1 GNU Wget NEWS -- history of user-visible changes.
3 Copyright (C) 1997-2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4 See the end for copying conditions.
6 Please send GNU Wget bug reports to <bug-wget@gnu.org>.
8 * Changes in Wget 1.11.
10 ** The GnuTLS library is now also supported for https downloads.
11 This is still work-in-progress. OpenSSL is still used by default; use
12 --with-ssl=gnutls to build with GnuTLS. OpenSSL is still required for
13 NTLM authorization to work, but this should eventually change.
15 ** The new option `--ignore-case' makes Wget ignore case when
16 matching files, directories, and wildcards. This affects the -X, -I,
17 -A, and -R options, as well as globbing in FTP URLs.
19 ** ETA projection is now displayed in "dot" progress output as well as
20 in the default progress bar. (The dot progress is used by default when
21 logging Wget's output to file using the `-o' option.)
23 ** The "lockable boolean" argument type is no longer supported. It
24 was only used by the passive_ftp .wgetrc setting. If you're running
25 broken scripts or Perl modules that unconditionally specify
26 `--passive-ftp' and your firewall disallows it, you can override them
27 by replacing wget with a script that execs wget "$@" --no-passive-ftp.
29 ** The source code has migrated from CVS to Subversion. The
30 repository is available at http://svn.dotsrc.org/repo/wget/; to
31 checkout the trunk to a directory named `wget', use something like
32 `svn checkout http://svn.dotsrc.org/repo/wget/trunk/ wget'.
34 * Changes in Wget 1.10.
36 ** Downloading files larger than 2GB, sometimes referred to as "large
37 files", now works on systems that support them. This includes the
38 majority of modern Unixes, as well as MS Windows.
40 ** IPv6 is now supported by Wget. Unlike the experimental code in
41 1.9, this version supports dual-family systems. The new flags
42 `--inet4' and `--inet6' (or `-4' and `-6' for short) force the use of
43 IPv4 and IPv6 respectively. Note that IPv6 support has not yet been
46 ** Microsoft's proprietary "NTLM" method of HTTP authentication is now
47 supported. This authentication method is undocumented and only used
48 by IIS. Note that *proxy* authentication is not supported in this
49 release; you can only authenticate to the target web site.
51 ** Wget no longer truncates partially downloaded files when download
52 has to start over because the server doesn't support Range. Instead,
53 with such servers Wget now simply ignores the data up to the byte
54 where the last attempt left off, and only then continues appending to
55 the file. That way the downloaded file never shrinks, and download
56 retries from servers without support for partial downloads work even
57 when downloading to stdout.
61 *** SSL/TLS downloads now attempt to verify the server's certificate
62 against the recognized certificate authorities. This requires CA
63 certificates to have been installed in a location visible to the
64 OpenSSL library. If this is not the case, you can get the bundle
65 yourself from a source you trust (for example, the bundle extracted
66 from Mozilla available at http://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html),
67 and point Wget to the PEM file using the `--ca-certificate'
68 command-line option or the corresponding `.wgetrc' command.
70 *** Secure downloads now verify that the host name in the URL matches
71 the "common name" in the certificate presented by the server.
73 *** Although the above checks provide more secure downloads, they
74 unavoidably break interoperability with some sites that worked with
75 previous versions, particularly those using self-signed, expired, or
76 otherwise invalid certificates. If you encounter "certificate
77 verification" errors or complaints that "common name doesn't match
78 requested host name" and are convinced of the site's authenticity, you
79 can use `--no-check-certificate' to bypass both checks.
81 *** Talking to SSL/TLS servers over proxies now actually works.
82 Previous versions of Wget erroneously sent GET requests for https
83 URLs. Wget 1.10 utilizes the CONNECT method designed for this
86 *** The SSL/TLS-related options have been redesigned and, for the
87 first time, documented in the manual. The old, undocumented, options
88 are no longer supported.
90 ** Passive FTP is now the default FTP transfer mode. Use
91 `--no-passive-ftp' or specify `passive_ftp = off' in your init file to
92 revert to the old behavior.
94 ** The `--header' option can now be used to override generated
95 headers. For example, `wget --header="Host: foo.bar"
96 http://127.0.0.1' tells Wget to connect to localhost, but to specify
97 "foo.bar" in the `Host' header. In previous versions such use of
98 `--header' lead to duplicate headers in HTTP requests.
100 ** The responses without headers, aka "HTTP 0.9" responses, are
101 detected and handled. Although HTTP 0.9 has long been obsolete, it is
102 still occasionally used, sometimes by accident.
104 ** The progress bar is now updated regularly even when the data does
105 not arrive from the network.
