263 tell Wget not to download the body of the URL faster than 15 kilobytes
266 ** Recursive retrieval and link conversion have been revamped:
268 *** Wget now traverses links breadth-first. This makes the
269 calculation of depth much more reliable than before. Also, recursive
270 downloads are faster and consume *significantly* less memory than
273 *** Links are converted only when the entire retrieval is complete.
274 This is the only safe thing to do, as only then is it known what URLs
275 have been downloaded.
277 *** BASE tags are handled correctly when converting links. Since Wget
278 already resolves <base href="..."> when resolving handling URLs, link
279 conversion now makes the BASE tags point to an empty string.
281 *** HTML anchors are now handled correctly. Links to an anchor in the
282 same document (<a href="#anchorname">), which used to confuse Wget,
283 are now converted correctly.
285 *** When in page-requisites (-p) mode, no-parent (-np) is ignored when
286 retrieving for inline images, stylesheets, and other documents needed
289 *** Page-requisites (-p) mode now works with frames. In other words,
290 `wget -p URL-THAT-USES-FRAMES' will now download the frame HTML files,
291 and all the files that they need to be displayed properly.
293 ** `--base' now works conjunction with `--input-file', providing a
294 base for each URL and thereby allowing the URLs in the file to be
297 ** If a host has more than one IP address, Wget uses the other
298 addresses when accessing the first one fails.
300 ** Host directories now contain port information if the URL is at a
303 ** Wget now supports the robots.txt directives specified in
304 <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt>.
306 ** URL parser has been fixed, especially the infamous overzealous
307 quoting. Wget no longer dequotes reserved characters, e.g. `%3F' is
308 no longer translated to `?', nor `%2B' to `+'. Unsafe characters
309 which are not reserved are still escaped, of course.
311 ** No more than 20 successive redirections are allowed.
313 * Wget 1.7.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
315 * Changes in Wget 1.7.
317 ** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
318 use the `--with-ssl' configure flag. You need to have OpenSSL
321 ** Cookies are now supported. Wget will accept cookies sent by the
322 server and return them in later requests. Additionally, it can load
323 and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.
325 ** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
326 Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
327 many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
328 stressing for the server and the network.
330 ** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
333 ** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
334 puts you in some directory other than '/'.
336 ** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'. For
337 example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
340 ** The HTML parser has been rewritten. The new one works more
341 reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
342 are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
343 skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc. It is
346 ** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.
348 ** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
349 where appropriate. This results in huge speedups when retrieving
350 large sites (thousands of documents).
352 ** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
353 documentation. (The last version that shipped with a man page was
354 1.4.5). To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
355 distribution installed on your system.
357 * Changes in Wget 1.6
359 ** Administrative changes.
361 *** Maintainership. Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
362 Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
363 real job as well). Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
364 are being helped by many other people.
366 *** Web page. Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
369 http://sunsite.dk/wget/
371 *** Anonymous CVS. Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
372 sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server. Take a look at
373 the web page for downloading instructions.
375 ** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
376 modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed. When
377 using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.
379 ** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
380 Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
381 retrieval. -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
382 opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.
384 ** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
385 of failed downloads. Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
386 first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS. waitretry is set to 10 by
387 default in the system wgetrc.
389 ** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
390 Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
391 page properly (e.g. inlined images).
393 ** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
394 to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
395 "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".
397 ** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean". Can be set to on, off,
398 always, or never. This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline. So far,
399 passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.
401 ** A number of new translation files have been added.
403 ** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts
404 bound to multiple IP addresses.
406 ** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.
408 * Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
410 * Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
412 * Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
414 * Changes in Wget 1.5.0
416 ** Wget speaks many languages!
418 On systems with gettext(), Wget will output messages in the language
419 set by the current locale, if available. At this time we support
420 Czech, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
422 ** Opie (Skey) is now supported with FTP.
424 ** HTTP Digest Access Authentication (RFC2069) is now supported.
426 ** The new `-b' option makes Wget go to background automatically.
428 ** The `-I' and `-X' options now accept wildcard arguments.
430 ** The `-w' option now accepts suffixes `s' for seconds, `m' for
431 minutes, `h' for hours, `d' for days and `w' for weeks.
433 ** Upon getting SIGHUP, the whole previous log is now copied to
436 ** Wget now understands proxy settings with explicit usernames and
437 passwords, e.g. `http://user:password@proxy.foo.com/'.
439 ** You can use the new `--cut-dirs' option to make Wget create less
442 ** The `;type=a' appendix to FTP URLs is now recognized. For
443 instance, the following command will retrieve the welcoming message in
446 wget "ftp://ftp.somewhere.com/welcome.msg;type=a"
448 ** `--help' and `--version' options have been redone to to conform to
449 standards set by other GNU utilities.
451 ** Wget should now be compilable under MS Windows environment. MS
452 Visual C++ and Watcom C have been used successfully.
454 ** If the file length is known, percentages are displayed during
457 ** The manual page, now hopelessly out of date, is no longer
458 distributed with Wget.
