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 ** Authentication information is no longer sent as part of the Referer
11 header in recursive fetches.
13 ** No authentication credentials are sent until a challenge is issued,
14 for improved security. Authentication handling is still not
15 RFC-compliant, as once a Basic challenge has been received, it will
16 assume it can send credentials to any URL at that same host, and not
17 just the ones at or below the original authenticated location.
18 Credentials for Digest authentication are still never saved or issued
19 automatically, and continue to require a challenge for each resource.
21 ** Added --max-redirect option, allowing the user to specify what should
22 be the maximum number of HTTP redirects to follow.
24 ** Wget now saves HTTP downloads using file names specified by the
25 `Content-Disposition' header. This is a standard way of specifying
26 the file name used by many web dynamically generated pages.
28 ** The GnuTLS library is now also supported for https downloads.
29 This is still work-in-progress. OpenSSL is still used by default; use
30 --with-ssl=gnutls to build with GnuTLS. OpenSSL is still required for
31 NTLM authorization to work, but this should eventually change.
33 ** The new option `--ignore-case' makes Wget ignore case when
34 matching files, directories, and wildcards. This affects the -X, -I,
35 -A, and -R options, as well as globbing in FTP URLs.
37 ** ETA projection is now displayed in "dot" progress output as well as
38 in the default progress bar. (The dot progress is used by default when
39 logging Wget's output to file using the `-o' option.)
41 ** The "lockable boolean" argument type is no longer supported. It
42 was only used by the passive_ftp .wgetrc setting. If you're running
43 broken scripts or Perl modules that unconditionally specify
44 `--passive-ftp' and your firewall disallows it, you can override them
45 by replacing wget with a script that execs wget "$@" --no-passive-ftp.
47 ** The source code has migrated from CVS to Subversion. The
48 repository is available at http://svn.dotsrc.org/repo/wget/; to
49 checkout the trunk to a directory named `wget', use something like
50 `svn checkout http://svn.dotsrc.org/repo/wget/trunk/ wget'.
52 * Changes in Wget 1.10.
54 ** Downloading files larger than 2GB, sometimes referred to as "large
55 files", now works on systems that support them. This includes the
56 majority of modern Unixes, as well as MS Windows.
58 ** IPv6 is now supported by Wget. Unlike the experimental code in
59 1.9, this version supports dual-family systems. The new flags
60 `--inet4' and `--inet6' (or `-4' and `-6' for short) force the use of
61 IPv4 and IPv6 respectively. Note that IPv6 support has not yet been
64 ** Microsoft's proprietary "NTLM" method of HTTP authentication is now
65 supported. This authentication method is undocumented and only used
66 by IIS. Note that *proxy* authentication is not supported in this
67 release; you can only authenticate to the target web site.
69 ** Wget no longer truncates partially downloaded files when download
70 has to start over because the server doesn't support Range. Instead,
71 with such servers Wget now simply ignores the data up to the byte
72 where the last attempt left off, and only then continues appending to
73 the file. That way the downloaded file never shrinks, and download
74 retries from servers without support for partial downloads work even
75 when downloading to stdout.
79 *** SSL/TLS downloads now attempt to verify the server's certificate
80 against the recognized certificate authorities. This requires CA
81 certificates to have been installed in a location visible to the
82 OpenSSL library. If this is not the case, you can get the bundle
83 yourself from a source you trust (for example, the bundle extracted
84 from Mozilla available at http://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html),
85 and point Wget to the PEM file using the `--ca-certificate'
86 command-line option or the corresponding `.wgetrc' command.
88 *** Secure downloads now verify that the host name in the URL matches
89 the "common name" in the certificate presented by the server.
91 *** Although the above checks provide more secure downloads, they
92 unavoidably break interoperability with some sites that worked with
93 previous versions, particularly those using self-signed, expired, or
94 otherwise invalid certificates. If you encounter "certificate
95 verification" errors or complaints that "common name doesn't match
96 requested host name" and are convinced of the site's authenticity, you
97 can use `--no-check-certificate' to bypass both checks.
