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 1.12 (MAINLINE)
11 ** --ask-password option (and associated wgetrc command) added to
12 support password prompts at the console.
14 * Changes in Wget 1.11.4
16 ** Fixed an issue (apparently a regression) where -O would refuse to
17 download when -nc was given, even though the file didn't exist.
19 ** Fixed a situation where Wget could abort with --continue if the
20 remote server gives a content-length of zero when the file exists
23 ** Fixed a crash on some systems, due to Wget casting a pointer-to-long
24 to a pointer-to-time_t.
26 ** Translation updates for Catalan.
28 * Changes in Wget 1.11.3
30 ** Downgraded -N with -O to a warning, rather than an error.
32 ** Translation updates
34 * Changes in Wget 1.11.2
36 ** Fixed a problem in authenticating over HTTPS through a proxy.
37 (Regression in 1.11 over 1.10.2.)
39 ** The combination of -r or -p with -O, which was disallowed in 1.11,
40 has been downgraded to a warning in 1.11.2. (-O and -N, which was never
41 meaningful, is still an error.)
43 ** Further improvements to progress bar displays in non-English locales
44 (too many spaces could be inserted, causing the display to scroll).
46 ** Successive invocations of Wget on FTP URLS, with --no-remove-listing
47 and --continue, was causing Wget to append, rather than replace,
48 information in the .listing file, and thereby download the same files
49 multiple times. This has been fixed in 1.11.2.
51 ** Wget 1.11 no longer allowed ".." to persist at the beginning of URLs,
52 for improved conformance with RFC 3986. However, this behavior presents
53 problems for some FTP setups, and so they are now preserved again, for
56 * Changes in Wget 1.11.1.
58 ** Interrupted downloads no longer result in renaming the file
59 (regression in 1.11 over 1.10.2).
61 ** Progress bar now displays correctly in non-English locales (and a
62 related assertion failure was fixed).
64 ** Wget no longer issues a GET request over HTTP for files it should
65 know it's not going to download (regression in 1.11 over 1.10.2).
67 ** Added option --auth-no-challenge, to support broken pre-1.11
68 authentication-before-server-challenge, which turns out to still be
69 useful for some limited cases.
71 ** Documentation of accept/reject lists in the manual's "Types of
72 Files" section now explains various aspects of their behavior that may
73 be surprising, and notes that they may change in the future.
75 ** Documentation of --no-parents now explains how a trailing slash, or
76 lack thereof, in the specified URL, will affect behavior.
78 * Changes in Wget 1.11.
80 ** Timestamping now uses the value from the most recent HTTP response,
81 rather than the first one it got.
83 ** Authentication information is no longer sent as part of the Referer
84 header in recursive fetches.
86 ** No authentication credentials are sent until a challenge is issued,
87 for improved security. Authentication handling is still not
88 RFC-compliant, as once a Basic challenge has been received, it will
89 assume it can send credentials to any URL at that same host, and not
90 just the ones at or below the original authenticated location.
91 Credentials for Digest authentication are still never saved or issued
92 automatically, and continue to require a challenge for each resource.
94 ** Added --max-redirect option, allowing the user to specify what should
95 be the maximum number of HTTP redirects to follow.
97 ** Wget now supports saving HTTP downloads using file names specified by
98 the `Content-Disposition' header. This is a standard way of specifying
99 the file name used by many web dynamically generated pages. However, the
100 current implementation is inefficient, and known to have bugs. It is
101 EXPERIMENTAL only, and not enabled by default. Use --content-disposition
104 ** The new option `--ignore-case' makes Wget ignore case when
105 matching files, directories, and wildcards. This affects the -X, -I,
106 -A, and -R options, as well as globbing in FTP URLs.
108 ** ETA projection is now displayed in "dot" progress output as well as
109 in the default progress bar. (The dot progress is used by default when
110 logging Wget's output to file using the `-o' option.)
112 ** The "lockable boolean" argument type is no longer supported. It
113 was only used by the passive_ftp .wgetrc setting. If you're running
114 broken scripts or Perl modules that unconditionally specify
115 `--passive-ftp' and your firewall disallows it, you can override them
116 by replacing wget with a script that execs wget "$@" --no-passive-ftp.
118 ** The source code has been migrated to Mercurial. The repositories are
119 available at http://hg.addictivecode.org/. Prior to this, the source
120 code was hosted on Subversion (migrated from the original CVS); you can
121 still get access to older tags and branches for Wget in the Subversion
122 repository at http://addictivecode.org/svn/wget/.
