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