1 GNU Wget NEWS -- history of user-visible changes.
3 Copyright (C) 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005,
4 2006, 2007, 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5 See the end for copying conditions.
7 Please send GNU Wget bug reports to <bug-wget@gnu.org>.
9 * Changes in Wget 1.11.3
11 ** Downgraded -N with -O to a warning, rather than an error.
13 ** Translation updates
15 * Changes in Wget 1.11.2
17 ** Fixed a problem in authenticating over HTTPS through a proxy.
18 (Regression in 1.11 over 1.10.2.)
20 ** The combination of -r or -p with -O, which was disallowed in 1.11,
21 has been downgraded to a warning in 1.11.2. (-O and -N, which was never
22 meaningful, is still an error.)
24 ** Further improvements to progress bar displays in non-English locales
25 (too many spaces could be inserted, causing the display to scroll).
27 ** Successive invocations of Wget on FTP URLS, with --no-remove-listing
28 and --continue, was causing Wget to append, rather than replace,
29 information in the .listing file, and thereby download the same files
30 multiple times. This has been fixed in 1.11.2.
32 ** Wget 1.11 no longer allowed ".." to persist at the beginning of URLs,
33 for improved conformance with RFC 3986. However, this behavior presents
34 problems for some FTP setups, and so they are now preserved again, for
37 * Changes in Wget 1.11.1.
39 ** Interrupted downloads no longer result in renaming the file
40 (regression in 1.11 over 1.10.2).
42 ** Progress bar now displays correctly in non-English locales (and a
43 related assertion failure was fixed).
45 ** Wget no longer issues a GET request over HTTP for files it should
46 know it's not going to download (regression in 1.11 over 1.10.2).
48 ** Added option --auth-no-challenge, to support broken pre-1.11
49 authentication-before-server-challenge, which turns out to still be
50 useful for some limited cases.
52 ** Documentation of accept/reject lists in the manual's "Types of
53 Files" section now explains various aspects of their behavior that may
54 be surprising, and notes that they may change in the future.
56 ** Documentation of --no-parents now explains how a trailing slash, or
57 lack thereof, in the specified URL, will affect behavior.
59 * Changes in Wget 1.11.
61 ** Timestamping now uses the value from the most recent HTTP response,
62 rather than the first one it got.
64 ** Authentication information is no longer sent as part of the Referer
65 header in recursive fetches.
67 ** No authentication credentials are sent until a challenge is issued,
68 for improved security. Authentication handling is still not
69 RFC-compliant, as once a Basic challenge has been received, it will
70 assume it can send credentials to any URL at that same host, and not
71 just the ones at or below the original authenticated location.
72 Credentials for Digest authentication are still never saved or issued
73 automatically, and continue to require a challenge for each resource.
75 ** Added --max-redirect option, allowing the user to specify what should
76 be the maximum number of HTTP redirects to follow.
78 ** Wget now supports saving HTTP downloads using file names specified by
79 the `Content-Disposition' header. This is a standard way of specifying
80 the file name used by many web dynamically generated pages. However, the
81 current implementation is inefficient, and known to have bugs. It is
82 EXPERIMENTAL only, and not enabled by default. Use --content-disposition
85 ** The new option `--ignore-case' makes Wget ignore case when
86 matching files, directories, and wildcards. This affects the -X, -I,
87 -A, and -R options, as well as globbing in FTP URLs.
89 ** ETA projection is now displayed in "dot" progress output as well as
90 in the default progress bar. (The dot progress is used by default when
91 logging Wget's output to file using the `-o' option.)
93 ** The "lockable boolean" argument type is no longer supported. It
94 was only used by the passive_ftp .wgetrc setting. If you're running
95 broken scripts or Perl modules that unconditionally specify
96 `--passive-ftp' and your firewall disallows it, you can override them
97 by replacing wget with a script that execs wget "$@" --no-passive-ftp.
99 ** The source code has been migrated to Mercurial. The repositories are
100 available at http://hg.addictivecode.org/. Prior to this, the source
101 code was hosted on Subversion (migrated from the original CVS); you can
102 still get access to older tags and branches for Wget in the Subversion
103 repository at http://addictivecode.org/svn/wget/.
105 * Changes in Wget 1.10.
107 ** Downloading files larger than 2GB, sometimes referred to as "large
108 files", now works on systems that support them. This includes the
109 majority of modern Unixes, as well as MS Windows.