107 ** Wget no longer preserves permissions of files retrieved by FTP by
108 default. Anonymous FTP servers frequently use permissions like "664",
109 which might not be what the user wants. The new option
110 `--preserve-permissions' and the corresponding `.wgetrc' variable can
111 be used to revert to the old behavior.
113 ** The new option `--protocol-directories' instructs Wget to also use
114 the protocol name as a directory component of local file names.
116 ** Options that previously unconditionally set or unset various flags
117 are now boolean options that can be invoked as either `--OPTION' or
118 `--no-OPTION'. Options that required an argument "on" or "off" have
119 also been changed this way, but they still accept the old syntax for
120 backward compatibility. For example, instead of `--glob=off' you can
123 Allowing `--no-OPTION' for every `--OPTION' and the other way around
124 is useful because it allows the user to override non-default behavior
125 specified via `.wgetrc'.
127 ** The new option `--keep-session-cookies' causes `--save-cookies' to
128 save session cookies (normally only kept in memory) along with the
129 permanent ones. This is useful because many sites track important
130 information, such as whether the user has authenticated, in session
131 cookies. With this option multiple Wget runs are treated as a single
134 ** Wget now supports the --ftp-user and --ftp-password command
135 switches to set username and password for FTP, and the --user and
136 --password command switches to set username and password for both FTP
137 and HTTP. The --http-passwd and --proxy-passwd command switches have
138 been renamed to --http-password and --proxy-password respectively, and
139 the related http_passwd and proxy_passwd .wgetrc commands to
140 http_password and proxy_password respectively. The login and passwd
141 .wgetrc commands have been deprecated.
143 * `wget -b' now works correctly under Windows.
145 * Wget 1.9.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
147 * Changes in Wget 1.9.
149 ** It is now possible to specify that POST method be used for HTTP
150 requests. For example, `wget --post-data="id=foo&data=bar" URL' will
151 send a POST request with the specified contents.
153 ** IPv6 support is available, although it's still experimental.
155 ** The `--timeout' option now also affects DNS lookup and establishing
156 the TCP connection. Previously it only affected reading and writing
157 data. Those three timeouts can be set separately using
158 `--dns-timeout', `--connection-timeout', and `--read-timeout',
161 ** Download speed shown by the progress bar is based on the data
162 recently read, rather than the average speed of the entire download.
163 The ETA projection is still based on the overall average.
165 ** It is now possible to connect to FTP servers through FWTK
166 firewalls. Set ftp_proxy to an FTP URL, and Wget will automatically
167 log on to the proxy as "username@host".
169 ** The new option `--retry-connrefused' makes Wget retry downloads
170 even in the face of refused connections, which are otherwise
171 considered a fatal error.
173 ** The new option `--no-dns-cache' may be used to prevent Wget from
176 ** Wget no longer escapes characters in local file names based on
177 whether they're appropriate in URLs. Escaping can still occur for
178 nonprintable characters or for '/', but no longer for frequent
179 characters such as space. You can use the new option
180 --restrict-file-names to relax or strengthen these rules, which can be
181 useful if you dislike the default or if you're downloading to
182 non-native partitions.
184 ** Handling of HTML comments has been dumbed down to conform to what
185 users expect and other browsers do: instead of being treated as SGML
186 declaration, a comment is terminated at the first occurrence of "-->".
187 Use `--strict-comments' to revert to the old behavior.
189 ** Wget now correctly handles relative URIs that begin with "//", such
190 as "//img.foo.com/foo.jpg".
192 ** Boolean options in `.wgetrc' and on the command line now accept
193 values "yes" and "no" along with the traditional "on" and "off".
195 ** It is now possible to specify decimal values for timeouts, waiting
196 periods, and download rate. For instance, `--wait=0.5' now works as
197 expected, as does `--dns-timeout=0.5' and even `--limit-rate=2.5k'.
199 * Wget 1.8.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
201 * Wget 1.8.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
203 * Changes in Wget 1.8.
205 ** A new progress indicator is now available and used by default.
206 You can choose the progress bar type with `--progress=TYPE'. Two
207 types are available, "bar" (the new default), and "dot" (the old
208 dotted indicator). You can permanently revert to the old progress
209 indicator by putting `progress = dot' in your `.wgetrc'.
211 ** You can limit the download rate of the retrieval using the
212 `--limit-rate' option. For example, `wget --limit-rate=15k URL' will
213 tell Wget not to download the body of the URL faster than 15 kilobytes
216 ** Recursive retrieval and link conversion have been revamped:
218 *** Wget now traverses links breadth-first. This makes the
219 calculation of depth much more reliable than before. Also, recursive
220 downloads are faster and consume *significantly* less memory than
223 *** Links are converted only when the entire retrieval is complete.
