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 1.11.3
11 ** Downgraded -N with -O to a warning, rather than an error.
13 ** Translation updates
15 * Changes in Wget (MAINLINE).
17 ** Gnulib is now used to provide code for certain portability aspects in
20 ** Wget uses Automake now as part of its build infrastructure.
22 * Changes in Wget 1.11.2
24 ** Fixed a problem in authenticating over HTTPS through a proxy.
25 (Regression in 1.11 over 1.10.2.)
27 ** The combination of -r or -p with -O, which was disallowed in 1.11,
28 has been downgraded to a warning in 1.11.2. (-O and -N, which was never
29 meaningful, is still an error.)
31 ** Further improvements to progress bar displays in non-English locales
32 (too many spaces could be inserted, causing the display to scroll).
34 ** Successive invocations of Wget on FTP URLS, with --no-remove-listing
35 and --continue, was causing Wget to append, rather than replace,
36 information in the .listing file, and thereby download the same files
37 multiple times. This has been fixed in 1.11.2.
39 ** Wget 1.11 no longer allowed ".." to persist at the beginning of URLs,
40 for improved conformance with RFC 3986. However, this behavior presents
41 problems for some FTP setups, and so they are now preserved again, for
44 * Changes in Wget 1.11.1.
46 ** Interrupted downloads no longer result in renaming the file
47 (regression in 1.11 over 1.10.2).
49 ** Progress bar now displays correctly in non-English locales (and a
50 related assertion failure was fixed).
52 ** Wget no longer issues a GET request over HTTP for files it should
53 know it's not going to download (regression in 1.11 over 1.10.2).
55 ** Added option --auth-no-challenge, to support broken pre-1.11
56 authentication-before-server-challenge, which turns out to still be
57 useful for some limited cases.
59 ** Documentation of accept/reject lists in the manual's "Types of
60 Files" section now explains various aspects of their behavior that may
61 be surprising, and notes that they may change in the future.
63 ** Documentation of --no-parents now explains how a trailing slash, or
64 lack thereof, in the specified URL, will affect behavior.
66 * Changes in Wget 1.11.
68 ** Timestamping now uses the value from the most recent HTTP response,
69 rather than the first one it got.
71 ** Authentication information is no longer sent as part of the Referer
72 header in recursive fetches.
74 ** No authentication credentials are sent until a challenge is issued,
75 for improved security. Authentication handling is still not
76 RFC-compliant, as once a Basic challenge has been received, it will
77 assume it can send credentials to any URL at that same host, and not
78 just the ones at or below the original authenticated location.
79 Credentials for Digest authentication are still never saved or issued
80 automatically, and continue to require a challenge for each resource.
82 ** Added --max-redirect option, allowing the user to specify what should
83 be the maximum number of HTTP redirects to follow.
85 ** Wget now supports saving HTTP downloads using file names specified by
86 the `Content-Disposition' header. This is a standard way of specifying
87 the file name used by many web dynamically generated pages. However, the
88 current implementation is inefficient, and known to have bugs. It is
89 EXPERIMENTAL only, and not enabled by default. Use --content-disposition
92 ** The new option `--ignore-case' makes Wget ignore case when
93 matching files, directories, and wildcards. This affects the -X, -I,
94 -A, and -R options, as well as globbing in FTP URLs.
96 ** ETA projection is now displayed in "dot" progress output as well as
97 in the default progress bar. (The dot progress is used by default when
98 logging Wget's output to file using the `-o' option.)
100 ** The "lockable boolean" argument type is no longer supported. It
101 was only used by the passive_ftp .wgetrc setting. If you're running
102 broken scripts or Perl modules that unconditionally specify
103 `--passive-ftp' and your firewall disallows it, you can override them
104 by replacing wget with a script that execs wget "$@" --no-passive-ftp.
106 ** The source code has been migrated to Mercurial. The repositories are
107 available at http://hg.addictivecode.org/. Prior to this, the source
108 code was hosted on Subversion (migrated from the original CVS); you can
109 still get access to older tags and branches for Wget in the Subversion
110 repository at http://addictivecode.org/svn/wget/.
112 * Changes in Wget 1.10.
114 ** Downloading files larger than 2GB, sometimes referred to as "large
115 files", now works on systems that support them. This includes the
116 majority of modern Unixes, as well as MS Windows.
