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 ** Wget now saves HTTP downloads using file names specified by the
22 `Content-Disposition' header. This is a standard way of specifying
23 the file name used by many web dynamically generated pages.
25 ** The GnuTLS library is now also supported for https downloads.
26 This is still work-in-progress. OpenSSL is still used by default; use
27 --with-ssl=gnutls to build with GnuTLS. OpenSSL is still required for
28 NTLM authorization to work, but this should eventually change.
30 ** The new option `--ignore-case' makes Wget ignore case when
31 matching files, directories, and wildcards. This affects the -X, -I,
32 -A, and -R options, as well as globbing in FTP URLs.
34 ** ETA projection is now displayed in "dot" progress output as well as
35 in the default progress bar. (The dot progress is used by default when
36 logging Wget's output to file using the `-o' option.)
38 ** The "lockable boolean" argument type is no longer supported. It
39 was only used by the passive_ftp .wgetrc setting. If you're running
40 broken scripts or Perl modules that unconditionally specify
41 `--passive-ftp' and your firewall disallows it, you can override them
42 by replacing wget with a script that execs wget "$@" --no-passive-ftp.
44 ** The source code has migrated from CVS to Subversion. The
45 repository is available at http://svn.dotsrc.org/repo/wget/; to
46 checkout the trunk to a directory named `wget', use something like
47 `svn checkout http://svn.dotsrc.org/repo/wget/trunk/ wget'.
49 * Changes in Wget 1.10.
51 ** Downloading files larger than 2GB, sometimes referred to as "large
52 files", now works on systems that support them. This includes the
53 majority of modern Unixes, as well as MS Windows.
55 ** IPv6 is now supported by Wget. Unlike the experimental code in
56 1.9, this version supports dual-family systems. The new flags
57 `--inet4' and `--inet6' (or `-4' and `-6' for short) force the use of
58 IPv4 and IPv6 respectively. Note that IPv6 support has not yet been
61 ** Microsoft's proprietary "NTLM" method of HTTP authentication is now
62 supported. This authentication method is undocumented and only used
63 by IIS. Note that *proxy* authentication is not supported in this
64 release; you can only authenticate to the target web site.
66 ** Wget no longer truncates partially downloaded files when download
67 has to start over because the server doesn't support Range. Instead,
68 with such servers Wget now simply ignores the data up to the byte
69 where the last attempt left off, and only then continues appending to
70 the file. That way the downloaded file never shrinks, and download
71 retries from servers without support for partial downloads work even
72 when downloading to stdout.
76 *** SSL/TLS downloads now attempt to verify the server's certificate
77 against the recognized certificate authorities. This requires CA
78 certificates to have been installed in a location visible to the
79 OpenSSL library. If this is not the case, you can get the bundle
80 yourself from a source you trust (for example, the bundle extracted
81 from Mozilla available at http://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html),
82 and point Wget to the PEM file using the `--ca-certificate'
83 command-line option or the corresponding `.wgetrc' command.
85 *** Secure downloads now verify that the host name in the URL matches
86 the "common name" in the certificate presented by the server.
88 *** Although the above checks provide more secure downloads, they
89 unavoidably break interoperability with some sites that worked with
90 previous versions, particularly those using self-signed, expired, or
91 otherwise invalid certificates. If you encounter "certificate
92 verification" errors or complaints that "common name doesn't match
93 requested host name" and are convinced of the site's authenticity, you
94 can use `--no-check-certificate' to bypass both checks.
96 *** Talking to SSL/TLS servers over proxies now actually works.
97 Previous versions of Wget erroneously sent GET requests for https
98 URLs. Wget 1.10 utilizes the CONNECT method designed for this
101 *** The SSL/TLS-related options have been redesigned and, for the
102 first time, documented in the manual. The old, undocumented, options
103 are no longer supported.
105 ** Passive FTP is now the default FTP transfer mode. Use
106 `--no-passive-ftp' or specify `passive_ftp = off' in your init file to
107 revert to the old behavior.
109 ** The `--header' option can now be used to override generated
110 headers. For example, `wget --header="Host: foo.bar"
111 http://127.0.0.1' tells Wget to connect to localhost, but to specify
112 "foo.bar" in the `Host' header. In previous versions such use of
113 `--header' lead to duplicate headers in HTTP requests.
115 ** The responses without headers, aka "HTTP 0.9" responses, are
116 detected and handled. Although HTTP 0.9 has long been obsolete, it is
117 still occasionally used, sometimes by accident.
119 ** The progress bar is now updated regularly even when the data does
120 not arrive from the network.
