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 ** configure.in now requires autoconf >= 2.61, rather than 2.59.
12 ** Authentication information is no longer sent as part of the Referer
13 header in recursive fetches.
15 ** No authentication credentials are sent until a challenge is issued,
16 for improved security. Authentication handling is still not
17 RFC-compliant, as once a Basic challenge has been received, it will
18 assume it can send credentials to any URL at that same host, and not
19 just the ones at or below the original authenticated location.
20 Credentials for Digest authentication are still never saved or issued
21 automatically, and continue to require a challenge for each resource.
23 ** Added --max-redirect option, allowing the user to specify what should
24 be the maximum number of HTTP redirects to follow.
26 ** Wget now saves HTTP downloads using file names specified by the
27 `Content-Disposition' header. This is a standard way of specifying
28 the file name used by many web dynamically generated pages.
30 ** The GnuTLS library is now also supported for https downloads.
31 This is still work-in-progress. OpenSSL is still used by default; use
32 --with-ssl=gnutls to build with GnuTLS. OpenSSL is still required for
33 NTLM authorization to work, but this should eventually change.
35 ** The new option `--ignore-case' makes Wget ignore case when
36 matching files, directories, and wildcards. This affects the -X, -I,
37 -A, and -R options, as well as globbing in FTP URLs.
39 ** ETA projection is now displayed in "dot" progress output as well as
40 in the default progress bar. (The dot progress is used by default when
41 logging Wget's output to file using the `-o' option.)
43 ** The "lockable boolean" argument type is no longer supported. It
44 was only used by the passive_ftp .wgetrc setting. If you're running
45 broken scripts or Perl modules that unconditionally specify
46 `--passive-ftp' and your firewall disallows it, you can override them
47 by replacing wget with a script that execs wget "$@" --no-passive-ftp.
49 ** The source code has migrated from CVS to Subversion. The
50 repository is available at http://svn.dotsrc.org/repo/wget/; to
51 checkout the trunk to a directory named `wget', use something like
52 `svn checkout http://svn.dotsrc.org/repo/wget/trunk/ wget'.
54 * Changes in Wget 1.10.
56 ** Downloading files larger than 2GB, sometimes referred to as "large
57 files", now works on systems that support them. This includes the
58 majority of modern Unixes, as well as MS Windows.
60 ** IPv6 is now supported by Wget. Unlike the experimental code in
61 1.9, this version supports dual-family systems. The new flags
62 `--inet4' and `--inet6' (or `-4' and `-6' for short) force the use of
63 IPv4 and IPv6 respectively. Note that IPv6 support has not yet been
66 ** Microsoft's proprietary "NTLM" method of HTTP authentication is now
67 supported. This authentication method is undocumented and only used
68 by IIS. Note that *proxy* authentication is not supported in this
69 release; you can only authenticate to the target web site.
71 ** Wget no longer truncates partially downloaded files when download
72 has to start over because the server doesn't support Range. Instead,
73 with such servers Wget now simply ignores the data up to the byte
74 where the last attempt left off, and only then continues appending to
75 the file. That way the downloaded file never shrinks, and download
76 retries from servers without support for partial downloads work even
77 when downloading to stdout.
81 *** SSL/TLS downloads now attempt to verify the server's certificate
82 against the recognized certificate authorities. This requires CA
83 certificates to have been installed in a location visible to the
84 OpenSSL library. If this is not the case, you can get the bundle
85 yourself from a source you trust (for example, the bundle extracted
86 from Mozilla available at http://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html),
87 and point Wget to the PEM file using the `--ca-certificate'
88 command-line option or the corresponding `.wgetrc' command.
90 *** Secure downloads now verify that the host name in the URL matches
91 the "common name" in the certificate presented by the server.