111 ** IPv6 is now supported by Wget. Unlike the experimental code in
112 1.9, this version supports dual-family systems. The new flags
113 `--inet4' and `--inet6' (or `-4' and `-6' for short) force the use of
114 IPv4 and IPv6 respectively. Note that IPv6 support has not yet been
117 ** Microsoft's proprietary "NTLM" method of HTTP authentication is now
118 supported. This authentication method is undocumented and only used
119 by IIS. Note that *proxy* authentication is not supported in this
120 release; you can only authenticate to the target web site.
122 ** Wget no longer truncates partially downloaded files when download
123 has to start over because the server doesn't support Range. Instead,
124 with such servers Wget now simply ignores the data up to the byte
125 where the last attempt left off, and only then continues appending to
126 the file. That way the downloaded file never shrinks, and download
127 retries from servers without support for partial downloads work even
128 when downloading to stdout.
132 *** SSL/TLS downloads now attempt to verify the server's certificate
133 against the recognized certificate authorities. This requires CA
134 certificates to have been installed in a location visible to the
135 OpenSSL library. If this is not the case, you can get the bundle
136 yourself from a source you trust (for example, the bundle extracted
137 from Mozilla available at http://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html),
138 and point Wget to the PEM file using the `--ca-certificate'
139 command-line option or the corresponding `.wgetrc' command.
141 *** Secure downloads now verify that the host name in the URL matches
142 the "common name" in the certificate presented by the server.
144 *** Although the above checks provide more secure downloads, they
145 unavoidably break interoperability with some sites that worked with
146 previous versions, particularly those using self-signed, expired, or
147 otherwise invalid certificates. If you encounter "certificate
148 verification" errors or complaints that "common name doesn't match
149 requested host name" and are convinced of the site's authenticity, you
150 can use `--no-check-certificate' to bypass both checks.
152 *** Talking to SSL/TLS servers over proxies now actually works.
153 Previous versions of Wget erroneously sent GET requests for https
154 URLs. Wget 1.10 utilizes the CONNECT method designed for this
157 *** The SSL/TLS-related options have been redesigned and, for the
158 first time, documented in the manual. The old, undocumented, options
159 are no longer supported.
161 ** Passive FTP is now the default FTP transfer mode. Use
162 `--no-passive-ftp' or specify `passive_ftp = off' in your init file to
163 revert to the old behavior.
165 ** The `--header' option can now be used to override generated
166 headers. For example, `wget --header="Host: foo.bar"
167 http://127.0.0.1' tells Wget to connect to localhost, but to specify
168 "foo.bar" in the `Host' header. In previous versions such use of
169 `--header' lead to duplicate headers in HTTP requests.
171 ** The responses without headers, aka "HTTP 0.9" responses, are
172 detected and handled. Although HTTP 0.9 has long been obsolete, it is
173 still occasionally used, sometimes by accident.
175 ** The progress bar is now updated regularly even when the data does
176 not arrive from the network.
178 ** Wget no longer preserves permissions of files retrieved by FTP by
179 default. Anonymous FTP servers frequently use permissions like "664",
180 which might not be what the user wants. The new option
181 `--preserve-permissions' and the corresponding `.wgetrc' variable can
182 be used to revert to the old behavior.
184 ** The new option `--protocol-directories' instructs Wget to also use
185 the protocol name as a directory component of local file names.
187 ** Options that previously unconditionally set or unset various flags
188 are now boolean options that can be invoked as either `--OPTION' or
189 `--no-OPTION'. Options that required an argument "on" or "off" have
190 also been changed this way, but they still accept the old syntax for
191 backward compatibility. For example, instead of `--glob=off' you can
194 Allowing `--no-OPTION' for every `--OPTION' and the other way around
195 is useful because it allows the user to override non-default behavior
196 specified via `.wgetrc'.
198 ** The new option `--keep-session-cookies' causes `--save-cookies' to
199 save session cookies (normally only kept in memory) along with the
200 permanent ones. This is useful because many sites track important
201 information, such as whether the user has authenticated, in session
202 cookies. With this option multiple Wget runs are treated as a single
205 ** Wget now supports the --ftp-user and --ftp-password command
206 switches to set username and password for FTP, and the --user and
207 --password command switches to set username and password for both FTP
208 and HTTP. The --http-passwd and --proxy-passwd command switches have
209 been renamed to --http-password and --proxy-password respectively, and
210 the related http_passwd and proxy_passwd .wgetrc commands to
211 http_password and proxy_password respectively. The login and passwd
212 .wgetrc commands have been deprecated.
