1 GNU Wget NEWS -- history of user-visible changes.
3 Copyright (C) 1997-2006 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 ** No authentication credentials are sent until a challenge is issued,
11 for improved security. Authentication handling is still not
12 RFC-compliant, as once a Basic challenge has been received, it will
13 assume it can send credentials to any URL at that same host, and not
14 just the ones at or below the original authenticated location.
15 Credentials for Digest authentication are still never saved or issued
16 automatically, and continue to require a challenge for each resource.
18 ** Wget now saves HTTP downloads using file names specified by the
19 `Content-Disposition' header. This is a standard way of specifying
20 the file name used by many web dynamically generated pages.
22 ** The GnuTLS library is now also supported for https downloads.
23 This is still work-in-progress. OpenSSL is still used by default; use
24 --with-ssl=gnutls to build with GnuTLS. OpenSSL is still required for
25 NTLM authorization to work, but this should eventually change.
27 ** The new option `--ignore-case' makes Wget ignore case when
28 matching files, directories, and wildcards. This affects the -X, -I,
29 -A, and -R options, as well as globbing in FTP URLs.
31 ** ETA projection is now displayed in "dot" progress output as well as
32 in the default progress bar. (The dot progress is used by default when
33 logging Wget's output to file using the `-o' option.)
35 ** The "lockable boolean" argument type is no longer supported. It
36 was only used by the passive_ftp .wgetrc setting. If you're running
37 broken scripts or Perl modules that unconditionally specify
38 `--passive-ftp' and your firewall disallows it, you can override them
39 by replacing wget with a script that execs wget "$@" --no-passive-ftp.
41 ** The source code has migrated from CVS to Subversion. The
42 repository is available at http://svn.dotsrc.org/repo/wget/; to
43 checkout the trunk to a directory named `wget', use something like
44 `svn checkout http://svn.dotsrc.org/repo/wget/trunk/ wget'.
46 * Changes in Wget 1.10.
48 ** Downloading files larger than 2GB, sometimes referred to as "large
49 files", now works on systems that support them. This includes the
50 majority of modern Unixes, as well as MS Windows.
52 ** IPv6 is now supported by Wget. Unlike the experimental code in
53 1.9, this version supports dual-family systems. The new flags
54 `--inet4' and `--inet6' (or `-4' and `-6' for short) force the use of
55 IPv4 and IPv6 respectively. Note that IPv6 support has not yet been
58 ** Microsoft's proprietary "NTLM" method of HTTP authentication is now
59 supported. This authentication method is undocumented and only used
60 by IIS. Note that *proxy* authentication is not supported in this
61 release; you can only authenticate to the target web site.
63 ** Wget no longer truncates partially downloaded files when download
64 has to start over because the server doesn't support Range. Instead,
65 with such servers Wget now simply ignores the data up to the byte
66 where the last attempt left off, and only then continues appending to
67 the file. That way the downloaded file never shrinks, and download
68 retries from servers without support for partial downloads work even
69 when downloading to stdout.
73 *** SSL/TLS downloads now attempt to verify the server's certificate
74 against the recognized certificate authorities. This requires CA
75 certificates to have been installed in a location visible to the
76 OpenSSL library. If this is not the case, you can get the bundle
77 yourself from a source you trust (for example, the bundle extracted
78 from Mozilla available at http://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html),
79 and point Wget to the PEM file using the `--ca-certificate'
80 command-line option or the corresponding `.wgetrc' command.
82 *** Secure downloads now verify that the host name in the URL matches
83 the "common name" in the certificate presented by the server.
85 *** Although the above checks provide more secure downloads, they
86 unavoidably break interoperability with some sites that worked with
87 previous versions, particularly those using self-signed, expired, or
88 otherwise invalid certificates. If you encounter "certificate
89 verification" errors or complaints that "common name doesn't match
90 requested host name" and are convinced of the site's authenticity, you
91 can use `--no-check-certificate' to bypass both checks.
93 *** Talking to SSL/TLS servers over proxies now actually works.
94 Previous versions of Wget erroneously sent GET requests for https
95 URLs. Wget 1.10 utilizes the CONNECT method designed for this
98 *** The SSL/TLS-related options have been redesigned and, for the
99 first time, documented in the manual. The old, undocumented, options
100 are no longer supported.
102 ** Passive FTP is now the default FTP transfer mode. Use
103 `--no-passive-ftp' or specify `passive_ftp = off' in your init file to
104 revert to the old behavior.
106 ** The `--header' option can now be used to override generated
107 headers. For example, `wget --header="Host: foo.bar"
108 http://127.0.0.1' tells Wget to connect to localhost, but to specify
109 "foo.bar" in the `Host' header. In previous versions such use of
110 `--header' lead to duplicate headers in HTTP requests.