93 *** Although the above checks provide more secure downloads, they
94 unavoidably break interoperability with some sites that worked with
95 previous versions, particularly those using self-signed, expired, or
96 otherwise invalid certificates. If you encounter "certificate
97 verification" errors or complaints that "common name doesn't match
98 requested host name" and are convinced of the site's authenticity, you
99 can use `--no-check-certificate' to bypass both checks.
101 *** Talking to SSL/TLS servers over proxies now actually works.
102 Previous versions of Wget erroneously sent GET requests for https
103 URLs. Wget 1.10 utilizes the CONNECT method designed for this
106 *** The SSL/TLS-related options have been redesigned and, for the
107 first time, documented in the manual. The old, undocumented, options
108 are no longer supported.
110 ** Passive FTP is now the default FTP transfer mode. Use
111 `--no-passive-ftp' or specify `passive_ftp = off' in your init file to
112 revert to the old behavior.
114 ** The `--header' option can now be used to override generated
115 headers. For example, `wget --header="Host: foo.bar"
116 http://127.0.0.1' tells Wget to connect to localhost, but to specify
117 "foo.bar" in the `Host' header. In previous versions such use of
118 `--header' lead to duplicate headers in HTTP requests.
120 ** The responses without headers, aka "HTTP 0.9" responses, are
121 detected and handled. Although HTTP 0.9 has long been obsolete, it is
122 still occasionally used, sometimes by accident.
124 ** The progress bar is now updated regularly even when the data does
125 not arrive from the network.
127 ** Wget no longer preserves permissions of files retrieved by FTP by
128 default. Anonymous FTP servers frequently use permissions like "664",
129 which might not be what the user wants. The new option
130 `--preserve-permissions' and the corresponding `.wgetrc' variable can
131 be used to revert to the old behavior.
133 ** The new option `--protocol-directories' instructs Wget to also use
134 the protocol name as a directory component of local file names.
136 ** Options that previously unconditionally set or unset various flags
137 are now boolean options that can be invoked as either `--OPTION' or
138 `--no-OPTION'. Options that required an argument "on" or "off" have
139 also been changed this way, but they still accept the old syntax for
140 backward compatibility. For example, instead of `--glob=off' you can
143 Allowing `--no-OPTION' for every `--OPTION' and the other way around
144 is useful because it allows the user to override non-default behavior
145 specified via `.wgetrc'.
147 ** The new option `--keep-session-cookies' causes `--save-cookies' to
148 save session cookies (normally only kept in memory) along with the
149 permanent ones. This is useful because many sites track important
150 information, such as whether the user has authenticated, in session
151 cookies. With this option multiple Wget runs are treated as a single
154 ** Wget now supports the --ftp-user and --ftp-password command
155 switches to set username and password for FTP, and the --user and
156 --password command switches to set username and password for both FTP
157 and HTTP. The --http-passwd and --proxy-passwd command switches have
158 been renamed to --http-password and --proxy-password respectively, and
159 the related http_passwd and proxy_passwd .wgetrc commands to
160 http_password and proxy_password respectively. The login and passwd
161 .wgetrc commands have been deprecated.
163 * `wget -b' now works correctly under Windows.
165 * Wget 1.9.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
167 * Changes in Wget 1.9.
169 ** It is now possible to specify that POST method be used for HTTP
170 requests. For example, `wget --post-data="id=foo&data=bar" URL' will
171 send a POST request with the specified contents.
173 ** IPv6 support is available, although it's still experimental.
175 ** The `--timeout' option now also affects DNS lookup and establishing
176 the TCP connection. Previously it only affected reading and writing
177 data. Those three timeouts can be set separately using
178 `--dns-timeout', `--connection-timeout', and `--read-timeout',
181 ** Download speed shown by the progress bar is based on the data
182 recently read, rather than the average speed of the entire download.
183 The ETA projection is still based on the overall average.
185 ** It is now possible to connect to FTP servers through FWTK
186 firewalls. Set ftp_proxy to an FTP URL, and Wget will automatically
187 log on to the proxy as "username@host".