214 * `wget -b' now works correctly under Windows.
216 * Wget 1.9.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
218 * Changes in Wget 1.9.
220 ** It is now possible to specify that POST method be used for HTTP
221 requests. For example, `wget --post-data="id=foo&data=bar" URL' will
222 send a POST request with the specified contents.
224 ** IPv6 support is available, although it's still experimental.
226 ** The `--timeout' option now also affects DNS lookup and establishing
227 the TCP connection. Previously it only affected reading and writing
228 data. Those three timeouts can be set separately using
229 `--dns-timeout', `--connection-timeout', and `--read-timeout',
232 ** Download speed shown by the progress bar is based on the data
233 recently read, rather than the average speed of the entire download.
234 The ETA projection is still based on the overall average.
236 ** It is now possible to connect to FTP servers through FWTK
237 firewalls. Set ftp_proxy to an FTP URL, and Wget will automatically
238 log on to the proxy as "username@host".
240 ** The new option `--retry-connrefused' makes Wget retry downloads
241 even in the face of refused connections, which are otherwise
242 considered a fatal error.
244 ** The new option `--no-dns-cache' may be used to prevent Wget from
247 ** Wget no longer escapes characters in local file names based on
248 whether they're appropriate in URLs. Escaping can still occur for
249 nonprintable characters or for '/', but no longer for frequent
250 characters such as space. You can use the new option
251 --restrict-file-names to relax or strengthen these rules, which can be
252 useful if you dislike the default or if you're downloading to
253 non-native partitions.
255 ** Handling of HTML comments has been dumbed down to conform to what
256 users expect and other browsers do: instead of being treated as SGML
257 declaration, a comment is terminated at the first occurrence of "-->".
258 Use `--strict-comments' to revert to the old behavior.
260 ** Wget now correctly handles relative URIs that begin with "//", such
261 as "//img.foo.com/foo.jpg".
263 ** Boolean options in `.wgetrc' and on the command line now accept
264 values "yes" and "no" along with the traditional "on" and "off".
266 ** It is now possible to specify decimal values for timeouts, waiting
267 periods, and download rate. For instance, `--wait=0.5' now works as
268 expected, as does `--dns-timeout=0.5' and even `--limit-rate=2.5k'.
270 * Wget 1.8.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
272 * Wget 1.8.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
274 * Changes in Wget 1.8.
276 ** A new progress indicator is now available and used by default.
277 You can choose the progress bar type with `--progress=TYPE'. Two
278 types are available, "bar" (the new default), and "dot" (the old
279 dotted indicator). You can permanently revert to the old progress
280 indicator by putting `progress = dot' in your `.wgetrc'.
282 ** You can limit the download rate of the retrieval using the
283 `--limit-rate' option. For example, `wget --limit-rate=15k URL' will
284 tell Wget not to download the body of the URL faster than 15 kilobytes
287 ** Recursive retrieval and link conversion have been revamped:
289 *** Wget now traverses links breadth-first. This makes the
290 calculation of depth much more reliable than before. Also, recursive
291 downloads are faster and consume *significantly* less memory than
294 *** Links are converted only when the entire retrieval is complete.
295 This is the only safe thing to do, as only then is it known what URLs
296 have been downloaded.
298 *** BASE tags are handled correctly when converting links. Since Wget
299 already resolves <base href="..."> when resolving handling URLs, link
300 conversion now makes the BASE tags point to an empty string.
302 *** HTML anchors are now handled correctly. Links to an anchor in the
303 same document (<a href="#anchorname">), which used to confuse Wget,
304 are now converted correctly.
306 *** When in page-requisites (-p) mode, no-parent (-np) is ignored when
307 retrieving for inline images, stylesheets, and other documents needed
310 *** Page-requisites (-p) mode now works with frames. In other words,
311 `wget -p URL-THAT-USES-FRAMES' will now download the frame HTML files,
312 and all the files that they need to be displayed properly.