124 * Changes in Wget 1.10.
126 ** Downloading files larger than 2GB, sometimes referred to as "large
127 files", now works on systems that support them. This includes the
128 majority of modern Unixes, as well as MS Windows.
130 ** IPv6 is now supported by Wget. Unlike the experimental code in
131 1.9, this version supports dual-family systems. The new flags
132 `--inet4' and `--inet6' (or `-4' and `-6' for short) force the use of
133 IPv4 and IPv6 respectively. Note that IPv6 support has not yet been
136 ** Microsoft's proprietary "NTLM" method of HTTP authentication is now
137 supported. This authentication method is undocumented and only used
138 by IIS. Note that *proxy* authentication is not supported in this
139 release; you can only authenticate to the target web site.
141 ** Wget no longer truncates partially downloaded files when download
142 has to start over because the server doesn't support Range. Instead,
143 with such servers Wget now simply ignores the data up to the byte
144 where the last attempt left off, and only then continues appending to
145 the file. That way the downloaded file never shrinks, and download
146 retries from servers without support for partial downloads work even
147 when downloading to stdout.
151 *** SSL/TLS downloads now attempt to verify the server's certificate
152 against the recognized certificate authorities. This requires CA
153 certificates to have been installed in a location visible to the
154 OpenSSL library. If this is not the case, you can get the bundle
155 yourself from a source you trust (for example, the bundle extracted
156 from Mozilla available at http://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html),
157 and point Wget to the PEM file using the `--ca-certificate'
158 command-line option or the corresponding `.wgetrc' command.
160 *** Secure downloads now verify that the host name in the URL matches
161 the "common name" in the certificate presented by the server.
163 *** Although the above checks provide more secure downloads, they
164 unavoidably break interoperability with some sites that worked with
165 previous versions, particularly those using self-signed, expired, or
166 otherwise invalid certificates. If you encounter "certificate
167 verification" errors or complaints that "common name doesn't match
168 requested host name" and are convinced of the site's authenticity, you
169 can use `--no-check-certificate' to bypass both checks.
171 *** Talking to SSL/TLS servers over proxies now actually works.
172 Previous versions of Wget erroneously sent GET requests for https
173 URLs. Wget 1.10 utilizes the CONNECT method designed for this
176 *** The SSL/TLS-related options have been redesigned and, for the
177 first time, documented in the manual. The old, undocumented, options
178 are no longer supported.
180 ** Passive FTP is now the default FTP transfer mode. Use
181 `--no-passive-ftp' or specify `passive_ftp = off' in your init file to
182 revert to the old behavior.
184 ** The `--header' option can now be used to override generated
185 headers. For example, `wget --header="Host: foo.bar"
186 http://127.0.0.1' tells Wget to connect to localhost, but to specify
187 "foo.bar" in the `Host' header. In previous versions such use of
188 `--header' lead to duplicate headers in HTTP requests.
190 ** The responses without headers, aka "HTTP 0.9" responses, are
191 detected and handled. Although HTTP 0.9 has long been obsolete, it is
192 still occasionally used, sometimes by accident.
194 ** The progress bar is now updated regularly even when the data does
195 not arrive from the network.
197 ** Wget no longer preserves permissions of files retrieved by FTP by
198 default. Anonymous FTP servers frequently use permissions like "664",
199 which might not be what the user wants. The new option
200 `--preserve-permissions' and the corresponding `.wgetrc' variable can
201 be used to revert to the old behavior.
203 ** The new option `--protocol-directories' instructs Wget to also use
204 the protocol name as a directory component of local file names.
206 ** Options that previously unconditionally set or unset various flags
207 are now boolean options that can be invoked as either `--OPTION' or
208 `--no-OPTION'. Options that required an argument "on" or "off" have
209 also been changed this way, but they still accept the old syntax for
210 backward compatibility. For example, instead of `--glob=off' you can
213 Allowing `--no-OPTION' for every `--OPTION' and the other way around
214 is useful because it allows the user to override non-default behavior
215 specified via `.wgetrc'.