189 ** The new option `--retry-connrefused' makes Wget retry downloads
190 even in the face of refused connections, which are otherwise
191 considered a fatal error.
193 ** The new option `--no-dns-cache' may be used to prevent Wget from
196 ** Wget no longer escapes characters in local file names based on
197 whether they're appropriate in URLs. Escaping can still occur for
198 nonprintable characters or for '/', but no longer for frequent
199 characters such as space. You can use the new option
200 --restrict-file-names to relax or strengthen these rules, which can be
201 useful if you dislike the default or if you're downloading to
202 non-native partitions.
204 ** Handling of HTML comments has been dumbed down to conform to what
205 users expect and other browsers do: instead of being treated as SGML
206 declaration, a comment is terminated at the first occurrence of "-->".
207 Use `--strict-comments' to revert to the old behavior.
209 ** Wget now correctly handles relative URIs that begin with "//", such
210 as "//img.foo.com/foo.jpg".
212 ** Boolean options in `.wgetrc' and on the command line now accept
213 values "yes" and "no" along with the traditional "on" and "off".
215 ** It is now possible to specify decimal values for timeouts, waiting
216 periods, and download rate. For instance, `--wait=0.5' now works as
217 expected, as does `--dns-timeout=0.5' and even `--limit-rate=2.5k'.
219 * Wget 1.8.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
221 * Wget 1.8.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
223 * Changes in Wget 1.8.
225 ** A new progress indicator is now available and used by default.
226 You can choose the progress bar type with `--progress=TYPE'. Two
227 types are available, "bar" (the new default), and "dot" (the old
228 dotted indicator). You can permanently revert to the old progress
229 indicator by putting `progress = dot' in your `.wgetrc'.
231 ** You can limit the download rate of the retrieval using the
232 `--limit-rate' option. For example, `wget --limit-rate=15k URL' will
233 tell Wget not to download the body of the URL faster than 15 kilobytes
236 ** Recursive retrieval and link conversion have been revamped:
238 *** Wget now traverses links breadth-first. This makes the
239 calculation of depth much more reliable than before. Also, recursive
240 downloads are faster and consume *significantly* less memory than
243 *** Links are converted only when the entire retrieval is complete.
244 This is the only safe thing to do, as only then is it known what URLs
245 have been downloaded.
247 *** BASE tags are handled correctly when converting links. Since Wget
248 already resolves <base href="..."> when resolving handling URLs, link
249 conversion now makes the BASE tags point to an empty string.
251 *** HTML anchors are now handled correctly. Links to an anchor in the
252 same document (<a href="#anchorname">), which used to confuse Wget,
253 are now converted correctly.
255 *** When in page-requisites (-p) mode, no-parent (-np) is ignored when
256 retrieving for inline images, stylesheets, and other documents needed
259 *** Page-requisites (-p) mode now works with frames. In other words,
260 `wget -p URL-THAT-USES-FRAMES' will now download the frame HTML files,
261 and all the files that they need to be displayed properly.
263 ** `--base' now works conjunction with `--input-file', providing a
264 base for each URL and thereby allowing the URLs in the file to be
267 ** If a host has more than one IP address, Wget uses the other
268 addresses when accessing the first one fails.
270 ** Host directories now contain port information if the URL is at a
273 ** Wget now supports the robots.txt directives specified in
274 <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt>.
276 ** URL parser has been fixed, especially the infamous overzealous
277 quoting. Wget no longer dequotes reserved characters, e.g. `%3F' is
278 no longer translated to `?', nor `%2B' to `+'. Unsafe characters
279 which are not reserved are still escaped, of course.
281 ** No more than 20 successive redirections are allowed.
283 * Wget 1.7.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
285 * Changes in Wget 1.7.
287 ** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
288 use the `--with-ssl' configure flag. You need to have OpenSSL
291 ** Cookies are now supported. Wget will accept cookies sent by the
292 server and return them in later requests. Additionally, it can load
293 and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.
