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 1.11.4
11 ** Fixed an issue (apparently a regression) where -O would refuse to
12 download when -nc was given, even though the file didn't exist.
14 ** Fixed a situation where Wget could abort with --continue if the
15 remote server gives a content-length of zero when the file exists
18 ** Fixed a crash on some systems, due to Wget casting a pointer-to-long
19 to a pointer-to-time_t.
21 ** Translation updates for Catalan.
23 * Changes in Wget 1.12 (MAINLINE)
25 ** --ask-password option (and associated wgetrc command) added to
26 support password prompts at the console.
29 * Changes in Wget 1.11.3
31 ** Downgraded -N with -O to a warning, rather than an error.
33 ** Translation updates
35 * Changes in Wget 1.11.2
37 ** Fixed a problem in authenticating over HTTPS through a proxy.
38 (Regression in 1.11 over 1.10.2.)
40 ** The combination of -r or -p with -O, which was disallowed in 1.11,
41 has been downgraded to a warning in 1.11.2. (-O and -N, which was never
42 meaningful, is still an error.)
44 ** Further improvements to progress bar displays in non-English locales
45 (too many spaces could be inserted, causing the display to scroll).
47 ** Successive invocations of Wget on FTP URLS, with --no-remove-listing
48 and --continue, was causing Wget to append, rather than replace,
49 information in the .listing file, and thereby download the same files
50 multiple times. This has been fixed in 1.11.2.
52 ** Wget 1.11 no longer allowed ".." to persist at the beginning of URLs,
53 for improved conformance with RFC 3986. However, this behavior presents
54 problems for some FTP setups, and so they are now preserved again, for
57 * Changes in Wget 1.11.1.
59 ** Interrupted downloads no longer result in renaming the file
60 (regression in 1.11 over 1.10.2).
62 ** Progress bar now displays correctly in non-English locales (and a
63 related assertion failure was fixed).
65 ** Wget no longer issues a GET request over HTTP for files it should
66 know it's not going to download (regression in 1.11 over 1.10.2).
68 ** Added option --auth-no-challenge, to support broken pre-1.11
69 authentication-before-server-challenge, which turns out to still be
70 useful for some limited cases.
72 ** Documentation of accept/reject lists in the manual's "Types of
73 Files" section now explains various aspects of their behavior that may
74 be surprising, and notes that they may change in the future.
76 ** Documentation of --no-parents now explains how a trailing slash, or
77 lack thereof, in the specified URL, will affect behavior.
79 * Changes in Wget 1.11.
81 ** Timestamping now uses the value from the most recent HTTP response,
82 rather than the first one it got.
84 ** Authentication information is no longer sent as part of the Referer
85 header in recursive fetches.
87 ** No authentication credentials are sent until a challenge is issued,
88 for improved security. Authentication handling is still not
89 RFC-compliant, as once a Basic challenge has been received, it will
90 assume it can send credentials to any URL at that same host, and not
91 just the ones at or below the original authenticated location.
92 Credentials for Digest authentication are still never saved or issued
93 automatically, and continue to require a challenge for each resource.
95 ** Added --max-redirect option, allowing the user to specify what should
96 be the maximum number of HTTP redirects to follow.
98 ** Wget now supports saving HTTP downloads using file names specified by
99 the `Content-Disposition' header. This is a standard way of specifying
100 the file name used by many web dynamically generated pages. However, the
101 current implementation is inefficient, and known to have bugs. It is
102 EXPERIMENTAL only, and not enabled by default. Use --content-disposition
105 ** The new option `--ignore-case' makes Wget ignore case when
106 matching files, directories, and wildcards. This affects the -X, -I,
107 -A, and -R options, as well as globbing in FTP URLs.
109 ** ETA projection is now displayed in "dot" progress output as well as
110 in the default progress bar. (The dot progress is used by default when
111 logging Wget's output to file using the `-o' option.)
113 ** The "lockable boolean" argument type is no longer supported. It
114 was only used by the passive_ftp .wgetrc setting. If you're running
115 broken scripts or Perl modules that unconditionally specify
116 `--passive-ftp' and your firewall disallows it, you can override them
117 by replacing wget with a script that execs wget "$@" --no-passive-ftp.
119 ** The source code has been migrated to Mercurial. The repositories are
120 available at http://hg.addictivecode.org/. Prior to this, the source
121 code was hosted on Subversion (migrated from the original CVS); you can
122 still get access to older tags and branches for Wget in the Subversion
123 repository at http://addictivecode.org/svn/wget/.