99 *** Talking to SSL/TLS servers over proxies now actually works.
100 Previous versions of Wget erroneously sent GET requests for https
101 URLs. Wget 1.10 utilizes the CONNECT method designed for this
104 *** The SSL/TLS-related options have been redesigned and, for the
105 first time, documented in the manual. The old, undocumented, options
106 are no longer supported.
108 ** Passive FTP is now the default FTP transfer mode. Use
109 `--no-passive-ftp' or specify `passive_ftp = off' in your init file to
110 revert to the old behavior.
112 ** The `--header' option can now be used to override generated
113 headers. For example, `wget --header="Host: foo.bar"
114 http://127.0.0.1' tells Wget to connect to localhost, but to specify
115 "foo.bar" in the `Host' header. In previous versions such use of
116 `--header' lead to duplicate headers in HTTP requests.
118 ** The responses without headers, aka "HTTP 0.9" responses, are
119 detected and handled. Although HTTP 0.9 has long been obsolete, it is
120 still occasionally used, sometimes by accident.
122 ** The progress bar is now updated regularly even when the data does
123 not arrive from the network.
125 ** Wget no longer preserves permissions of files retrieved by FTP by
126 default. Anonymous FTP servers frequently use permissions like "664",
127 which might not be what the user wants. The new option
128 `--preserve-permissions' and the corresponding `.wgetrc' variable can
129 be used to revert to the old behavior.
131 ** The new option `--protocol-directories' instructs Wget to also use
132 the protocol name as a directory component of local file names.
134 ** Options that previously unconditionally set or unset various flags
135 are now boolean options that can be invoked as either `--OPTION' or
136 `--no-OPTION'. Options that required an argument "on" or "off" have
137 also been changed this way, but they still accept the old syntax for
138 backward compatibility. For example, instead of `--glob=off' you can
141 Allowing `--no-OPTION' for every `--OPTION' and the other way around
142 is useful because it allows the user to override non-default behavior
143 specified via `.wgetrc'.
145 ** The new option `--keep-session-cookies' causes `--save-cookies' to
146 save session cookies (normally only kept in memory) along with the
147 permanent ones. This is useful because many sites track important
148 information, such as whether the user has authenticated, in session
149 cookies. With this option multiple Wget runs are treated as a single
152 ** Wget now supports the --ftp-user and --ftp-password command
153 switches to set username and password for FTP, and the --user and
154 --password command switches to set username and password for both FTP
155 and HTTP. The --http-passwd and --proxy-passwd command switches have
156 been renamed to --http-password and --proxy-password respectively, and
157 the related http_passwd and proxy_passwd .wgetrc commands to
158 http_password and proxy_password respectively. The login and passwd
159 .wgetrc commands have been deprecated.
161 * `wget -b' now works correctly under Windows.
163 * Wget 1.9.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
165 * Changes in Wget 1.9.
167 ** It is now possible to specify that POST method be used for HTTP
168 requests. For example, `wget --post-data="id=foo&data=bar" URL' will
169 send a POST request with the specified contents.
171 ** IPv6 support is available, although it's still experimental.
173 ** The `--timeout' option now also affects DNS lookup and establishing
174 the TCP connection. Previously it only affected reading and writing
175 data. Those three timeouts can be set separately using
176 `--dns-timeout', `--connection-timeout', and `--read-timeout',
179 ** Download speed shown by the progress bar is based on the data
180 recently read, rather than the average speed of the entire download.
181 The ETA projection is still based on the overall average.
183 ** It is now possible to connect to FTP servers through FWTK
184 firewalls. Set ftp_proxy to an FTP URL, and Wget will automatically
185 log on to the proxy as "username@host".