295 ** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
296 Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
297 many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
298 stressing for the server and the network.
300 ** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
303 ** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
304 puts you in some directory other than '/'.
306 ** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'. For
307 example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
310 ** The HTML parser has been rewritten. The new one works more
311 reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
312 are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
313 skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc. It is
316 ** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.
318 ** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
319 where appropriate. This results in huge speedups when retrieving
320 large sites (thousands of documents).
322 ** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
323 documentation. (The last version that shipped with a man page was
324 1.4.5). To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
325 distribution installed on your system.
327 * Changes in Wget 1.6
329 ** Administrative changes.
331 *** Maintainership. Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
332 Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
333 real job as well). Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
334 are being helped by many other people.
336 *** Web page. Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
339 http://sunsite.dk/wget/
341 *** Anonymous CVS. Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
342 sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server. Take a look at
343 the web page for downloading instructions.
345 ** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
346 modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed. When
347 using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.
349 ** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
350 Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
351 retrieval. -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
352 opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.
354 ** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
355 of failed downloads. Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
356 first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS. waitretry is set to 10 by
357 default in the system wgetrc.
359 ** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
360 Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
361 page properly (e.g. inlined images).
363 ** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
364 to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
365 "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".
367 ** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean". Can be set to on, off,
368 always, or never. This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline. So far,
369 passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.
371 ** A number of new translation files have been added.
373 ** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts
374 bound to multiple IP addresses.
376 ** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.
378 * Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
380 * Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
382 * Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
384 * Changes in Wget 1.5.0
386 ** Wget speaks many languages!
388 On systems with gettext(), Wget will output messages in the language
389 set by the current locale, if available. At this time we support
390 Czech, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
392 ** Opie (Skey) is now supported with FTP.
394 ** HTTP Digest Access Authentication (RFC2069) is now supported.
396 ** The new `-b' option makes Wget go to background automatically.
398 ** The `-I' and `-X' options now accept wildcard arguments.
400 ** The `-w' option now accepts suffixes `s' for seconds, `m' for
401 minutes, `h' for hours, `d' for days and `w' for weeks.
403 ** Upon getting SIGHUP, the whole previous log is now copied to
406 ** Wget now understands proxy settings with explicit usernames and
407 passwords, e.g. `http://user:password@proxy.foo.com/'.
409 ** You can use the new `--cut-dirs' option to make Wget create less
412 ** The `;type=a' appendix to FTP URLs is now recognized. For
413 instance, the following command will retrieve the welcoming message in
416 wget "ftp://ftp.somewhere.com/welcome.msg;type=a"
418 ** `--help' and `--version' options have been redone to to conform to
419 standards set by other GNU utilities.
421 ** Wget should now be compilable under MS Windows environment. MS
422 Visual C++ and Watcom C have been used successfully.
424 ** If the file length is known, percentages are displayed during
427 ** The manual page, now hopelessly out of date, is no longer
428 distributed with Wget.
430 * Wget 1.4.5 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
432 * Wget 1.4.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
434 * Changes in Wget 1.4.3
436 ** Wget is now a GNU utility.
438 ** Can do passive FTP.
442 ** Info documentation expanded.
444 ** Compiles on pre-ANSI compilers.
446 ** Global wgetrc now goes to /usr/local/etc (i.e. $sysconfdir).
450 * Changes in Wget 1.4.2
452 ** New mirror site at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/,
453 thanks to Karsten Thygesen.
455 ** Mailing list! Mail to wget-request@sunsite.auc.dk to subscribe.
457 ** New option --delete-after for proxy prefetching.
459 ** New option --retr-symlinks to retrieve symbolic links like plain
462 ** rmold.pl -- script to remove files deleted on the remote server
464 ** --convert-links should work now.
468 * Changes in Wget 1.4.1
472 ** Added -I (the opposite of -X).