224 This is the only safe thing to do, as only then is it known what URLs
225 have been downloaded.
227 *** BASE tags are handled correctly when converting links. Since Wget
228 already resolves <base href="..."> when resolving handling URLs, link
229 conversion now makes the BASE tags point to an empty string.
231 *** HTML anchors are now handled correctly. Links to an anchor in the
232 same document (<a href="#anchorname">), which used to confuse Wget,
233 are now converted correctly.
235 *** When in page-requisites (-p) mode, no-parent (-np) is ignored when
236 retrieving for inline images, stylesheets, and other documents needed
239 *** Page-requisites (-p) mode now works with frames. In other words,
240 `wget -p URL-THAT-USES-FRAMES' will now download the frame HTML files,
241 and all the files that they need to be displayed properly.
243 ** `--base' now works conjunction with `--input-file', providing a
244 base for each URL and thereby allowing the URLs in the file to be
247 ** If a host has more than one IP address, Wget uses the other
248 addresses when accessing the first one fails.
250 ** Host directories now contain port information if the URL is at a
253 ** Wget now supports the robots.txt directives specified in
254 <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt>.
256 ** URL parser has been fixed, especially the infamous overzealous
257 quoting. Wget no longer dequotes reserved characters, e.g. `%3F' is
258 no longer translated to `?', nor `%2B' to `+'. Unsafe characters
259 which are not reserved are still escaped, of course.
261 ** No more than 20 successive redirections are allowed.
263 * Wget 1.7.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
265 * Changes in Wget 1.7.
267 ** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
268 use the `--with-ssl' configure flag. You need to have OpenSSL
271 ** Cookies are now supported. Wget will accept cookies sent by the
272 server and return them in later requests. Additionally, it can load
273 and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.
275 ** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
276 Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
277 many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
278 stressing for the server and the network.
280 ** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
283 ** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
284 puts you in some directory other than '/'.
286 ** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'. For
287 example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
290 ** The HTML parser has been rewritten. The new one works more
291 reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
292 are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
293 skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc. It is
296 ** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.
298 ** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
299 where appropriate. This results in huge speedups when retrieving
300 large sites (thousands of documents).
302 ** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
303 documentation. (The last version that shipped with a man page was
304 1.4.5). To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
305 distribution installed on your system.
307 * Changes in Wget 1.6
309 ** Administrative changes.
311 *** Maintainership. Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
312 Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
313 real job as well). Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
314 are being helped by many other people.
316 *** Web page. Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
319 http://sunsite.dk/wget/
321 *** Anonymous CVS. Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
322 sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server. Take a look at
323 the web page for downloading instructions.
325 ** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
326 modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed. When
327 using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.
329 ** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
330 Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
331 retrieval. -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
332 opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.
334 ** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
335 of failed downloads. Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
336 first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS. waitretry is set to 10 by
337 default in the system wgetrc.
339 ** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
340 Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
341 page properly (e.g. inlined images).
343 ** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
344 to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
345 "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".
347 ** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean". Can be set to on, off,
348 always, or never. This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline. So far,
349 passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.
351 ** A number of new translation files have been added.
353 ** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts
354 bound to multiple IP addresses.
356 ** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.
358 * Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
360 * Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
362 * Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
364 * Changes in Wget 1.5.0
366 ** Wget speaks many languages!
368 On systems with gettext(), Wget will output messages in the language
369 set by the current locale, if available. At this time we support
370 Czech, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
372 ** Opie (Skey) is now supported with FTP.
374 ** HTTP Digest Access Authentication (RFC2069) is now supported.
376 ** The new `-b' option makes Wget go to background automatically.
378 ** The `-I' and `-X' options now accept wildcard arguments.
380 ** The `-w' option now accepts suffixes `s' for seconds, `m' for
381 minutes, `h' for hours, `d' for days and `w' for weeks.
383 ** Upon getting SIGHUP, the whole previous log is now copied to
386 ** Wget now understands proxy settings with explicit usernames and
387 passwords, e.g. `http://user:password@proxy.foo.com/'.
389 ** You can use the new `--cut-dirs' option to make Wget create less
392 ** The `;type=a' appendix to FTP URLs is now recognized. For
393 instance, the following command will retrieve the welcoming message in
396 wget "ftp://ftp.somewhere.com/welcome.msg;type=a"
398 ** `--help' and `--version' options have been redone to to conform to
399 standards set by other GNU utilities.
401 ** Wget should now be compilable under MS Windows environment. MS
402 Visual C++ and Watcom C have been used successfully.
404 ** If the file length is known, percentages are displayed during
407 ** The manual page, now hopelessly out of date, is no longer
408 distributed with Wget.
410 * Wget 1.4.5 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
412 * Wget 1.4.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
414 * Changes in Wget 1.4.3
416 ** Wget is now a GNU utility.