122 ** Wget no longer preserves permissions of files retrieved by FTP by
123 default. Anonymous FTP servers frequently use permissions like "664",
124 which might not be what the user wants. The new option
125 `--preserve-permissions' and the corresponding `.wgetrc' variable can
126 be used to revert to the old behavior.
128 ** The new option `--protocol-directories' instructs Wget to also use
129 the protocol name as a directory component of local file names.
131 ** Options that previously unconditionally set or unset various flags
132 are now boolean options that can be invoked as either `--OPTION' or
133 `--no-OPTION'. Options that required an argument "on" or "off" have
134 also been changed this way, but they still accept the old syntax for
135 backward compatibility. For example, instead of `--glob=off' you can
138 Allowing `--no-OPTION' for every `--OPTION' and the other way around
139 is useful because it allows the user to override non-default behavior
140 specified via `.wgetrc'.
142 ** The new option `--keep-session-cookies' causes `--save-cookies' to
143 save session cookies (normally only kept in memory) along with the
144 permanent ones. This is useful because many sites track important
145 information, such as whether the user has authenticated, in session
146 cookies. With this option multiple Wget runs are treated as a single
149 ** Wget now supports the --ftp-user and --ftp-password command
150 switches to set username and password for FTP, and the --user and
151 --password command switches to set username and password for both FTP
152 and HTTP. The --http-passwd and --proxy-passwd command switches have
153 been renamed to --http-password and --proxy-password respectively, and
154 the related http_passwd and proxy_passwd .wgetrc commands to
155 http_password and proxy_password respectively. The login and passwd
156 .wgetrc commands have been deprecated.
158 * `wget -b' now works correctly under Windows.
160 * Wget 1.9.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
162 * Changes in Wget 1.9.
164 ** It is now possible to specify that POST method be used for HTTP
165 requests. For example, `wget --post-data="id=foo&data=bar" URL' will
166 send a POST request with the specified contents.
168 ** IPv6 support is available, although it's still experimental.
170 ** The `--timeout' option now also affects DNS lookup and establishing
171 the TCP connection. Previously it only affected reading and writing
172 data. Those three timeouts can be set separately using
173 `--dns-timeout', `--connection-timeout', and `--read-timeout',
176 ** Download speed shown by the progress bar is based on the data
177 recently read, rather than the average speed of the entire download.
178 The ETA projection is still based on the overall average.
180 ** It is now possible to connect to FTP servers through FWTK
181 firewalls. Set ftp_proxy to an FTP URL, and Wget will automatically
182 log on to the proxy as "username@host".
184 ** The new option `--retry-connrefused' makes Wget retry downloads
185 even in the face of refused connections, which are otherwise
186 considered a fatal error.
188 ** The new option `--no-dns-cache' may be used to prevent Wget from
191 ** Wget no longer escapes characters in local file names based on
192 whether they're appropriate in URLs. Escaping can still occur for
193 nonprintable characters or for '/', but no longer for frequent
194 characters such as space. You can use the new option
195 --restrict-file-names to relax or strengthen these rules, which can be
196 useful if you dislike the default or if you're downloading to
197 non-native partitions.
199 ** Handling of HTML comments has been dumbed down to conform to what
200 users expect and other browsers do: instead of being treated as SGML
201 declaration, a comment is terminated at the first occurrence of "-->".
202 Use `--strict-comments' to revert to the old behavior.
204 ** Wget now correctly handles relative URIs that begin with "//", such
205 as "//img.foo.com/foo.jpg".
207 ** Boolean options in `.wgetrc' and on the command line now accept
208 values "yes" and "no" along with the traditional "on" and "off".
210 ** It is now possible to specify decimal values for timeouts, waiting
211 periods, and download rate. For instance, `--wait=0.5' now works as
212 expected, as does `--dns-timeout=0.5' and even `--limit-rate=2.5k'.
214 * Wget 1.8.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
216 * Wget 1.8.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
218 * Changes in Wget 1.8.
220 ** A new progress indicator is now available and used by default.
221 You can choose the progress bar type with `--progress=TYPE'. Two
222 types are available, "bar" (the new default), and "dot" (the old
223 dotted indicator). You can permanently revert to the old progress
224 indicator by putting `progress = dot' in your `.wgetrc'.
226 ** You can limit the download rate of the retrieval using the
227 `--limit-rate' option. For example, `wget --limit-rate=15k URL' will
228 tell Wget not to download the body of the URL faster than 15 kilobytes
231 ** Recursive retrieval and link conversion have been revamped:
233 *** Wget now traverses links breadth-first. This makes the
234 calculation of depth much more reliable than before. Also, recursive
235 downloads are faster and consume *significantly* less memory than
238 *** Links are converted only when the entire retrieval is complete.
239 This is the only safe thing to do, as only then is it known what URLs
240 have been downloaded.