217 ** The new option `--keep-session-cookies' causes `--save-cookies' to
218 save session cookies (normally only kept in memory) along with the
219 permanent ones. This is useful because many sites track important
220 information, such as whether the user has authenticated, in session
221 cookies. With this option multiple Wget runs are treated as a single
224 ** Wget now supports the --ftp-user and --ftp-password command
225 switches to set username and password for FTP, and the --user and
226 --password command switches to set username and password for both FTP
227 and HTTP. The --http-passwd and --proxy-passwd command switches have
228 been renamed to --http-password and --proxy-password respectively, and
229 the related http_passwd and proxy_passwd .wgetrc commands to
230 http_password and proxy_password respectively. The login and passwd
231 .wgetrc commands have been deprecated.
233 * `wget -b' now works correctly under Windows.
235 * Wget 1.9.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
237 * Changes in Wget 1.9.
239 ** It is now possible to specify that POST method be used for HTTP
240 requests. For example, `wget --post-data="id=foo&data=bar" URL' will
241 send a POST request with the specified contents.
243 ** IPv6 support is available, although it's still experimental.
245 ** The `--timeout' option now also affects DNS lookup and establishing
246 the TCP connection. Previously it only affected reading and writing
247 data. Those three timeouts can be set separately using
248 `--dns-timeout', `--connection-timeout', and `--read-timeout',
251 ** Download speed shown by the progress bar is based on the data
252 recently read, rather than the average speed of the entire download.
253 The ETA projection is still based on the overall average.
255 ** It is now possible to connect to FTP servers through FWTK
256 firewalls. Set ftp_proxy to an FTP URL, and Wget will automatically
257 log on to the proxy as "username@host".
259 ** The new option `--retry-connrefused' makes Wget retry downloads
260 even in the face of refused connections, which are otherwise
261 considered a fatal error.
263 ** The new option `--no-dns-cache' may be used to prevent Wget from
266 ** Wget no longer escapes characters in local file names based on
267 whether they're appropriate in URLs. Escaping can still occur for
268 nonprintable characters or for '/', but no longer for frequent
269 characters such as space. You can use the new option
270 --restrict-file-names to relax or strengthen these rules, which can be
271 useful if you dislike the default or if you're downloading to
272 non-native partitions.
274 ** Handling of HTML comments has been dumbed down to conform to what
275 users expect and other browsers do: instead of being treated as SGML
276 declaration, a comment is terminated at the first occurrence of "-->".
277 Use `--strict-comments' to revert to the old behavior.
279 ** Wget now correctly handles relative URIs that begin with "//", such
280 as "//img.foo.com/foo.jpg".
282 ** Boolean options in `.wgetrc' and on the command line now accept
283 values "yes" and "no" along with the traditional "on" and "off".
285 ** It is now possible to specify decimal values for timeouts, waiting
286 periods, and download rate. For instance, `--wait=0.5' now works as
287 expected, as does `--dns-timeout=0.5' and even `--limit-rate=2.5k'.
289 * Wget 1.8.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
291 * Wget 1.8.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
293 * Changes in Wget 1.8.
295 ** A new progress indicator is now available and used by default.
296 You can choose the progress bar type with `--progress=TYPE'. Two
297 types are available, "bar" (the new default), and "dot" (the old
298 dotted indicator). You can permanently revert to the old progress
299 indicator by putting `progress = dot' in your `.wgetrc'.
301 ** You can limit the download rate of the retrieval using the
302 `--limit-rate' option. For example, `wget --limit-rate=15k URL' will
303 tell Wget not to download the body of the URL faster than 15 kilobytes
306 ** Recursive retrieval and link conversion have been revamped:
308 *** Wget now traverses links breadth-first. This makes the
309 calculation of depth much more reliable than before. Also, recursive
310 downloads are faster and consume *significantly* less memory than
313 *** Links are converted only when the entire retrieval is complete.
314 This is the only safe thing to do, as only then is it known what URLs
315 have been downloaded.
317 *** BASE tags are handled correctly when converting links. Since Wget
318 already resolves <base href="..."> when resolving handling URLs, link
319 conversion now makes the BASE tags point to an empty string.
321 *** HTML anchors are now handled correctly. Links to an anchor in the
322 same document (<a href="#anchorname">), which used to confuse Wget,
323 are now converted correctly.
325 *** When in page-requisites (-p) mode, no-parent (-np) is ignored when
326 retrieving for inline images, stylesheets, and other documents needed
329 *** Page-requisites (-p) mode now works with frames. In other words,
330 `wget -p URL-THAT-USES-FRAMES' will now download the frame HTML files,
331 and all the files that they need to be displayed properly.