187 ** The new option `--retry-connrefused' makes Wget retry downloads
188 even in the face of refused connections, which are otherwise
189 considered a fatal error.
191 ** The new option `--no-dns-cache' may be used to prevent Wget from
194 ** Wget no longer escapes characters in local file names based on
195 whether they're appropriate in URLs. Escaping can still occur for
196 nonprintable characters or for '/', but no longer for frequent
197 characters such as space. You can use the new option
198 --restrict-file-names to relax or strengthen these rules, which can be
199 useful if you dislike the default or if you're downloading to
200 non-native partitions.
202 ** Handling of HTML comments has been dumbed down to conform to what
203 users expect and other browsers do: instead of being treated as SGML
204 declaration, a comment is terminated at the first occurrence of "-->".
205 Use `--strict-comments' to revert to the old behavior.
207 ** Wget now correctly handles relative URIs that begin with "//", such
208 as "//img.foo.com/foo.jpg".
210 ** Boolean options in `.wgetrc' and on the command line now accept
211 values "yes" and "no" along with the traditional "on" and "off".
213 ** It is now possible to specify decimal values for timeouts, waiting
214 periods, and download rate. For instance, `--wait=0.5' now works as
215 expected, as does `--dns-timeout=0.5' and even `--limit-rate=2.5k'.
217 * Wget 1.8.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
219 * Wget 1.8.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
221 * Changes in Wget 1.8.
223 ** A new progress indicator is now available and used by default.
224 You can choose the progress bar type with `--progress=TYPE'. Two
225 types are available, "bar" (the new default), and "dot" (the old
226 dotted indicator). You can permanently revert to the old progress
227 indicator by putting `progress = dot' in your `.wgetrc'.
229 ** You can limit the download rate of the retrieval using the
230 `--limit-rate' option. For example, `wget --limit-rate=15k URL' will
231 tell Wget not to download the body of the URL faster than 15 kilobytes
234 ** Recursive retrieval and link conversion have been revamped:
236 *** Wget now traverses links breadth-first. This makes the
237 calculation of depth much more reliable than before. Also, recursive
238 downloads are faster and consume *significantly* less memory than
241 *** Links are converted only when the entire retrieval is complete.
242 This is the only safe thing to do, as only then is it known what URLs
243 have been downloaded.
245 *** BASE tags are handled correctly when converting links. Since Wget
246 already resolves <base href="..."> when resolving handling URLs, link
247 conversion now makes the BASE tags point to an empty string.
249 *** HTML anchors are now handled correctly. Links to an anchor in the
250 same document (<a href="#anchorname">), which used to confuse Wget,
251 are now converted correctly.
253 *** When in page-requisites (-p) mode, no-parent (-np) is ignored when
254 retrieving for inline images, stylesheets, and other documents needed
257 *** Page-requisites (-p) mode now works with frames. In other words,
258 `wget -p URL-THAT-USES-FRAMES' will now download the frame HTML files,
259 and all the files that they need to be displayed properly.
261 ** `--base' now works conjunction with `--input-file', providing a
262 base for each URL and thereby allowing the URLs in the file to be
265 ** If a host has more than one IP address, Wget uses the other
266 addresses when accessing the first one fails.
268 ** Host directories now contain port information if the URL is at a
271 ** Wget now supports the robots.txt directives specified in
272 <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt>.
274 ** URL parser has been fixed, especially the infamous overzealous
275 quoting. Wget no longer dequotes reserved characters, e.g. `%3F' is
276 no longer translated to `?', nor `%2B' to `+'. Unsafe characters
277 which are not reserved are still escaped, of course.
279 ** No more than 20 successive redirections are allowed.
281 * Wget 1.7.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
283 * Changes in Wget 1.7.
285 ** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
286 use the `--with-ssl' configure flag. You need to have OpenSSL
289 ** Cookies are now supported. Wget will accept cookies sent by the
290 server and return them in later requests. Additionally, it can load
291 and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.