242 *** BASE tags are handled correctly when converting links. Since Wget
243 already resolves <base href="..."> when resolving handling URLs, link
244 conversion now makes the BASE tags point to an empty string.
246 *** HTML anchors are now handled correctly. Links to an anchor in the
247 same document (<a href="#anchorname">), which used to confuse Wget,
248 are now converted correctly.
250 *** When in page-requisites (-p) mode, no-parent (-np) is ignored when
251 retrieving for inline images, stylesheets, and other documents needed
254 *** Page-requisites (-p) mode now works with frames. In other words,
255 `wget -p URL-THAT-USES-FRAMES' will now download the frame HTML files,
256 and all the files that they need to be displayed properly.
258 ** `--base' now works conjunction with `--input-file', providing a
259 base for each URL and thereby allowing the URLs in the file to be
262 ** If a host has more than one IP address, Wget uses the other
263 addresses when accessing the first one fails.
265 ** Host directories now contain port information if the URL is at a
268 ** Wget now supports the robots.txt directives specified in
269 <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt>.
271 ** URL parser has been fixed, especially the infamous overzealous
272 quoting. Wget no longer dequotes reserved characters, e.g. `%3F' is
273 no longer translated to `?', nor `%2B' to `+'. Unsafe characters
274 which are not reserved are still escaped, of course.
276 ** No more than 20 successive redirections are allowed.
278 * Wget 1.7.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
280 * Changes in Wget 1.7.
282 ** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
283 use the `--with-ssl' configure flag. You need to have OpenSSL
286 ** Cookies are now supported. Wget will accept cookies sent by the
287 server and return them in later requests. Additionally, it can load
288 and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.
290 ** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
291 Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
292 many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
293 stressing for the server and the network.
295 ** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
298 ** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
299 puts you in some directory other than '/'.
301 ** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'. For
302 example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
305 ** The HTML parser has been rewritten. The new one works more
306 reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
307 are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
308 skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc. It is
311 ** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.
313 ** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
314 where appropriate. This results in huge speedups when retrieving
315 large sites (thousands of documents).
317 ** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
318 documentation. (The last version that shipped with a man page was
319 1.4.5). To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
320 distribution installed on your system.
322 * Changes in Wget 1.6
324 ** Administrative changes.
326 *** Maintainership. Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
327 Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
328 real job as well). Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
329 are being helped by many other people.
331 *** Web page. Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
334 http://sunsite.dk/wget/
336 *** Anonymous CVS. Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
337 sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server. Take a look at
338 the web page for downloading instructions.
340 ** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
341 modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed. When
342 using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.
344 ** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
345 Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
346 retrieval. -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
347 opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.
349 ** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
350 of failed downloads. Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
351 first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS. waitretry is set to 10 by
352 default in the system wgetrc.
354 ** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
355 Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
356 page properly (e.g. inlined images).
358 ** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
359 to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
360 "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".
362 ** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean". Can be set to on, off,
363 always, or never. This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline. So far,
364 passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.
366 ** A number of new translation files have been added.
368 ** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts
369 bound to multiple IP addresses.
371 ** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.
373 * Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
375 * Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
377 * Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
379 * Changes in Wget 1.5.0
381 ** Wget speaks many languages!
383 On systems with gettext(), Wget will output messages in the language
384 set by the current locale, if available. At this time we support
385 Czech, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
387 ** Opie (Skey) is now supported with FTP.
389 ** HTTP Digest Access Authentication (RFC2069) is now supported.
391 ** The new `-b' option makes Wget go to background automatically.
393 ** The `-I' and `-X' options now accept wildcard arguments.
395 ** The `-w' option now accepts suffixes `s' for seconds, `m' for
396 minutes, `h' for hours, `d' for days and `w' for weeks.
398 ** Upon getting SIGHUP, the whole previous log is now copied to
401 ** Wget now understands proxy settings with explicit usernames and
402 passwords, e.g. `http://user:password@proxy.foo.com/'.
404 ** You can use the new `--cut-dirs' option to make Wget create less
407 ** The `;type=a' appendix to FTP URLs is now recognized. For
408 instance, the following command will retrieve the welcoming message in
411 wget "ftp://ftp.somewhere.com/welcome.msg;type=a"
413 ** `--help' and `--version' options have been redone to to conform to
414 standards set by other GNU utilities.
416 ** Wget should now be compilable under MS Windows environment. MS
417 Visual C++ and Watcom C have been used successfully.
419 ** If the file length is known, percentages are displayed during
422 ** The manual page, now hopelessly out of date, is no longer
423 distributed with Wget.
425 * Wget 1.4.5 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
427 * Wget 1.4.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
429 * Changes in Wget 1.4.3
431 ** Wget is now a GNU utility.