333 ** `--base' now works conjunction with `--input-file', providing a
334 base for each URL and thereby allowing the URLs in the file to be
337 ** If a host has more than one IP address, Wget uses the other
338 addresses when accessing the first one fails.
340 ** Host directories now contain port information if the URL is at a
343 ** Wget now supports the robots.txt directives specified in
344 <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt>.
346 ** URL parser has been fixed, especially the infamous overzealous
347 quoting. Wget no longer dequotes reserved characters, e.g. `%3F' is
348 no longer translated to `?', nor `%2B' to `+'. Unsafe characters
349 which are not reserved are still escaped, of course.
351 ** No more than 20 successive redirections are allowed.
353 * Wget 1.7.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
355 * Changes in Wget 1.7.
357 ** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
358 use the `--with-ssl' configure flag. You need to have OpenSSL
361 ** Cookies are now supported. Wget will accept cookies sent by the
362 server and return them in later requests. Additionally, it can load
363 and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.
365 ** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
366 Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
367 many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
368 stressing for the server and the network.
370 ** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
373 ** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
374 puts you in some directory other than '/'.
376 ** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'. For
377 example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
380 ** The HTML parser has been rewritten. The new one works more
381 reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
382 are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
383 skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc. It is
386 ** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.
388 ** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
389 where appropriate. This results in huge speedups when retrieving
390 large sites (thousands of documents).
392 ** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
393 documentation. (The last version that shipped with a man page was
394 1.4.5). To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
395 distribution installed on your system.
397 * Changes in Wget 1.6
399 ** Administrative changes.
401 *** Maintainership. Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
402 Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
403 real job as well). Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
404 are being helped by many other people.
406 *** Web page. Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
409 http://sunsite.dk/wget/
411 *** Anonymous CVS. Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
412 sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server. Take a look at
413 the web page for downloading instructions.
415 ** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
416 modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed. When
417 using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.
419 ** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
420 Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
421 retrieval. -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
422 opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.
424 ** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
425 of failed downloads. Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
426 first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS. waitretry is set to 10 by
427 default in the system wgetrc.
429 ** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
430 Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
431 page properly (e.g. inlined images).
433 ** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
434 to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
435 "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".
437 ** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean". Can be set to on, off,
438 always, or never. This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline. So far,
439 passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.
441 ** A number of new translation files have been added.
443 ** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts
444 bound to multiple IP addresses.
446 ** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.
448 * Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
450 * Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
452 * Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
454 * Changes in Wget 1.5.0
456 ** Wget speaks many languages!
458 On systems with gettext(), Wget will output messages in the language
459 set by the current locale, if available. At this time we support
460 Czech, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
462 ** Opie (Skey) is now supported with FTP.
464 ** HTTP Digest Access Authentication (RFC2069) is now supported.
466 ** The new `-b' option makes Wget go to background automatically.
468 ** The `-I' and `-X' options now accept wildcard arguments.
470 ** The `-w' option now accepts suffixes `s' for seconds, `m' for
471 minutes, `h' for hours, `d' for days and `w' for weeks.
473 ** Upon getting SIGHUP, the whole previous log is now copied to
476 ** Wget now understands proxy settings with explicit usernames and
477 passwords, e.g. `http://user:password@proxy.foo.com/'.
479 ** You can use the new `--cut-dirs' option to make Wget create less
482 ** The `;type=a' appendix to FTP URLs is now recognized. For
483 instance, the following command will retrieve the welcoming message in
486 wget "ftp://ftp.somewhere.com/welcome.msg;type=a"
488 ** `--help' and `--version' options have been redone to to conform to
489 standards set by other GNU utilities.
491 ** Wget should now be compilable under MS Windows environment. MS
492 Visual C++ and Watcom C have been used successfully.
494 ** If the file length is known, percentages are displayed during
497 ** The manual page, now hopelessly out of date, is no longer
498 distributed with Wget.
500 * Wget 1.4.5 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
502 * Wget 1.4.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
504 * Changes in Wget 1.4.3
506 ** Wget is now a GNU utility.
508 ** Can do passive FTP.
512 ** Info documentation expanded.
514 ** Compiles on pre-ANSI compilers.
516 ** Global wgetrc now goes to /usr/local/etc (i.e. $sysconfdir).
520 * Changes in Wget 1.4.2
522 ** New mirror site at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/,
523 thanks to Karsten Thygesen.