460 * Wget 1.4.5 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
462 * Wget 1.4.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
464 * Changes in Wget 1.4.3
466 ** Wget is now a GNU utility.
468 ** Can do passive FTP.
472 ** Info documentation expanded.
474 ** Compiles on pre-ANSI compilers.
476 ** Global wgetrc now goes to /usr/local/etc (i.e. $sysconfdir).
480 * Changes in Wget 1.4.2
482 ** New mirror site at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/,
483 thanks to Karsten Thygesen.
485 ** Mailing list! Mail to wget-request@sunsite.auc.dk to subscribe.
487 ** New option --delete-after for proxy prefetching.
489 ** New option --retr-symlinks to retrieve symbolic links like plain
492 ** rmold.pl -- script to remove files deleted on the remote server
494 ** --convert-links should work now.
498 * Changes in Wget 1.4.1
502 ** Added -I (the opposite of -X).
504 ** Dot tracing is now customizable; try wget --dot-style=binary
506 * Changes in Wget 1.4.0
508 ** Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of
509 Geturl. Although many things look suspiciously similar, most of the
510 stuff was rewritten, like recursive retrieval, HTTP, FTP and mostly
511 everything else. Wget should be now easier to debug, maintain and,
512 most importantly, use.
514 ** Recursive HTTP should now work without glitches, even with Location
515 changes, server-generated directory listings and other naughty stuff.
517 ** HTTP regetting is supported on servers that support Range
518 specification. WWW authorization is supported -- try
519 wget http://user:password@hostname/
521 ** FTP support was rewritten and widely enhanced. Globbing should now
522 work flawlessly. Symbolic links are created locally. All the
523 information the Unix-style ls listing can give is now recognized.
525 ** Recursive FTP is supported, e.g.
526 wget -r ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/
528 ** You can specify "rejected" directories, to which you do not want to
529 enter, e.g. with wget -X /pub
531 ** Time-stamping is supported, with both HTTP and FTP. Try wget -N URL.
533 ** A new texinfo reference manual is provided. It can be read with
534 Emacs, standalone info, or converted to HTML, dvi or postscript.
536 ** Fixed a long-standing bug, so that Wget now works over SLIP
539 ** You can have a system-wide wgetrc (/usr/local/lib/wgetrc by
540 default). Settings in $HOME/.wgetrc override the global ones, of
543 ** You can set up quota in .wgetrc to prevent sucking too much
544 data. Try `quota = 5M' in .wgetrc (or quota = 100K if you want your
545 sysadmin to like you).
547 ** Download rate is printed after retrieval.
549 ** Wget now sends the `Referer' header when retrieving
552 ** With the new --no-parent option Wget can retrieve FTP recursively
553 through a proxy server.
555 ** HTML parser, as well as the whole of Wget was rewritten to be much
556 faster and less memory-consuming (yes, both).
558 ** Absolute links can be converted to relative links locally. Check
561 ** Wget catches hangup, filtering the output to a log file and
562 resuming work. Try kill -HUP %?wget.
564 ** User-defined headers can be sent. Try
566 wget http://fly.cc.her.hr/ --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2'
568 ** Acceptance/Rejection lists may contain wildcards.
570 ** Wget can display HTTP headers and/or FTP server response with the
571 new `-S' option. It can save the original HTTP headers with `-s'.
573 ** socks library is now supported (thanks to Antonio Rosella
574 <Antonio.Rosella@agip.it>). Configure with --with-socks.
576 ** There is a nicer display of REST-ed output.
578 ** Many new options (like -x to force directory hierarchy, or -m to
579 turn on mirroring options).
581 ** Wget is now distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
583 ** Lots of small features I can't remember. :-)
585 ** A host of bugfixes.
587 * Changes in Geturl 1.3
589 ** Added FTP globbing support (ftp://fly.cc.fer.hr/*)
591 ** Added support for no_proxy
593 ** Added support for ftp://user:password@host/
595 ** Added support for %xx in URL syntax
597 ** More natural command-line options
599 ** Added -e switch to execute .geturlrc commands from the command-line
601 ** Added support for robots.txt
603 ** Fixed some minor bugs
605 * Geturl 1.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
607 * Changes in Geturl 1.1
609 ** REST supported in FTP
611 ** Proxy servers supported
613 ** GNU getopt used, which enables command-line arguments to be ordered
614 as you wish, e.g. geturl http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -vo log is the same as
615 geturl -vo log http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
617 ** Netscape-compatible URL syntax for HTTP supported: host[:port]/dir/file
619 ** NcFTP-compatible colon URL syntax for FTP supported: host:/dir/file
621 ** <base href="xxx"> supported
623 ** autoconf supported
625 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
626 Copyright information:
628 Copyright (C) 1997-2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
630 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
631 copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that
632 the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus
633 giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
635 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this
636 document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions,
637 provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last