293 ** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
294 Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
295 many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
296 stressing for the server and the network.
298 ** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
301 ** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
302 puts you in some directory other than '/'.
304 ** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'. For
305 example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
308 ** The HTML parser has been rewritten. The new one works more
309 reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
310 are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
311 skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc. It is
314 ** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.
316 ** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
317 where appropriate. This results in huge speedups when retrieving
318 large sites (thousands of documents).
320 ** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
321 documentation. (The last version that shipped with a man page was
322 1.4.5). To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
323 distribution installed on your system.
325 * Changes in Wget 1.6
327 ** Administrative changes.
329 *** Maintainership. Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
330 Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
331 real job as well). Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
332 are being helped by many other people.
334 *** Web page. Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
337 http://sunsite.dk/wget/
339 *** Anonymous CVS. Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
340 sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server. Take a look at
341 the web page for downloading instructions.
343 ** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
344 modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed. When
345 using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.
347 ** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
348 Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
349 retrieval. -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
350 opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.
352 ** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
353 of failed downloads. Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
354 first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS. waitretry is set to 10 by
355 default in the system wgetrc.
357 ** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
358 Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
359 page properly (e.g. inlined images).
361 ** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
362 to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
363 "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".
365 ** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean". Can be set to on, off,
366 always, or never. This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline. So far,
367 passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.
369 ** A number of new translation files have been added.
371 ** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts
372 bound to multiple IP addresses.
374 ** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.
376 * Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
378 * Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
380 * Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
382 * Changes in Wget 1.5.0
384 ** Wget speaks many languages!
386 On systems with gettext(), Wget will output messages in the language
387 set by the current locale, if available. At this time we support
388 Czech, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
390 ** Opie (Skey) is now supported with FTP.
392 ** HTTP Digest Access Authentication (RFC2069) is now supported.
394 ** The new `-b' option makes Wget go to background automatically.
396 ** The `-I' and `-X' options now accept wildcard arguments.
398 ** The `-w' option now accepts suffixes `s' for seconds, `m' for
399 minutes, `h' for hours, `d' for days and `w' for weeks.
401 ** Upon getting SIGHUP, the whole previous log is now copied to
404 ** Wget now understands proxy settings with explicit usernames and
405 passwords, e.g. `http://user:password@proxy.foo.com/'.
407 ** You can use the new `--cut-dirs' option to make Wget create less
410 ** The `;type=a' appendix to FTP URLs is now recognized. For
411 instance, the following command will retrieve the welcoming message in
414 wget "ftp://ftp.somewhere.com/welcome.msg;type=a"
416 ** `--help' and `--version' options have been redone to to conform to
417 standards set by other GNU utilities.
419 ** Wget should now be compilable under MS Windows environment. MS
420 Visual C++ and Watcom C have been used successfully.
422 ** If the file length is known, percentages are displayed during
425 ** The manual page, now hopelessly out of date, is no longer
426 distributed with Wget.
428 * Wget 1.4.5 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
430 * Wget 1.4.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
432 * Changes in Wget 1.4.3
434 ** Wget is now a GNU utility.
436 ** Can do passive FTP.
440 ** Info documentation expanded.
442 ** Compiles on pre-ANSI compilers.
444 ** Global wgetrc now goes to /usr/local/etc (i.e. $sysconfdir).
448 * Changes in Wget 1.4.2
450 ** New mirror site at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/,
451 thanks to Karsten Thygesen.
453 ** Mailing list! Mail to wget-request@sunsite.auc.dk to subscribe.
455 ** New option --delete-after for proxy prefetching.
457 ** New option --retr-symlinks to retrieve symbolic links like plain
460 ** rmold.pl -- script to remove files deleted on the remote server
462 ** --convert-links should work now.
466 * Changes in Wget 1.4.1
470 ** Added -I (the opposite of -X).