118 ** IPv6 is now supported by Wget. Unlike the experimental code in
119 1.9, this version supports dual-family systems. The new flags
120 `--inet4' and `--inet6' (or `-4' and `-6' for short) force the use of
121 IPv4 and IPv6 respectively. Note that IPv6 support has not yet been
124 ** Microsoft's proprietary "NTLM" method of HTTP authentication is now
125 supported. This authentication method is undocumented and only used
126 by IIS. Note that *proxy* authentication is not supported in this
127 release; you can only authenticate to the target web site.
129 ** Wget no longer truncates partially downloaded files when download
130 has to start over because the server doesn't support Range. Instead,
131 with such servers Wget now simply ignores the data up to the byte
132 where the last attempt left off, and only then continues appending to
133 the file. That way the downloaded file never shrinks, and download
134 retries from servers without support for partial downloads work even
135 when downloading to stdout.
139 *** SSL/TLS downloads now attempt to verify the server's certificate
140 against the recognized certificate authorities. This requires CA
141 certificates to have been installed in a location visible to the
142 OpenSSL library. If this is not the case, you can get the bundle
143 yourself from a source you trust (for example, the bundle extracted
144 from Mozilla available at http://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html),
145 and point Wget to the PEM file using the `--ca-certificate'
146 command-line option or the corresponding `.wgetrc' command.
148 *** Secure downloads now verify that the host name in the URL matches
149 the "common name" in the certificate presented by the server.
151 *** Although the above checks provide more secure downloads, they
152 unavoidably break interoperability with some sites that worked with
153 previous versions, particularly those using self-signed, expired, or
154 otherwise invalid certificates. If you encounter "certificate
155 verification" errors or complaints that "common name doesn't match
156 requested host name" and are convinced of the site's authenticity, you
157 can use `--no-check-certificate' to bypass both checks.
159 *** Talking to SSL/TLS servers over proxies now actually works.
160 Previous versions of Wget erroneously sent GET requests for https
161 URLs. Wget 1.10 utilizes the CONNECT method designed for this
164 *** The SSL/TLS-related options have been redesigned and, for the
165 first time, documented in the manual. The old, undocumented, options
166 are no longer supported.
168 ** Passive FTP is now the default FTP transfer mode. Use
169 `--no-passive-ftp' or specify `passive_ftp = off' in your init file to
170 revert to the old behavior.
172 ** The `--header' option can now be used to override generated
173 headers. For example, `wget --header="Host: foo.bar"
174 http://127.0.0.1' tells Wget to connect to localhost, but to specify
175 "foo.bar" in the `Host' header. In previous versions such use of
176 `--header' lead to duplicate headers in HTTP requests.
178 ** The responses without headers, aka "HTTP 0.9" responses, are
179 detected and handled. Although HTTP 0.9 has long been obsolete, it is
180 still occasionally used, sometimes by accident.
182 ** The progress bar is now updated regularly even when the data does
183 not arrive from the network.
185 ** Wget no longer preserves permissions of files retrieved by FTP by
186 default. Anonymous FTP servers frequently use permissions like "664",
187 which might not be what the user wants. The new option
188 `--preserve-permissions' and the corresponding `.wgetrc' variable can
189 be used to revert to the old behavior.
191 ** The new option `--protocol-directories' instructs Wget to also use
192 the protocol name as a directory component of local file names.
194 ** Options that previously unconditionally set or unset various flags
195 are now boolean options that can be invoked as either `--OPTION' or
196 `--no-OPTION'. Options that required an argument "on" or "off" have
197 also been changed this way, but they still accept the old syntax for
198 backward compatibility. For example, instead of `--glob=off' you can
201 Allowing `--no-OPTION' for every `--OPTION' and the other way around
202 is useful because it allows the user to override non-default behavior
203 specified via `.wgetrc'.
205 ** The new option `--keep-session-cookies' causes `--save-cookies' to
206 save session cookies (normally only kept in memory) along with the
207 permanent ones. This is useful because many sites track important
208 information, such as whether the user has authenticated, in session
209 cookies. With this option multiple Wget runs are treated as a single
212 ** Wget now supports the --ftp-user and --ftp-password command
213 switches to set username and password for FTP, and the --user and
214 --password command switches to set username and password for both FTP
215 and HTTP. The --http-passwd and --proxy-passwd command switches have
216 been renamed to --http-password and --proxy-password respectively, and
217 the related http_passwd and proxy_passwd .wgetrc commands to
218 http_password and proxy_password respectively. The login and passwd
219 .wgetrc commands have been deprecated.