112 ** The responses without headers, aka "HTTP 0.9" responses, are
113 detected and handled. Although HTTP 0.9 has long been obsolete, it is
114 still occasionally used, sometimes by accident.
116 ** The progress bar is now updated regularly even when the data does
117 not arrive from the network.
119 ** Wget no longer preserves permissions of files retrieved by FTP by
120 default. Anonymous FTP servers frequently use permissions like "664",
121 which might not be what the user wants. The new option
122 `--preserve-permissions' and the corresponding `.wgetrc' variable can
123 be used to revert to the old behavior.
125 ** The new option `--protocol-directories' instructs Wget to also use
126 the protocol name as a directory component of local file names.
128 ** Options that previously unconditionally set or unset various flags
129 are now boolean options that can be invoked as either `--OPTION' or
130 `--no-OPTION'. Options that required an argument "on" or "off" have
131 also been changed this way, but they still accept the old syntax for
132 backward compatibility. For example, instead of `--glob=off' you can
135 Allowing `--no-OPTION' for every `--OPTION' and the other way around
136 is useful because it allows the user to override non-default behavior
137 specified via `.wgetrc'.
139 ** The new option `--keep-session-cookies' causes `--save-cookies' to
140 save session cookies (normally only kept in memory) along with the
141 permanent ones. This is useful because many sites track important
142 information, such as whether the user has authenticated, in session
143 cookies. With this option multiple Wget runs are treated as a single
146 ** Wget now supports the --ftp-user and --ftp-password command
147 switches to set username and password for FTP, and the --user and
148 --password command switches to set username and password for both FTP
149 and HTTP. The --http-passwd and --proxy-passwd command switches have
150 been renamed to --http-password and --proxy-password respectively, and
151 the related http_passwd and proxy_passwd .wgetrc commands to
152 http_password and proxy_password respectively. The login and passwd
153 .wgetrc commands have been deprecated.
155 * `wget -b' now works correctly under Windows.
157 * Wget 1.9.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
159 * Changes in Wget 1.9.
161 ** It is now possible to specify that POST method be used for HTTP
162 requests. For example, `wget --post-data="id=foo&data=bar" URL' will
163 send a POST request with the specified contents.
165 ** IPv6 support is available, although it's still experimental.
167 ** The `--timeout' option now also affects DNS lookup and establishing
168 the TCP connection. Previously it only affected reading and writing
169 data. Those three timeouts can be set separately using
170 `--dns-timeout', `--connection-timeout', and `--read-timeout',
173 ** Download speed shown by the progress bar is based on the data
174 recently read, rather than the average speed of the entire download.
175 The ETA projection is still based on the overall average.
177 ** It is now possible to connect to FTP servers through FWTK
178 firewalls. Set ftp_proxy to an FTP URL, and Wget will automatically
179 log on to the proxy as "username@host".
181 ** The new option `--retry-connrefused' makes Wget retry downloads
182 even in the face of refused connections, which are otherwise
183 considered a fatal error.
185 ** The new option `--no-dns-cache' may be used to prevent Wget from
188 ** Wget no longer escapes characters in local file names based on
189 whether they're appropriate in URLs. Escaping can still occur for
190 nonprintable characters or for '/', but no longer for frequent
191 characters such as space. You can use the new option
192 --restrict-file-names to relax or strengthen these rules, which can be
193 useful if you dislike the default or if you're downloading to
194 non-native partitions.
196 ** Handling of HTML comments has been dumbed down to conform to what
197 users expect and other browsers do: instead of being treated as SGML
198 declaration, a comment is terminated at the first occurrence of "-->".
199 Use `--strict-comments' to revert to the old behavior.
201 ** Wget now correctly handles relative URIs that begin with "//", such
202 as "//img.foo.com/foo.jpg".
204 ** Boolean options in `.wgetrc' and on the command line now accept
205 values "yes" and "no" along with the traditional "on" and "off".
207 ** It is now possible to specify decimal values for timeouts, waiting
208 periods, and download rate. For instance, `--wait=0.5' now works as
209 expected, as does `--dns-timeout=0.5' and even `--limit-rate=2.5k'.
211 * Wget 1.8.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
213 * Wget 1.8.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
215 * Changes in Wget 1.8.
217 ** A new progress indicator is now available and used by default.
218 You can choose the progress bar type with `--progress=TYPE'. Two
219 types are available, "bar" (the new default), and "dot" (the old
220 dotted indicator). You can permanently revert to the old progress
221 indicator by putting `progress = dot' in your `.wgetrc'.
223 ** You can limit the download rate of the retrieval using the
224 `--limit-rate' option. For example, `wget --limit-rate=15k URL' will
225 tell Wget not to download the body of the URL faster than 15 kilobytes
228 ** Recursive retrieval and link conversion have been revamped:
230 *** Wget now traverses links breadth-first. This makes the
231 calculation of depth much more reliable than before. Also, recursive
232 downloads are faster and consume *significantly* less memory than
235 *** Links are converted only when the entire retrieval is complete.