125 * Changes in Wget 1.10.
127 ** Downloading files larger than 2GB, sometimes referred to as "large
128 files", now works on systems that support them. This includes the
129 majority of modern Unixes, as well as MS Windows.
131 ** IPv6 is now supported by Wget. Unlike the experimental code in
132 1.9, this version supports dual-family systems. The new flags
133 `--inet4' and `--inet6' (or `-4' and `-6' for short) force the use of
134 IPv4 and IPv6 respectively. Note that IPv6 support has not yet been
137 ** Microsoft's proprietary "NTLM" method of HTTP authentication is now
138 supported. This authentication method is undocumented and only used
139 by IIS. Note that *proxy* authentication is not supported in this
140 release; you can only authenticate to the target web site.
142 ** Wget no longer truncates partially downloaded files when download
143 has to start over because the server doesn't support Range. Instead,
144 with such servers Wget now simply ignores the data up to the byte
145 where the last attempt left off, and only then continues appending to
146 the file. That way the downloaded file never shrinks, and download
147 retries from servers without support for partial downloads work even
148 when downloading to stdout.
152 *** SSL/TLS downloads now attempt to verify the server's certificate
153 against the recognized certificate authorities. This requires CA
154 certificates to have been installed in a location visible to the
155 OpenSSL library. If this is not the case, you can get the bundle
156 yourself from a source you trust (for example, the bundle extracted
157 from Mozilla available at http://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html),
158 and point Wget to the PEM file using the `--ca-certificate'
159 command-line option or the corresponding `.wgetrc' command.
161 *** Secure downloads now verify that the host name in the URL matches
162 the "common name" in the certificate presented by the server.
164 *** Although the above checks provide more secure downloads, they
165 unavoidably break interoperability with some sites that worked with
166 previous versions, particularly those using self-signed, expired, or
167 otherwise invalid certificates. If you encounter "certificate
168 verification" errors or complaints that "common name doesn't match
169 requested host name" and are convinced of the site's authenticity, you
170 can use `--no-check-certificate' to bypass both checks.
172 *** Talking to SSL/TLS servers over proxies now actually works.
173 Previous versions of Wget erroneously sent GET requests for https
174 URLs. Wget 1.10 utilizes the CONNECT method designed for this
177 *** The SSL/TLS-related options have been redesigned and, for the
178 first time, documented in the manual. The old, undocumented, options
179 are no longer supported.
181 ** Passive FTP is now the default FTP transfer mode. Use
182 `--no-passive-ftp' or specify `passive_ftp = off' in your init file to
183 revert to the old behavior.
185 ** The `--header' option can now be used to override generated
186 headers. For example, `wget --header="Host: foo.bar"
187 http://127.0.0.1' tells Wget to connect to localhost, but to specify
188 "foo.bar" in the `Host' header. In previous versions such use of
189 `--header' lead to duplicate headers in HTTP requests.
191 ** The responses without headers, aka "HTTP 0.9" responses, are
192 detected and handled. Although HTTP 0.9 has long been obsolete, it is
193 still occasionally used, sometimes by accident.
195 ** The progress bar is now updated regularly even when the data does
196 not arrive from the network.
198 ** Wget no longer preserves permissions of files retrieved by FTP by
199 default. Anonymous FTP servers frequently use permissions like "664",
200 which might not be what the user wants. The new option
201 `--preserve-permissions' and the corresponding `.wgetrc' variable can
202 be used to revert to the old behavior.
204 ** The new option `--protocol-directories' instructs Wget to also use
205 the protocol name as a directory component of local file names.
207 ** Options that previously unconditionally set or unset various flags
208 are now boolean options that can be invoked as either `--OPTION' or
209 `--no-OPTION'. Options that required an argument "on" or "off" have
210 also been changed this way, but they still accept the old syntax for
211 backward compatibility. For example, instead of `--glob=off' you can
214 Allowing `--no-OPTION' for every `--OPTION' and the other way around
215 is useful because it allows the user to override non-default behavior
216 specified via `.wgetrc'.