474 ** Dot tracing is now customizable; try wget --dot-style=binary
476 * Changes in Wget 1.4.0
478 ** Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of
479 Geturl. Although many things look suspiciously similar, most of the
480 stuff was rewritten, like recursive retrieval, HTTP, FTP and mostly
481 everything else. Wget should be now easier to debug, maintain and,
482 most importantly, use.
484 ** Recursive HTTP should now work without glitches, even with Location
485 changes, server-generated directory listings and other naughty stuff.
487 ** HTTP regetting is supported on servers that support Range
488 specification. WWW authorization is supported -- try
489 wget http://user:password@hostname/
491 ** FTP support was rewritten and widely enhanced. Globbing should now
492 work flawlessly. Symbolic links are created locally. All the
493 information the Unix-style ls listing can give is now recognized.
495 ** Recursive FTP is supported, e.g.
496 wget -r ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/
498 ** You can specify "rejected" directories, to which you do not want to
499 enter, e.g. with wget -X /pub
501 ** Time-stamping is supported, with both HTTP and FTP. Try wget -N URL.
503 ** A new texinfo reference manual is provided. It can be read with
504 Emacs, standalone info, or converted to HTML, dvi or postscript.
506 ** Fixed a long-standing bug, so that Wget now works over SLIP
509 ** You can have a system-wide wgetrc (/usr/local/lib/wgetrc by
510 default). Settings in $HOME/.wgetrc override the global ones, of
513 ** You can set up quota in .wgetrc to prevent sucking too much
514 data. Try `quota = 5M' in .wgetrc (or quota = 100K if you want your
515 sysadmin to like you).
517 ** Download rate is printed after retrieval.
519 ** Wget now sends the `Referer' header when retrieving
522 ** With the new --no-parent option Wget can retrieve FTP recursively
523 through a proxy server.
525 ** HTML parser, as well as the whole of Wget was rewritten to be much
526 faster and less memory-consuming (yes, both).
528 ** Absolute links can be converted to relative links locally. Check
531 ** Wget catches hangup, filtering the output to a log file and
532 resuming work. Try kill -HUP %?wget.
534 ** User-defined headers can be sent. Try
536 wget http://fly.cc.her.hr/ --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2'
538 ** Acceptance/Rejection lists may contain wildcards.
540 ** Wget can display HTTP headers and/or FTP server response with the
541 new `-S' option. It can save the original HTTP headers with `-s'.
543 ** socks library is now supported (thanks to Antonio Rosella
544 <Antonio.Rosella@agip.it>). Configure with --with-socks.
546 ** There is a nicer display of REST-ed output.
548 ** Many new options (like -x to force directory hierarchy, or -m to
549 turn on mirroring options).
551 ** Wget is now distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
553 ** Lots of small features I can't remember. :-)
555 ** A host of bugfixes.
557 * Changes in Geturl 1.3
559 ** Added FTP globbing support (ftp://fly.cc.fer.hr/*)
561 ** Added support for no_proxy
563 ** Added support for ftp://user:password@host/
565 ** Added support for %xx in URL syntax
567 ** More natural command-line options
569 ** Added -e switch to execute .geturlrc commands from the command-line
571 ** Added support for robots.txt
573 ** Fixed some minor bugs
575 * Geturl 1.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
577 * Changes in Geturl 1.1
579 ** REST supported in FTP
581 ** Proxy servers supported
583 ** GNU getopt used, which enables command-line arguments to be ordered
584 as you wish, e.g. geturl http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -vo log is the same as
585 geturl -vo log http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
587 ** Netscape-compatible URL syntax for HTTP supported: host[:port]/dir/file
589 ** NcFTP-compatible colon URL syntax for FTP supported: host:/dir/file
591 ** <base href="xxx"> supported
593 ** autoconf supported
595 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
596 Copyright information:
598 Copyright (C) 1997-2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
600 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
601 copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that
602 the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus
603 giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
605 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this
606 document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions,
607 provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last