314 ** `--base' now works conjunction with `--input-file', providing a
315 base for each URL and thereby allowing the URLs in the file to be
318 ** If a host has more than one IP address, Wget uses the other
319 addresses when accessing the first one fails.
321 ** Host directories now contain port information if the URL is at a
324 ** Wget now supports the robots.txt directives specified in
325 <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt>.
327 ** URL parser has been fixed, especially the infamous overzealous
328 quoting. Wget no longer dequotes reserved characters, e.g. `%3F' is
329 no longer translated to `?', nor `%2B' to `+'. Unsafe characters
330 which are not reserved are still escaped, of course.
332 ** No more than 20 successive redirections are allowed.
334 * Wget 1.7.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
336 * Changes in Wget 1.7.
338 ** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
339 use the `--with-ssl' configure flag. You need to have OpenSSL
342 ** Cookies are now supported. Wget will accept cookies sent by the
343 server and return them in later requests. Additionally, it can load
344 and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.
346 ** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
347 Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
348 many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
349 stressing for the server and the network.
351 ** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
354 ** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
355 puts you in some directory other than '/'.
357 ** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'. For
358 example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
361 ** The HTML parser has been rewritten. The new one works more
362 reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
363 are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
364 skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc. It is
367 ** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.
369 ** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
370 where appropriate. This results in huge speedups when retrieving
371 large sites (thousands of documents).
373 ** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
374 documentation. (The last version that shipped with a man page was
375 1.4.5). To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
376 distribution installed on your system.
378 * Changes in Wget 1.6
380 ** Administrative changes.
382 *** Maintainership. Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
383 Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
384 real job as well). Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
385 are being helped by many other people.
387 *** Web page. Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
390 http://sunsite.dk/wget/
392 *** Anonymous CVS. Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
393 sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server. Take a look at
394 the web page for downloading instructions.
396 ** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
397 modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed. When
398 using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.
400 ** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
401 Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
402 retrieval. -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
403 opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.
405 ** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
406 of failed downloads. Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
407 first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS. waitretry is set to 10 by
408 default in the system wgetrc.
410 ** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
411 Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
412 page properly (e.g. inlined images).
414 ** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
415 to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
416 "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".
418 ** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean". Can be set to on, off,
419 always, or never. This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline. So far,
420 passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.
422 ** A number of new translation files have been added.
424 ** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts
425 bound to multiple IP addresses.
427 ** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.
429 * Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
431 * Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
433 * Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
435 * Changes in Wget 1.5.0
437 ** Wget speaks many languages!
439 On systems with gettext(), Wget will output messages in the language
440 set by the current locale, if available. At this time we support
441 Czech, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
443 ** Opie (Skey) is now supported with FTP.
445 ** HTTP Digest Access Authentication (RFC2069) is now supported.
447 ** The new `-b' option makes Wget go to background automatically.
449 ** The `-I' and `-X' options now accept wildcard arguments.
451 ** The `-w' option now accepts suffixes `s' for seconds, `m' for
452 minutes, `h' for hours, `d' for days and `w' for weeks.
454 ** Upon getting SIGHUP, the whole previous log is now copied to
457 ** Wget now understands proxy settings with explicit usernames and
458 passwords, e.g. `http://user:password@proxy.foo.com/'.
460 ** You can use the new `--cut-dirs' option to make Wget create less
463 ** The `;type=a' appendix to FTP URLs is now recognized. For
464 instance, the following command will retrieve the welcoming message in
467 wget "ftp://ftp.somewhere.com/welcome.msg;type=a"
469 ** `--help' and `--version' options have been redone to to conform to
470 standards set by other GNU utilities.
472 ** Wget should now be compilable under MS Windows environment. MS
473 Visual C++ and Watcom C have been used successfully.
475 ** If the file length is known, percentages are displayed during
478 ** The manual page, now hopelessly out of date, is no longer
479 distributed with Wget.
481 * Wget 1.4.5 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
483 * Wget 1.4.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
485 * Changes in Wget 1.4.3
487 ** Wget is now a GNU utility.
489 ** Can do passive FTP.
493 ** Info documentation expanded.
495 ** Compiles on pre-ANSI compilers.
497 ** Global wgetrc now goes to /usr/local/etc (i.e. $sysconfdir).
501 * Changes in Wget 1.4.2
503 ** New mirror site at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/,
504 thanks to Karsten Thygesen.
506 ** Mailing list! Mail to wget-request@sunsite.auc.dk to subscribe.