236 This is the only safe thing to do, as only then is it known what URLs
237 have been downloaded.
239 *** BASE tags are handled correctly when converting links. Since Wget
240 already resolves <base href="..."> when resolving handling URLs, link
241 conversion now makes the BASE tags point to an empty string.
243 *** HTML anchors are now handled correctly. Links to an anchor in the
244 same document (<a href="#anchorname">), which used to confuse Wget,
245 are now converted correctly.
247 *** When in page-requisites (-p) mode, no-parent (-np) is ignored when
248 retrieving for inline images, stylesheets, and other documents needed
251 *** Page-requisites (-p) mode now works with frames. In other words,
252 `wget -p URL-THAT-USES-FRAMES' will now download the frame HTML files,
253 and all the files that they need to be displayed properly.
255 ** `--base' now works conjunction with `--input-file', providing a
256 base for each URL and thereby allowing the URLs in the file to be
259 ** If a host has more than one IP address, Wget uses the other
260 addresses when accessing the first one fails.
262 ** Host directories now contain port information if the URL is at a
265 ** Wget now supports the robots.txt directives specified in
266 <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt>.
268 ** URL parser has been fixed, especially the infamous overzealous
269 quoting. Wget no longer dequotes reserved characters, e.g. `%3F' is
270 no longer translated to `?', nor `%2B' to `+'. Unsafe characters
271 which are not reserved are still escaped, of course.
273 ** No more than 20 successive redirections are allowed.
275 * Wget 1.7.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
277 * Changes in Wget 1.7.
279 ** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
280 use the `--with-ssl' configure flag. You need to have OpenSSL
283 ** Cookies are now supported. Wget will accept cookies sent by the
284 server and return them in later requests. Additionally, it can load
285 and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.
287 ** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
288 Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
289 many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
290 stressing for the server and the network.
292 ** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
295 ** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
296 puts you in some directory other than '/'.
298 ** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'. For
299 example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
302 ** The HTML parser has been rewritten. The new one works more
303 reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
304 are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
305 skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc. It is
308 ** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.
310 ** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
311 where appropriate. This results in huge speedups when retrieving
312 large sites (thousands of documents).
314 ** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
315 documentation. (The last version that shipped with a man page was
316 1.4.5). To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
317 distribution installed on your system.
319 * Changes in Wget 1.6
321 ** Administrative changes.
323 *** Maintainership. Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
324 Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
325 real job as well). Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
326 are being helped by many other people.
328 *** Web page. Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
331 http://sunsite.dk/wget/
333 *** Anonymous CVS. Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
334 sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server. Take a look at
335 the web page for downloading instructions.
337 ** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
338 modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed. When
339 using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.
341 ** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
342 Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
343 retrieval. -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
344 opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.
346 ** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
347 of failed downloads. Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
348 first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS. waitretry is set to 10 by
349 default in the system wgetrc.
351 ** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
352 Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
353 page properly (e.g. inlined images).
355 ** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
356 to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
357 "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".
359 ** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean". Can be set to on, off,
360 always, or never. This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline. So far,
361 passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.
363 ** A number of new translation files have been added.
365 ** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts
366 bound to multiple IP addresses.
368 ** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.
370 * Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
372 * Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
374 * Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
376 * Changes in Wget 1.5.0
378 ** Wget speaks many languages!
380 On systems with gettext(), Wget will output messages in the language
381 set by the current locale, if available. At this time we support
382 Czech, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
384 ** Opie (Skey) is now supported with FTP.
386 ** HTTP Digest Access Authentication (RFC2069) is now supported.
388 ** The new `-b' option makes Wget go to background automatically.
390 ** The `-I' and `-X' options now accept wildcard arguments.
392 ** The `-w' option now accepts suffixes `s' for seconds, `m' for
393 minutes, `h' for hours, `d' for days and `w' for weeks.
395 ** Upon getting SIGHUP, the whole previous log is now copied to
398 ** Wget now understands proxy settings with explicit usernames and
399 passwords, e.g. `http://user:password@proxy.foo.com/'.
401 ** You can use the new `--cut-dirs' option to make Wget create less
404 ** The `;type=a' appendix to FTP URLs is now recognized. For
405 instance, the following command will retrieve the welcoming message in
408 wget "ftp://ftp.somewhere.com/welcome.msg;type=a"
410 ** `--help' and `--version' options have been redone to to conform to
411 standards set by other GNU utilities.
413 ** Wget should now be compilable under MS Windows environment. MS
414 Visual C++ and Watcom C have been used successfully.
416 ** If the file length is known, percentages are displayed during
419 ** The manual page, now hopelessly out of date, is no longer
420 distributed with Wget.