221 * `wget -b' now works correctly under Windows.
223 * Wget 1.9.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
225 * Changes in Wget 1.9.
227 ** It is now possible to specify that POST method be used for HTTP
228 requests. For example, `wget --post-data="id=foo&data=bar" URL' will
229 send a POST request with the specified contents.
231 ** IPv6 support is available, although it's still experimental.
233 ** The `--timeout' option now also affects DNS lookup and establishing
234 the TCP connection. Previously it only affected reading and writing
235 data. Those three timeouts can be set separately using
236 `--dns-timeout', `--connection-timeout', and `--read-timeout',
239 ** Download speed shown by the progress bar is based on the data
240 recently read, rather than the average speed of the entire download.
241 The ETA projection is still based on the overall average.
243 ** It is now possible to connect to FTP servers through FWTK
244 firewalls. Set ftp_proxy to an FTP URL, and Wget will automatically
245 log on to the proxy as "username@host".
247 ** The new option `--retry-connrefused' makes Wget retry downloads
248 even in the face of refused connections, which are otherwise
249 considered a fatal error.
251 ** The new option `--no-dns-cache' may be used to prevent Wget from
254 ** Wget no longer escapes characters in local file names based on
255 whether they're appropriate in URLs. Escaping can still occur for
256 nonprintable characters or for '/', but no longer for frequent
257 characters such as space. You can use the new option
258 --restrict-file-names to relax or strengthen these rules, which can be
259 useful if you dislike the default or if you're downloading to
260 non-native partitions.
262 ** Handling of HTML comments has been dumbed down to conform to what
263 users expect and other browsers do: instead of being treated as SGML
264 declaration, a comment is terminated at the first occurrence of "-->".
265 Use `--strict-comments' to revert to the old behavior.
267 ** Wget now correctly handles relative URIs that begin with "//", such
268 as "//img.foo.com/foo.jpg".
270 ** Boolean options in `.wgetrc' and on the command line now accept
271 values "yes" and "no" along with the traditional "on" and "off".
273 ** It is now possible to specify decimal values for timeouts, waiting
274 periods, and download rate. For instance, `--wait=0.5' now works as
275 expected, as does `--dns-timeout=0.5' and even `--limit-rate=2.5k'.
277 * Wget 1.8.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
279 * Wget 1.8.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
281 * Changes in Wget 1.8.
283 ** A new progress indicator is now available and used by default.
284 You can choose the progress bar type with `--progress=TYPE'. Two
285 types are available, "bar" (the new default), and "dot" (the old
286 dotted indicator). You can permanently revert to the old progress
287 indicator by putting `progress = dot' in your `.wgetrc'.
289 ** You can limit the download rate of the retrieval using the
290 `--limit-rate' option. For example, `wget --limit-rate=15k URL' will
291 tell Wget not to download the body of the URL faster than 15 kilobytes
294 ** Recursive retrieval and link conversion have been revamped:
296 *** Wget now traverses links breadth-first. This makes the
297 calculation of depth much more reliable than before. Also, recursive
298 downloads are faster and consume *significantly* less memory than
301 *** Links are converted only when the entire retrieval is complete.
302 This is the only safe thing to do, as only then is it known what URLs
303 have been downloaded.
305 *** BASE tags are handled correctly when converting links. Since Wget
306 already resolves <base href="..."> when resolving handling URLs, link
307 conversion now makes the BASE tags point to an empty string.
309 *** HTML anchors are now handled correctly. Links to an anchor in the
310 same document (<a href="#anchorname">), which used to confuse Wget,
311 are now converted correctly.
313 *** When in page-requisites (-p) mode, no-parent (-np) is ignored when
314 retrieving for inline images, stylesheets, and other documents needed
317 *** Page-requisites (-p) mode now works with frames. In other words,
318 `wget -p URL-THAT-USES-FRAMES' will now download the frame HTML files,
319 and all the files that they need to be displayed properly.