508 ** New option --delete-after for proxy prefetching.
510 ** New option --retr-symlinks to retrieve symbolic links like plain
513 ** rmold.pl -- script to remove files deleted on the remote server
515 ** --convert-links should work now.
519 * Changes in Wget 1.4.1
523 ** Added -I (the opposite of -X).
525 ** Dot tracing is now customizable; try wget --dot-style=binary
527 * Changes in Wget 1.4.0
529 ** Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of
530 Geturl. Although many things look suspiciously similar, most of the
531 stuff was rewritten, like recursive retrieval, HTTP, FTP and mostly
532 everything else. Wget should be now easier to debug, maintain and,
533 most importantly, use.
535 ** Recursive HTTP should now work without glitches, even with Location
536 changes, server-generated directory listings and other naughty stuff.
538 ** HTTP regetting is supported on servers that support Range
539 specification. WWW authorization is supported -- try
540 wget http://user:password@hostname/
542 ** FTP support was rewritten and widely enhanced. Globbing should now
543 work flawlessly. Symbolic links are created locally. All the
544 information the Unix-style ls listing can give is now recognized.
546 ** Recursive FTP is supported, e.g.
547 wget -r ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/
549 ** You can specify "rejected" directories, to which you do not want to
550 enter, e.g. with wget -X /pub
552 ** Time-stamping is supported, with both HTTP and FTP. Try wget -N URL.
554 ** A new texinfo reference manual is provided. It can be read with
555 Emacs, standalone info, or converted to HTML, dvi or postscript.
557 ** Fixed a long-standing bug, so that Wget now works over SLIP
560 ** You can have a system-wide wgetrc (/usr/local/lib/wgetrc by
561 default). Settings in $HOME/.wgetrc override the global ones, of
564 ** You can set up quota in .wgetrc to prevent sucking too much
565 data. Try `quota = 5M' in .wgetrc (or quota = 100K if you want your
566 sysadmin to like you).
568 ** Download rate is printed after retrieval.
570 ** Wget now sends the `Referer' header when retrieving
573 ** With the new --no-parent option Wget can retrieve FTP recursively
574 through a proxy server.
576 ** HTML parser, as well as the whole of Wget was rewritten to be much
577 faster and less memory-consuming (yes, both).
579 ** Absolute links can be converted to relative links locally. Check
582 ** Wget catches hangup, filtering the output to a log file and
583 resuming work. Try kill -HUP %?wget.
585 ** User-defined headers can be sent. Try
587 wget http://fly.cc.her.hr/ --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2'
589 ** Acceptance/Rejection lists may contain wildcards.
591 ** Wget can display HTTP headers and/or FTP server response with the
592 new `-S' option. It can save the original HTTP headers with `-s'.
594 ** socks library is now supported (thanks to Antonio Rosella
595 <Antonio.Rosella@agip.it>). Configure with --with-socks.
597 ** There is a nicer display of REST-ed output.
599 ** Many new options (like -x to force directory hierarchy, or -m to
600 turn on mirroring options).
602 ** Wget is now distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
604 ** Lots of small features I can't remember. :-)
606 ** A host of bugfixes.
608 * Changes in Geturl 1.3
610 ** Added FTP globbing support (ftp://fly.cc.fer.hr/*)
612 ** Added support for no_proxy
614 ** Added support for ftp://user:password@host/
616 ** Added support for %xx in URL syntax
618 ** More natural command-line options
620 ** Added -e switch to execute .geturlrc commands from the command-line
622 ** Added support for robots.txt
624 ** Fixed some minor bugs
626 * Geturl 1.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
628 * Changes in Geturl 1.1
630 ** REST supported in FTP
632 ** Proxy servers supported
634 ** GNU getopt used, which enables command-line arguments to be ordered
635 as you wish, e.g. geturl http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -vo log is the same as
636 geturl -vo log http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
638 ** Netscape-compatible URL syntax for HTTP supported: host[:port]/dir/file
640 ** NcFTP-compatible colon URL syntax for FTP supported: host:/dir/file
642 ** <base href="xxx"> supported
644 ** autoconf supported
646 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
647 Copyright information:
649 Copyright (C) 1997-2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
651 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
652 copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that
653 the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus
654 giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
656 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this
657 document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions,
658 provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last