472 ** Dot tracing is now customizable; try wget --dot-style=binary
474 * Changes in Wget 1.4.0
476 ** Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of
477 Geturl. Although many things look suspiciously similar, most of the
478 stuff was rewritten, like recursive retrieval, HTTP, FTP and mostly
479 everything else. Wget should be now easier to debug, maintain and,
480 most importantly, use.
482 ** Recursive HTTP should now work without glitches, even with Location
483 changes, server-generated directory listings and other naughty stuff.
485 ** HTTP regetting is supported on servers that support Range
486 specification. WWW authorization is supported -- try
487 wget http://user:password@hostname/
489 ** FTP support was rewritten and widely enhanced. Globbing should now
490 work flawlessly. Symbolic links are created locally. All the
491 information the Unix-style ls listing can give is now recognized.
493 ** Recursive FTP is supported, e.g.
494 wget -r ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/
496 ** You can specify "rejected" directories, to which you do not want to
497 enter, e.g. with wget -X /pub
499 ** Time-stamping is supported, with both HTTP and FTP. Try wget -N URL.
501 ** A new texinfo reference manual is provided. It can be read with
502 Emacs, standalone info, or converted to HTML, dvi or postscript.
504 ** Fixed a long-standing bug, so that Wget now works over SLIP
507 ** You can have a system-wide wgetrc (/usr/local/lib/wgetrc by
508 default). Settings in $HOME/.wgetrc override the global ones, of
511 ** You can set up quota in .wgetrc to prevent sucking too much
512 data. Try `quota = 5M' in .wgetrc (or quota = 100K if you want your
513 sysadmin to like you).
515 ** Download rate is printed after retrieval.
517 ** Wget now sends the `Referer' header when retrieving
520 ** With the new --no-parent option Wget can retrieve FTP recursively
521 through a proxy server.
523 ** HTML parser, as well as the whole of Wget was rewritten to be much
524 faster and less memory-consuming (yes, both).
526 ** Absolute links can be converted to relative links locally. Check
529 ** Wget catches hangup, filtering the output to a log file and
530 resuming work. Try kill -HUP %?wget.
532 ** User-defined headers can be sent. Try
534 wget http://fly.cc.her.hr/ --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2'
536 ** Acceptance/Rejection lists may contain wildcards.
538 ** Wget can display HTTP headers and/or FTP server response with the
539 new `-S' option. It can save the original HTTP headers with `-s'.
541 ** socks library is now supported (thanks to Antonio Rosella
542 <Antonio.Rosella@agip.it>). Configure with --with-socks.
544 ** There is a nicer display of REST-ed output.
546 ** Many new options (like -x to force directory hierarchy, or -m to
547 turn on mirroring options).
549 ** Wget is now distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
551 ** Lots of small features I can't remember. :-)
553 ** A host of bugfixes.
555 * Changes in Geturl 1.3
557 ** Added FTP globbing support (ftp://fly.cc.fer.hr/*)
559 ** Added support for no_proxy
561 ** Added support for ftp://user:password@host/
563 ** Added support for %xx in URL syntax
565 ** More natural command-line options
567 ** Added -e switch to execute .geturlrc commands from the command-line
569 ** Added support for robots.txt
571 ** Fixed some minor bugs
573 * Geturl 1.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
575 * Changes in Geturl 1.1
577 ** REST supported in FTP
579 ** Proxy servers supported
581 ** GNU getopt used, which enables command-line arguments to be ordered
582 as you wish, e.g. geturl http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -vo log is the same as
583 geturl -vo log http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
585 ** Netscape-compatible URL syntax for HTTP supported: host[:port]/dir/file
587 ** NcFTP-compatible colon URL syntax for FTP supported: host:/dir/file
589 ** <base href="xxx"> supported
591 ** autoconf supported
593 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
594 Copyright information:
596 Copyright (C) 1997-2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
598 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
599 copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that
600 the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus
601 giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
603 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this
604 document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions,
605 provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last