433 ** Can do passive FTP.
437 ** Info documentation expanded.
439 ** Compiles on pre-ANSI compilers.
441 ** Global wgetrc now goes to /usr/local/etc (i.e. $sysconfdir).
445 * Changes in Wget 1.4.2
447 ** New mirror site at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/,
448 thanks to Karsten Thygesen.
450 ** Mailing list! Mail to wget-request@sunsite.auc.dk to subscribe.
452 ** New option --delete-after for proxy prefetching.
454 ** New option --retr-symlinks to retrieve symbolic links like plain
457 ** rmold.pl -- script to remove files deleted on the remote server
459 ** --convert-links should work now.
463 * Changes in Wget 1.4.1
467 ** Added -I (the opposite of -X).
469 ** Dot tracing is now customizable; try wget --dot-style=binary
471 * Changes in Wget 1.4.0
473 ** Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of
474 Geturl. Although many things look suspiciously similar, most of the
475 stuff was rewritten, like recursive retrieval, HTTP, FTP and mostly
476 everything else. Wget should be now easier to debug, maintain and,
477 most importantly, use.
479 ** Recursive HTTP should now work without glitches, even with Location
480 changes, server-generated directory listings and other naughty stuff.
482 ** HTTP regetting is supported on servers that support Range
483 specification. WWW authorization is supported -- try
484 wget http://user:password@hostname/
486 ** FTP support was rewritten and widely enhanced. Globbing should now
487 work flawlessly. Symbolic links are created locally. All the
488 information the Unix-style ls listing can give is now recognized.
490 ** Recursive FTP is supported, e.g.
491 wget -r ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/
493 ** You can specify "rejected" directories, to which you do not want to
494 enter, e.g. with wget -X /pub
496 ** Time-stamping is supported, with both HTTP and FTP. Try wget -N URL.
498 ** A new texinfo reference manual is provided. It can be read with
499 Emacs, standalone info, or converted to HTML, dvi or postscript.
501 ** Fixed a long-standing bug, so that Wget now works over SLIP
504 ** You can have a system-wide wgetrc (/usr/local/lib/wgetrc by
505 default). Settings in $HOME/.wgetrc override the global ones, of
508 ** You can set up quota in .wgetrc to prevent sucking too much
509 data. Try `quota = 5M' in .wgetrc (or quota = 100K if you want your
510 sysadmin to like you).
512 ** Download rate is printed after retrieval.
514 ** Wget now sends the `Referer' header when retrieving
517 ** With the new --no-parent option Wget can retrieve FTP recursively
518 through a proxy server.
520 ** HTML parser, as well as the whole of Wget was rewritten to be much
521 faster and less memory-consuming (yes, both).
523 ** Absolute links can be converted to relative links locally. Check
526 ** Wget catches hangup, filtering the output to a log file and
527 resuming work. Try kill -HUP %?wget.
529 ** User-defined headers can be sent. Try
531 wget http://fly.cc.her.hr/ --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2'
533 ** Acceptance/Rejection lists may contain wildcards.
535 ** Wget can display HTTP headers and/or FTP server response with the
536 new `-S' option. It can save the original HTTP headers with `-s'.
538 ** socks library is now supported (thanks to Antonio Rosella
539 <Antonio.Rosella@agip.it>). Configure with --with-socks.
541 ** There is a nicer display of REST-ed output.
543 ** Many new options (like -x to force directory hierarchy, or -m to
544 turn on mirroring options).
546 ** Wget is now distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
548 ** Lots of small features I can't remember. :-)
550 ** A host of bugfixes.
552 * Changes in Geturl 1.3
554 ** Added FTP globbing support (ftp://fly.cc.fer.hr/*)
556 ** Added support for no_proxy
558 ** Added support for ftp://user:password@host/
560 ** Added support for %xx in URL syntax
562 ** More natural command-line options
564 ** Added -e switch to execute .geturlrc commands from the command-line
566 ** Added support for robots.txt
568 ** Fixed some minor bugs
570 * Geturl 1.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
572 * Changes in Geturl 1.1
574 ** REST supported in FTP
576 ** Proxy servers supported
578 ** GNU getopt used, which enables command-line arguments to be ordered
579 as you wish, e.g. geturl http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -vo log is the same as
580 geturl -vo log http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
582 ** Netscape-compatible URL syntax for HTTP supported: host[:port]/dir/file
584 ** NcFTP-compatible colon URL syntax for FTP supported: host:/dir/file
586 ** <base href="xxx"> supported
588 ** autoconf supported
590 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
591 Copyright information:
593 Copyright (C) 1997-2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
595 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
596 copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that
597 the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus
598 giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
600 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this
601 document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions,
602 provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last