422 * Wget 1.4.5 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
424 * Wget 1.4.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
426 * Changes in Wget 1.4.3
428 ** Wget is now a GNU utility.
430 ** Can do passive FTP.
434 ** Info documentation expanded.
436 ** Compiles on pre-ANSI compilers.
438 ** Global wgetrc now goes to /usr/local/etc (i.e. $sysconfdir).
442 * Changes in Wget 1.4.2
444 ** New mirror site at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/,
445 thanks to Karsten Thygesen.
447 ** Mailing list! Mail to wget-request@sunsite.auc.dk to subscribe.
449 ** New option --delete-after for proxy prefetching.
451 ** New option --retr-symlinks to retrieve symbolic links like plain
454 ** rmold.pl -- script to remove files deleted on the remote server
456 ** --convert-links should work now.
460 * Changes in Wget 1.4.1
464 ** Added -I (the opposite of -X).
466 ** Dot tracing is now customizable; try wget --dot-style=binary
468 * Changes in Wget 1.4.0
470 ** Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of
471 Geturl. Although many things look suspiciously similar, most of the
472 stuff was rewritten, like recursive retrieval, HTTP, FTP and mostly
473 everything else. Wget should be now easier to debug, maintain and,
474 most importantly, use.
476 ** Recursive HTTP should now work without glitches, even with Location
477 changes, server-generated directory listings and other naughty stuff.
479 ** HTTP regetting is supported on servers that support Range
480 specification. WWW authorization is supported -- try
481 wget http://user:password@hostname/
483 ** FTP support was rewritten and widely enhanced. Globbing should now
484 work flawlessly. Symbolic links are created locally. All the
485 information the Unix-style ls listing can give is now recognized.
487 ** Recursive FTP is supported, e.g.
488 wget -r ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/
490 ** You can specify "rejected" directories, to which you do not want to
491 enter, e.g. with wget -X /pub
493 ** Time-stamping is supported, with both HTTP and FTP. Try wget -N URL.
495 ** A new texinfo reference manual is provided. It can be read with
496 Emacs, standalone info, or converted to HTML, dvi or postscript.
498 ** Fixed a long-standing bug, so that Wget now works over SLIP
501 ** You can have a system-wide wgetrc (/usr/local/lib/wgetrc by
502 default). Settings in $HOME/.wgetrc override the global ones, of
505 ** You can set up quota in .wgetrc to prevent sucking too much
506 data. Try `quota = 5M' in .wgetrc (or quota = 100K if you want your
507 sysadmin to like you).
509 ** Download rate is printed after retrieval.
511 ** Wget now sends the `Referer' header when retrieving
514 ** With the new --no-parent option Wget can retrieve FTP recursively
515 through a proxy server.
517 ** HTML parser, as well as the whole of Wget was rewritten to be much
518 faster and less memory-consuming (yes, both).
520 ** Absolute links can be converted to relative links locally. Check
523 ** Wget catches hangup, filtering the output to a log file and
524 resuming work. Try kill -HUP %?wget.
526 ** User-defined headers can be sent. Try
528 wget http://fly.cc.her.hr/ --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2'
530 ** Acceptance/Rejection lists may contain wildcards.
532 ** Wget can display HTTP headers and/or FTP server response with the
533 new `-S' option. It can save the original HTTP headers with `-s'.
535 ** socks library is now supported (thanks to Antonio Rosella
536 <Antonio.Rosella@agip.it>). Configure with --with-socks.
538 ** There is a nicer display of REST-ed output.
540 ** Many new options (like -x to force directory hierarchy, or -m to
541 turn on mirroring options).
543 ** Wget is now distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
545 ** Lots of small features I can't remember. :-)
547 ** A host of bugfixes.
549 * Changes in Geturl 1.3
551 ** Added FTP globbing support (ftp://fly.cc.fer.hr/*)
553 ** Added support for no_proxy
555 ** Added support for ftp://user:password@host/
557 ** Added support for %xx in URL syntax
559 ** More natural command-line options
561 ** Added -e switch to execute .geturlrc commands from the command-line
563 ** Added support for robots.txt
565 ** Fixed some minor bugs
567 * Geturl 1.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
569 * Changes in Geturl 1.1
571 ** REST supported in FTP
573 ** Proxy servers supported
575 ** GNU getopt used, which enables command-line arguments to be ordered
576 as you wish, e.g. geturl http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -vo log is the same as
577 geturl -vo log http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
579 ** Netscape-compatible URL syntax for HTTP supported: host[:port]/dir/file
581 ** NcFTP-compatible colon URL syntax for FTP supported: host:/dir/file
583 ** <base href="xxx"> supported
585 ** autoconf supported
587 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
588 Copyright information:
590 Copyright (C) 1997-2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
592 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
593 copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that
594 the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus
595 giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
597 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this
598 document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions,
599 provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last