218 ** The new option `--keep-session-cookies' causes `--save-cookies' to
219 save session cookies (normally only kept in memory) along with the
220 permanent ones. This is useful because many sites track important
221 information, such as whether the user has authenticated, in session
222 cookies. With this option multiple Wget runs are treated as a single
225 ** Wget now supports the --ftp-user and --ftp-password command
226 switches to set username and password for FTP, and the --user and
227 --password command switches to set username and password for both FTP
228 and HTTP. The --http-passwd and --proxy-passwd command switches have
229 been renamed to --http-password and --proxy-password respectively, and
230 the related http_passwd and proxy_passwd .wgetrc commands to
231 http_password and proxy_password respectively. The login and passwd
232 .wgetrc commands have been deprecated.
234 * `wget -b' now works correctly under Windows.
236 * Wget 1.9.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
238 * Changes in Wget 1.9.
240 ** It is now possible to specify that POST method be used for HTTP
241 requests. For example, `wget --post-data="id=foo&data=bar" URL' will
242 send a POST request with the specified contents.
244 ** IPv6 support is available, although it's still experimental.
246 ** The `--timeout' option now also affects DNS lookup and establishing
247 the TCP connection. Previously it only affected reading and writing
248 data. Those three timeouts can be set separately using
249 `--dns-timeout', `--connection-timeout', and `--read-timeout',
252 ** Download speed shown by the progress bar is based on the data
253 recently read, rather than the average speed of the entire download.
254 The ETA projection is still based on the overall average.
256 ** It is now possible to connect to FTP servers through FWTK
257 firewalls. Set ftp_proxy to an FTP URL, and Wget will automatically
258 log on to the proxy as "username@host".
260 ** The new option `--retry-connrefused' makes Wget retry downloads
261 even in the face of refused connections, which are otherwise
262 considered a fatal error.
264 ** The new option `--no-dns-cache' may be used to prevent Wget from
267 ** Wget no longer escapes characters in local file names based on
268 whether they're appropriate in URLs. Escaping can still occur for
269 nonprintable characters or for '/', but no longer for frequent
270 characters such as space. You can use the new option
271 --restrict-file-names to relax or strengthen these rules, which can be
272 useful if you dislike the default or if you're downloading to
273 non-native partitions.
275 ** Handling of HTML comments has been dumbed down to conform to what
276 users expect and other browsers do: instead of being treated as SGML
277 declaration, a comment is terminated at the first occurrence of "-->".
278 Use `--strict-comments' to revert to the old behavior.
280 ** Wget now correctly handles relative URIs that begin with "//", such
281 as "//img.foo.com/foo.jpg".
283 ** Boolean options in `.wgetrc' and on the command line now accept
284 values "yes" and "no" along with the traditional "on" and "off".
286 ** It is now possible to specify decimal values for timeouts, waiting
287 periods, and download rate. For instance, `--wait=0.5' now works as
288 expected, as does `--dns-timeout=0.5' and even `--limit-rate=2.5k'.
290 * Wget 1.8.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
292 * Wget 1.8.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
294 * Changes in Wget 1.8.
296 ** A new progress indicator is now available and used by default.
297 You can choose the progress bar type with `--progress=TYPE'. Two
298 types are available, "bar" (the new default), and "dot" (the old
299 dotted indicator). You can permanently revert to the old progress
300 indicator by putting `progress = dot' in your `.wgetrc'.
302 ** You can limit the download rate of the retrieval using the
303 `--limit-rate' option. For example, `wget --limit-rate=15k URL' will
304 tell Wget not to download the body of the URL faster than 15 kilobytes
307 ** Recursive retrieval and link conversion have been revamped:
309 *** Wget now traverses links breadth-first. This makes the
310 calculation of depth much more reliable than before. Also, recursive
311 downloads are faster and consume *significantly* less memory than
314 *** Links are converted only when the entire retrieval is complete.
315 This is the only safe thing to do, as only then is it known what URLs
316 have been downloaded.
318 *** BASE tags are handled correctly when converting links. Since Wget
319 already resolves <base href="..."> when resolving handling URLs, link
320 conversion now makes the BASE tags point to an empty string.
322 *** HTML anchors are now handled correctly. Links to an anchor in the
323 same document (<a href="#anchorname">), which used to confuse Wget,
324 are now converted correctly.
326 *** When in page-requisites (-p) mode, no-parent (-np) is ignored when
327 retrieving for inline images, stylesheets, and other documents needed
330 *** Page-requisites (-p) mode now works with frames. In other words,
331 `wget -p URL-THAT-USES-FRAMES' will now download the frame HTML files,
332 and all the files that they need to be displayed properly.