321 ** `--base' now works conjunction with `--input-file', providing a
322 base for each URL and thereby allowing the URLs in the file to be
325 ** If a host has more than one IP address, Wget uses the other
326 addresses when accessing the first one fails.
328 ** Host directories now contain port information if the URL is at a
331 ** Wget now supports the robots.txt directives specified in
332 <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt>.
334 ** URL parser has been fixed, especially the infamous overzealous
335 quoting. Wget no longer dequotes reserved characters, e.g. `%3F' is
336 no longer translated to `?', nor `%2B' to `+'. Unsafe characters
337 which are not reserved are still escaped, of course.
339 ** No more than 20 successive redirections are allowed.
341 * Wget 1.7.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
343 * Changes in Wget 1.7.
345 ** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
346 use the `--with-ssl' configure flag. You need to have OpenSSL
349 ** Cookies are now supported. Wget will accept cookies sent by the
350 server and return them in later requests. Additionally, it can load
351 and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.
353 ** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
354 Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
355 many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
356 stressing for the server and the network.
358 ** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
361 ** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
362 puts you in some directory other than '/'.
364 ** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'. For
365 example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
368 ** The HTML parser has been rewritten. The new one works more
369 reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
370 are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
371 skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc. It is
374 ** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.
376 ** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
377 where appropriate. This results in huge speedups when retrieving
378 large sites (thousands of documents).
380 ** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
381 documentation. (The last version that shipped with a man page was
382 1.4.5). To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
383 distribution installed on your system.
385 * Changes in Wget 1.6
387 ** Administrative changes.
389 *** Maintainership. Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
390 Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
391 real job as well). Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
392 are being helped by many other people.
394 *** Web page. Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
397 http://sunsite.dk/wget/
399 *** Anonymous CVS. Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
400 sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server. Take a look at
401 the web page for downloading instructions.
403 ** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
404 modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed. When
405 using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.
407 ** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
408 Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
409 retrieval. -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
410 opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.
412 ** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
413 of failed downloads. Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
414 first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS. waitretry is set to 10 by
415 default in the system wgetrc.
417 ** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
418 Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
419 page properly (e.g. inlined images).
421 ** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
422 to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
423 "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".
425 ** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean". Can be set to on, off,
426 always, or never. This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline. So far,
427 passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.
429 ** A number of new translation files have been added.
431 ** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts
432 bound to multiple IP addresses.
434 ** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.
436 * Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
438 * Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
440 * Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
442 * Changes in Wget 1.5.0
444 ** Wget speaks many languages!
446 On systems with gettext(), Wget will output messages in the language
447 set by the current locale, if available. At this time we support
448 Czech, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
450 ** Opie (Skey) is now supported with FTP.
452 ** HTTP Digest Access Authentication (RFC2069) is now supported.
454 ** The new `-b' option makes Wget go to background automatically.
456 ** The `-I' and `-X' options now accept wildcard arguments.
458 ** The `-w' option now accepts suffixes `s' for seconds, `m' for
459 minutes, `h' for hours, `d' for days and `w' for weeks.
461 ** Upon getting SIGHUP, the whole previous log is now copied to
464 ** Wget now understands proxy settings with explicit usernames and
465 passwords, e.g. `http://user:password@proxy.foo.com/'.
467 ** You can use the new `--cut-dirs' option to make Wget create less
470 ** The `;type=a' appendix to FTP URLs is now recognized. For
471 instance, the following command will retrieve the welcoming message in
474 wget "ftp://ftp.somewhere.com/welcome.msg;type=a"
476 ** `--help' and `--version' options have been redone to to conform to
477 standards set by other GNU utilities.
479 ** Wget should now be compilable under MS Windows environment. MS
480 Visual C++ and Watcom C have been used successfully.
482 ** If the file length is known, percentages are displayed during
485 ** The manual page, now hopelessly out of date, is no longer
486 distributed with Wget.
488 * Wget 1.4.5 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
490 * Wget 1.4.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
492 * Changes in Wget 1.4.3
494 ** Wget is now a GNU utility.
496 ** Can do passive FTP.
500 ** Info documentation expanded.
502 ** Compiles on pre-ANSI compilers.
504 ** Global wgetrc now goes to /usr/local/etc (i.e. $sysconfdir).
508 * Changes in Wget 1.4.2
510 ** New mirror site at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/,
511 thanks to Karsten Thygesen.
513 ** Mailing list! Mail to wget-request@sunsite.auc.dk to subscribe.