525 ** Mailing list! Mail to wget-request@sunsite.auc.dk to subscribe.
527 ** New option --delete-after for proxy prefetching.
529 ** New option --retr-symlinks to retrieve symbolic links like plain
532 ** rmold.pl -- script to remove files deleted on the remote server
534 ** --convert-links should work now.
538 * Changes in Wget 1.4.1
542 ** Added -I (the opposite of -X).
544 ** Dot tracing is now customizable; try wget --dot-style=binary
546 * Changes in Wget 1.4.0
548 ** Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of
549 Geturl. Although many things look suspiciously similar, most of the
550 stuff was rewritten, like recursive retrieval, HTTP, FTP and mostly
551 everything else. Wget should be now easier to debug, maintain and,
552 most importantly, use.
554 ** Recursive HTTP should now work without glitches, even with Location
555 changes, server-generated directory listings and other naughty stuff.
557 ** HTTP regetting is supported on servers that support Range
558 specification. WWW authorization is supported -- try
559 wget http://user:password@hostname/
561 ** FTP support was rewritten and widely enhanced. Globbing should now
562 work flawlessly. Symbolic links are created locally. All the
563 information the Unix-style ls listing can give is now recognized.
565 ** Recursive FTP is supported, e.g.
566 wget -r ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/
568 ** You can specify "rejected" directories, to which you do not want to
569 enter, e.g. with wget -X /pub
571 ** Time-stamping is supported, with both HTTP and FTP. Try wget -N URL.
573 ** A new texinfo reference manual is provided. It can be read with
574 Emacs, standalone info, or converted to HTML, dvi or postscript.
576 ** Fixed a long-standing bug, so that Wget now works over SLIP
579 ** You can have a system-wide wgetrc (/usr/local/lib/wgetrc by
580 default). Settings in $HOME/.wgetrc override the global ones, of
583 ** You can set up quota in .wgetrc to prevent sucking too much
584 data. Try `quota = 5M' in .wgetrc (or quota = 100K if you want your
585 sysadmin to like you).
587 ** Download rate is printed after retrieval.
589 ** Wget now sends the `Referer' header when retrieving
592 ** With the new --no-parent option Wget can retrieve FTP recursively
593 through a proxy server.
595 ** HTML parser, as well as the whole of Wget was rewritten to be much
596 faster and less memory-consuming (yes, both).
598 ** Absolute links can be converted to relative links locally. Check
601 ** Wget catches hangup, filtering the output to a log file and
602 resuming work. Try kill -HUP %?wget.
604 ** User-defined headers can be sent. Try
606 wget http://fly.cc.her.hr/ --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2'
608 ** Acceptance/Rejection lists may contain wildcards.
610 ** Wget can display HTTP headers and/or FTP server response with the
611 new `-S' option. It can save the original HTTP headers with `-s'.
613 ** socks library is now supported (thanks to Antonio Rosella
614 <Antonio.Rosella@agip.it>). Configure with --with-socks.
616 ** There is a nicer display of REST-ed output.
618 ** Many new options (like -x to force directory hierarchy, or -m to
619 turn on mirroring options).
621 ** Wget is now distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
623 ** Lots of small features I can't remember. :-)
625 ** A host of bugfixes.
627 * Changes in Geturl 1.3
629 ** Added FTP globbing support (ftp://fly.cc.fer.hr/*)
631 ** Added support for no_proxy
633 ** Added support for ftp://user:password@host/
635 ** Added support for %xx in URL syntax
637 ** More natural command-line options
639 ** Added -e switch to execute .geturlrc commands from the command-line
641 ** Added support for robots.txt
643 ** Fixed some minor bugs
645 * Geturl 1.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
647 * Changes in Geturl 1.1
649 ** REST supported in FTP
651 ** Proxy servers supported
653 ** GNU getopt used, which enables command-line arguments to be ordered
654 as you wish, e.g. geturl http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -vo log is the same as
655 geturl -vo log http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
657 ** Netscape-compatible URL syntax for HTTP supported: host[:port]/dir/file
659 ** NcFTP-compatible colon URL syntax for FTP supported: host:/dir/file
661 ** <base href="xxx"> supported
663 ** autoconf supported
665 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
666 Copyright information:
668 Copyright (C) 1997-2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
670 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
671 copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that
672 the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus
673 giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
675 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this
676 document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions,
677 provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last