418 ** Can do passive FTP.
422 ** Info documentation expanded.
424 ** Compiles on pre-ANSI compilers.
426 ** Global wgetrc now goes to /usr/local/etc (i.e. $sysconfdir).
430 * Changes in Wget 1.4.2
432 ** New mirror site at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/,
433 thanks to Karsten Thygesen.
435 ** Mailing list! Mail to wget-request@sunsite.auc.dk to subscribe.
437 ** New option --delete-after for proxy prefetching.
439 ** New option --retr-symlinks to retrieve symbolic links like plain
442 ** rmold.pl -- script to remove files deleted on the remote server
444 ** --convert-links should work now.
448 * Changes in Wget 1.4.1
452 ** Added -I (the opposite of -X).
454 ** Dot tracing is now customizable; try wget --dot-style=binary
456 * Changes in Wget 1.4.0
458 ** Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of
459 Geturl. Although many things look suspiciously similar, most of the
460 stuff was rewritten, like recursive retrieval, HTTP, FTP and mostly
461 everything else. Wget should be now easier to debug, maintain and,
462 most importantly, use.
464 ** Recursive HTTP should now work without glitches, even with Location
465 changes, server-generated directory listings and other naughty stuff.
467 ** HTTP regetting is supported on servers that support Range
468 specification. WWW authorization is supported -- try
469 wget http://user:password@hostname/
471 ** FTP support was rewritten and widely enhanced. Globbing should now
472 work flawlessly. Symbolic links are created locally. All the
473 information the Unix-style ls listing can give is now recognized.
475 ** Recursive FTP is supported, e.g.
476 wget -r ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/
478 ** You can specify "rejected" directories, to which you do not want to
479 enter, e.g. with wget -X /pub
481 ** Time-stamping is supported, with both HTTP and FTP. Try wget -N URL.
483 ** A new texinfo reference manual is provided. It can be read with
484 Emacs, standalone info, or converted to HTML, dvi or postscript.
486 ** Fixed a long-standing bug, so that Wget now works over SLIP
489 ** You can have a system-wide wgetrc (/usr/local/lib/wgetrc by
490 default). Settings in $HOME/.wgetrc override the global ones, of
493 ** You can set up quota in .wgetrc to prevent sucking too much
494 data. Try `quota = 5M' in .wgetrc (or quota = 100K if you want your
495 sysadmin to like you).
497 ** Download rate is printed after retrieval.
499 ** Wget now sends the `Referer' header when retrieving
502 ** With the new --no-parent option Wget can retrieve FTP recursively
503 through a proxy server.
505 ** HTML parser, as well as the whole of Wget was rewritten to be much
506 faster and less memory-consuming (yes, both).
508 ** Absolute links can be converted to relative links locally. Check
511 ** Wget catches hangup, filtering the output to a log file and
512 resuming work. Try kill -HUP %?wget.
514 ** User-defined headers can be sent. Try
516 wget http://fly.cc.her.hr/ --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2'
518 ** Acceptance/Rejection lists may contain wildcards.
520 ** Wget can display HTTP headers and/or FTP server response with the
521 new `-S' option. It can save the original HTTP headers with `-s'.
523 ** socks library is now supported (thanks to Antonio Rosella
524 <Antonio.Rosella@agip.it>). Configure with --with-socks.
526 ** There is a nicer display of REST-ed output.
528 ** Many new options (like -x to force directory hierarchy, or -m to
529 turn on mirroring options).
531 ** Wget is now distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
533 ** Lots of small features I can't remember. :-)
535 ** A host of bugfixes.
537 * Changes in Geturl 1.3
539 ** Added FTP globbing support (ftp://fly.cc.fer.hr/*)
541 ** Added support for no_proxy
543 ** Added support for ftp://user:password@host/
545 ** Added support for %xx in URL syntax
547 ** More natural command-line options
549 ** Added -e switch to execute .geturlrc commands from the command-line
551 ** Added support for robots.txt
553 ** Fixed some minor bugs
555 * Geturl 1.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
557 * Changes in Geturl 1.1
559 ** REST supported in FTP
561 ** Proxy servers supported
563 ** GNU getopt used, which enables command-line arguments to be ordered
564 as you wish, e.g. geturl http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -vo log is the same as
565 geturl -vo log http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
567 ** Netscape-compatible URL syntax for HTTP supported: host[:port]/dir/file
569 ** NcFTP-compatible colon URL syntax for FTP supported: host:/dir/file
571 ** <base href="xxx"> supported
573 ** autoconf supported
575 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
576 Copyright information:
578 Copyright (C) 1997-2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
580 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
581 copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that
582 the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus
583 giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
585 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this
586 document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions,
587 provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last