515 ** New option --delete-after for proxy prefetching.
517 ** New option --retr-symlinks to retrieve symbolic links like plain
520 ** rmold.pl -- script to remove files deleted on the remote server
522 ** --convert-links should work now.
526 * Changes in Wget 1.4.1
530 ** Added -I (the opposite of -X).
532 ** Dot tracing is now customizable; try wget --dot-style=binary
534 * Changes in Wget 1.4.0
536 ** Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of
537 Geturl. Although many things look suspiciously similar, most of the
538 stuff was rewritten, like recursive retrieval, HTTP, FTP and mostly
539 everything else. Wget should be now easier to debug, maintain and,
540 most importantly, use.
542 ** Recursive HTTP should now work without glitches, even with Location
543 changes, server-generated directory listings and other naughty stuff.
545 ** HTTP regetting is supported on servers that support Range
546 specification. WWW authorization is supported -- try
547 wget http://user:password@hostname/
549 ** FTP support was rewritten and widely enhanced. Globbing should now
550 work flawlessly. Symbolic links are created locally. All the
551 information the Unix-style ls listing can give is now recognized.
553 ** Recursive FTP is supported, e.g.
554 wget -r ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/
556 ** You can specify "rejected" directories, to which you do not want to
557 enter, e.g. with wget -X /pub
559 ** Time-stamping is supported, with both HTTP and FTP. Try wget -N URL.
561 ** A new texinfo reference manual is provided. It can be read with
562 Emacs, standalone info, or converted to HTML, dvi or postscript.
564 ** Fixed a long-standing bug, so that Wget now works over SLIP
567 ** You can have a system-wide wgetrc (/usr/local/lib/wgetrc by
568 default). Settings in $HOME/.wgetrc override the global ones, of
571 ** You can set up quota in .wgetrc to prevent sucking too much
572 data. Try `quota = 5M' in .wgetrc (or quota = 100K if you want your
573 sysadmin to like you).
575 ** Download rate is printed after retrieval.
577 ** Wget now sends the `Referer' header when retrieving
580 ** With the new --no-parent option Wget can retrieve FTP recursively
581 through a proxy server.
583 ** HTML parser, as well as the whole of Wget was rewritten to be much
584 faster and less memory-consuming (yes, both).
586 ** Absolute links can be converted to relative links locally. Check
589 ** Wget catches hangup, filtering the output to a log file and
590 resuming work. Try kill -HUP %?wget.
592 ** User-defined headers can be sent. Try
594 wget http://fly.cc.her.hr/ --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2'
596 ** Acceptance/Rejection lists may contain wildcards.
598 ** Wget can display HTTP headers and/or FTP server response with the
599 new `-S' option. It can save the original HTTP headers with `-s'.
601 ** socks library is now supported (thanks to Antonio Rosella
602 <Antonio.Rosella@agip.it>). Configure with --with-socks.
604 ** There is a nicer display of REST-ed output.
606 ** Many new options (like -x to force directory hierarchy, or -m to
607 turn on mirroring options).
609 ** Wget is now distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
611 ** Lots of small features I can't remember. :-)
613 ** A host of bugfixes.
615 * Changes in Geturl 1.3
617 ** Added FTP globbing support (ftp://fly.cc.fer.hr/*)
619 ** Added support for no_proxy
621 ** Added support for ftp://user:password@host/
623 ** Added support for %xx in URL syntax
625 ** More natural command-line options
627 ** Added -e switch to execute .geturlrc commands from the command-line
629 ** Added support for robots.txt
631 ** Fixed some minor bugs
633 * Geturl 1.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
635 * Changes in Geturl 1.1
637 ** REST supported in FTP
639 ** Proxy servers supported
641 ** GNU getopt used, which enables command-line arguments to be ordered
642 as you wish, e.g. geturl http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -vo log is the same as
643 geturl -vo log http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
645 ** Netscape-compatible URL syntax for HTTP supported: host[:port]/dir/file
647 ** NcFTP-compatible colon URL syntax for FTP supported: host:/dir/file
649 ** <base href="xxx"> supported
651 ** autoconf supported
653 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
654 Copyright information:
656 Copyright (C) 1997-2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
658 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
659 copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that
660 the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus
661 giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
663 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this
664 document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions,
665 provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last