334 ** `--base' now works conjunction with `--input-file', providing a
335 base for each URL and thereby allowing the URLs in the file to be
338 ** If a host has more than one IP address, Wget uses the other
339 addresses when accessing the first one fails.
341 ** Host directories now contain port information if the URL is at a
344 ** Wget now supports the robots.txt directives specified in
345 <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt>.
347 ** URL parser has been fixed, especially the infamous overzealous
348 quoting. Wget no longer dequotes reserved characters, e.g. `%3F' is
349 no longer translated to `?', nor `%2B' to `+'. Unsafe characters
350 which are not reserved are still escaped, of course.
352 ** No more than 20 successive redirections are allowed.
354 * Wget 1.7.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
356 * Changes in Wget 1.7.
358 ** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
359 use the `--with-ssl' configure flag. You need to have OpenSSL
362 ** Cookies are now supported. Wget will accept cookies sent by the
363 server and return them in later requests. Additionally, it can load
364 and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.
366 ** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
367 Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
368 many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
369 stressing for the server and the network.
371 ** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
374 ** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
375 puts you in some directory other than '/'.
377 ** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'. For
378 example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
381 ** The HTML parser has been rewritten. The new one works more
382 reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
383 are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
384 skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc. It is
387 ** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.
389 ** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
390 where appropriate. This results in huge speedups when retrieving
391 large sites (thousands of documents).
393 ** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
394 documentation. (The last version that shipped with a man page was
395 1.4.5). To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
396 distribution installed on your system.
398 * Changes in Wget 1.6
400 ** Administrative changes.
402 *** Maintainership. Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
403 Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
404 real job as well). Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
405 are being helped by many other people.
407 *** Web page. Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
410 http://sunsite.dk/wget/
412 *** Anonymous CVS. Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
413 sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server. Take a look at
414 the web page for downloading instructions.
416 ** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
417 modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed. When
418 using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.
420 ** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
421 Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
422 retrieval. -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
423 opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.
425 ** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
426 of failed downloads. Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
427 first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS. waitretry is set to 10 by
428 default in the system wgetrc.
430 ** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
431 Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
432 page properly (e.g. inlined images).
434 ** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
435 to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
436 "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".
438 ** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean". Can be set to on, off,
439 always, or never. This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline. So far,
440 passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.
442 ** A number of new translation files have been added.
444 ** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts
445 bound to multiple IP addresses.
447 ** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.
449 * Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
451 * Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
453 * Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
455 * Changes in Wget 1.5.0
457 ** Wget speaks many languages!
459 On systems with gettext(), Wget will output messages in the language
460 set by the current locale, if available. At this time we support
461 Czech, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
463 ** Opie (Skey) is now supported with FTP.
465 ** HTTP Digest Access Authentication (RFC2069) is now supported.
467 ** The new `-b' option makes Wget go to background automatically.
469 ** The `-I' and `-X' options now accept wildcard arguments.
471 ** The `-w' option now accepts suffixes `s' for seconds, `m' for
472 minutes, `h' for hours, `d' for days and `w' for weeks.
474 ** Upon getting SIGHUP, the whole previous log is now copied to
477 ** Wget now understands proxy settings with explicit usernames and
478 passwords, e.g. `http://user:password@proxy.foo.com/'.
480 ** You can use the new `--cut-dirs' option to make Wget create less
483 ** The `;type=a' appendix to FTP URLs is now recognized. For
484 instance, the following command will retrieve the welcoming message in
487 wget "ftp://ftp.somewhere.com/welcome.msg;type=a"
489 ** `--help' and `--version' options have been redone to to conform to
490 standards set by other GNU utilities.
492 ** Wget should now be compilable under MS Windows environment. MS
493 Visual C++ and Watcom C have been used successfully.
495 ** If the file length is known, percentages are displayed during
498 ** The manual page, now hopelessly out of date, is no longer
499 distributed with Wget.
501 * Wget 1.4.5 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
503 * Wget 1.4.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
505 * Changes in Wget 1.4.3
507 ** Wget is now a GNU utility.
509 ** Can do passive FTP.
513 ** Info documentation expanded.
515 ** Compiles on pre-ANSI compilers.
517 ** Global wgetrc now goes to /usr/local/etc (i.e. $sysconfdir).
521 * Changes in Wget 1.4.2
523 ** New mirror site at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/,
524 thanks to Karsten Thygesen.
526 ** Mailing list! Mail to wget-request@sunsite.auc.dk to subscribe.
528 ** New option --delete-after for proxy prefetching.
530 ** New option --retr-symlinks to retrieve symbolic links like plain
533 ** rmold.pl -- script to remove files deleted on the remote server
535 ** --convert-links should work now.
539 * Changes in Wget 1.4.1
543 ** Added -I (the opposite of -X).
545 ** Dot tracing is now customizable; try wget --dot-style=binary
547 * Changes in Wget 1.4.0
549 ** Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of
550 Geturl. Although many things look suspiciously similar, most of the
551 stuff was rewritten, like recursive retrieval, HTTP, FTP and mostly
552 everything else. Wget should be now easier to debug, maintain and,
553 most importantly, use.
555 ** Recursive HTTP should now work without glitches, even with Location
556 changes, server-generated directory listings and other naughty stuff.
558 ** HTTP regetting is supported on servers that support Range
559 specification. WWW authorization is supported -- try
560 wget http://user:password@hostname/
562 ** FTP support was rewritten and widely enhanced. Globbing should now
563 work flawlessly. Symbolic links are created locally. All the
564 information the Unix-style ls listing can give is now recognized.
566 ** Recursive FTP is supported, e.g.
567 wget -r ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/
569 ** You can specify "rejected" directories, to which you do not want to
570 enter, e.g. with wget -X /pub
572 ** Time-stamping is supported, with both HTTP and FTP. Try wget -N URL.
574 ** A new texinfo reference manual is provided. It can be read with
575 Emacs, standalone info, or converted to HTML, dvi or postscript.
577 ** Fixed a long-standing bug, so that Wget now works over SLIP
580 ** You can have a system-wide wgetrc (/usr/local/lib/wgetrc by
581 default). Settings in $HOME/.wgetrc override the global ones, of
584 ** You can set up quota in .wgetrc to prevent sucking too much
585 data. Try `quota = 5M' in .wgetrc (or quota = 100K if you want your
586 sysadmin to like you).
588 ** Download rate is printed after retrieval.
590 ** Wget now sends the `Referer' header when retrieving
593 ** With the new --no-parent option Wget can retrieve FTP recursively
594 through a proxy server.
596 ** HTML parser, as well as the whole of Wget was rewritten to be much
597 faster and less memory-consuming (yes, both).
599 ** Absolute links can be converted to relative links locally. Check
602 ** Wget catches hangup, filtering the output to a log file and
603 resuming work. Try kill -HUP %?wget.
605 ** User-defined headers can be sent. Try
607 wget http://fly.cc.her.hr/ --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2'
609 ** Acceptance/Rejection lists may contain wildcards.
611 ** Wget can display HTTP headers and/or FTP server response with the
612 new `-S' option. It can save the original HTTP headers with `-s'.
614 ** socks library is now supported (thanks to Antonio Rosella
615 <Antonio.Rosella@agip.it>). Configure with --with-socks.
617 ** There is a nicer display of REST-ed output.
619 ** Many new options (like -x to force directory hierarchy, or -m to
620 turn on mirroring options).
622 ** Wget is now distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
624 ** Lots of small features I can't remember. :-)
626 ** A host of bugfixes.
628 * Changes in Geturl 1.3
630 ** Added FTP globbing support (ftp://fly.cc.fer.hr/*)
632 ** Added support for no_proxy
634 ** Added support for ftp://user:password@host/
636 ** Added support for %xx in URL syntax
638 ** More natural command-line options
640 ** Added -e switch to execute .geturlrc commands from the command-line
642 ** Added support for robots.txt
644 ** Fixed some minor bugs
646 * Geturl 1.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
648 * Changes in Geturl 1.1
650 ** REST supported in FTP
652 ** Proxy servers supported
654 ** GNU getopt used, which enables command-line arguments to be ordered
655 as you wish, e.g. geturl http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -vo log is the same as
656 geturl -vo log http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
658 ** Netscape-compatible URL syntax for HTTP supported: host[:port]/dir/file
660 ** NcFTP-compatible colon URL syntax for FTP supported: host:/dir/file
662 ** <base href="xxx"> supported
664 ** autoconf supported
666 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
667 Copyright information:
669 Copyright (C) 1997-2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
671 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
672 copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that
673 the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus
674 giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
676 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this
677 document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions,
678 provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last