1 GNU Wget NEWS -- history of user-visible changes.
3 Copyright (C) 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005,
4 2006, 2007 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.
11 ** TODO file removed: we use a bugtracker now; see
12 http://wget.addictivecode.org/BugTracker. Also,
13 http://wget.addictivecode.org/FeatureSpecifications.
15 ** Timestamping now uses the value from the most recent HTTP response,
16 rather than the first one it got.
18 ** configure.in now requires autoconf >= 2.61, rather than 2.59.
20 ** Authentication information is no longer sent as part of the Referer
21 header in recursive fetches.
23 ** No authentication credentials are sent until a challenge is issued,
24 for improved security. Authentication handling is still not
25 RFC-compliant, as once a Basic challenge has been received, it will
26 assume it can send credentials to any URL at that same host, and not
27 just the ones at or below the original authenticated location.
28 Credentials for Digest authentication are still never saved or issued
29 automatically, and continue to require a challenge for each resource.
31 ** Added --max-redirect option, allowing the user to specify what should
32 be the maximum number of HTTP redirects to follow.
34 ** Wget now saves HTTP downloads using file names specified by the
35 `Content-Disposition' header. This is a standard way of specifying the
36 file name used by many web dynamically generated pages. For the time
37 being, Content-Disposition is not used by default, to avoid the extra
38 round-trips incurred (must specify "-e contentdisposition=yes"); this
39 may change in a future version.
41 ** The GnuTLS library is now also experimentally supported for https
42 downloads. This is still work-in-progress. OpenSSL is still used by
43 default; use --with-ssl=gnutls to build with GnuTLS. OpenSSL is still
44 required for NTLM authorization to work, but this should eventually
45 change. NOTE: Certificate verification is _not_ currently supported:
46 this means that you can currently only use GnuTLS to encrypt
47 connections, but _not_ to verify that a host is who it claims to be. Use
48 of OpenSSL is suggested until this missing feature is implemented.
50 ** The new option `--ignore-case' makes Wget ignore case when
51 matching files, directories, and wildcards. This affects the -X, -I,
52 -A, and -R options, as well as globbing in FTP URLs.
54 ** ETA projection is now displayed in "dot" progress output as well as
55 in the default progress bar. (The dot progress is used by default when
56 logging Wget's output to file using the `-o' option.)
58 ** The "lockable boolean" argument type is no longer supported. It
59 was only used by the passive_ftp .wgetrc setting. If you're running
60 broken scripts or Perl modules that unconditionally specify
61 `--passive-ftp' and your firewall disallows it, you can override them
62 by replacing wget with a script that execs wget "$@" --no-passive-ftp.
64 ** The source code has migrated from CVS to Subversion. The
65 repository is available at http://svn.dotsrc.org/repo/wget/; to
66 checkout the trunk to a directory named `wget', use something like
67 `svn checkout http://svn.dotsrc.org/repo/wget/trunk/ wget'.
69 * Changes in Wget 1.10.
71 ** Downloading files larger than 2GB, sometimes referred to as "large
72 files", now works on systems that support them. This includes the
73 majority of modern Unixes, as well as MS Windows.
75 ** IPv6 is now supported by Wget. Unlike the experimental code in
76 1.9, this version supports dual-family systems. The new flags
77 `--inet4' and `--inet6' (or `-4' and `-6' for short) force the use of
78 IPv4 and IPv6 respectively. Note that IPv6 support has not yet been
81 ** Microsoft's proprietary "NTLM" method of HTTP authentication is now
82 supported. This authentication method is undocumented and only used
83 by IIS. Note that *proxy* authentication is not supported in this
84 release; you can only authenticate to the target web site.
86 ** Wget no longer truncates partially downloaded files when download
87 has to start over because the server doesn't support Range. Instead,
88 with such servers Wget now simply ignores the data up to the byte
89 where the last attempt left off, and only then continues appending to
90 the file. That way the downloaded file never shrinks, and download
91 retries from servers without support for partial downloads work even
92 when downloading to stdout.
96 *** SSL/TLS downloads now attempt to verify the server's certificate
97 against the recognized certificate authorities. This requires CA
98 certificates to have been installed in a location visible to the
99 OpenSSL library. If this is not the case, you can get the bundle
100 yourself from a source you trust (for example, the bundle extracted
101 from Mozilla available at http://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html),
102 and point Wget to the PEM file using the `--ca-certificate'
103 command-line option or the corresponding `.wgetrc' command.
105 *** Secure downloads now verify that the host name in the URL matches
106 the "common name" in the certificate presented by the server.
108 *** Although the above checks provide more secure downloads, they
109 unavoidably break interoperability with some sites that worked with
110 previous versions, particularly those using self-signed, expired, or
111 otherwise invalid certificates. If you encounter "certificate
112 verification" errors or complaints that "common name doesn't match
113 requested host name" and are convinced of the site's authenticity, you
114 can use `--no-check-certificate' to bypass both checks.
116 *** Talking to SSL/TLS servers over proxies now actually works.
117 Previous versions of Wget erroneously sent GET requests for https
118 URLs. Wget 1.10 utilizes the CONNECT method designed for this
121 *** The SSL/TLS-related options have been redesigned and, for the
122 first time, documented in the manual. The old, undocumented, options
123 are no longer supported.
125 ** Passive FTP is now the default FTP transfer mode. Use
126 `--no-passive-ftp' or specify `passive_ftp = off' in your init file to
127 revert to the old behavior.
129 ** The `--header' option can now be used to override generated
130 headers. For example, `wget --header="Host: foo.bar"
131 http://127.0.0.1' tells Wget to connect to localhost, but to specify
132 "foo.bar" in the `Host' header. In previous versions such use of
133 `--header' lead to duplicate headers in HTTP requests.
135 ** The responses without headers, aka "HTTP 0.9" responses, are
136 detected and handled. Although HTTP 0.9 has long been obsolete, it is
137 still occasionally used, sometimes by accident.
139 ** The progress bar is now updated regularly even when the data does
140 not arrive from the network.
142 ** Wget no longer preserves permissions of files retrieved by FTP by
143 default. Anonymous FTP servers frequently use permissions like "664",
144 which might not be what the user wants. The new option
145 `--preserve-permissions' and the corresponding `.wgetrc' variable can
146 be used to revert to the old behavior.
148 ** The new option `--protocol-directories' instructs Wget to also use
149 the protocol name as a directory component of local file names.
151 ** Options that previously unconditionally set or unset various flags
152 are now boolean options that can be invoked as either `--OPTION' or
153 `--no-OPTION'. Options that required an argument "on" or "off" have
154 also been changed this way, but they still accept the old syntax for
155 backward compatibility. For example, instead of `--glob=off' you can
158 Allowing `--no-OPTION' for every `--OPTION' and the other way around
159 is useful because it allows the user to override non-default behavior
160 specified via `.wgetrc'.
162 ** The new option `--keep-session-cookies' causes `--save-cookies' to
163 save session cookies (normally only kept in memory) along with the
164 permanent ones. This is useful because many sites track important
165 information, such as whether the user has authenticated, in session
166 cookies. With this option multiple Wget runs are treated as a single
169 ** Wget now supports the --ftp-user and --ftp-password command
170 switches to set username and password for FTP, and the --user and
171 --password command switches to set username and password for both FTP
172 and HTTP. The --http-passwd and --proxy-passwd command switches have
173 been renamed to --http-password and --proxy-password respectively, and
174 the related http_passwd and proxy_passwd .wgetrc commands to
175 http_password and proxy_password respectively. The login and passwd
176 .wgetrc commands have been deprecated.
178 * `wget -b' now works correctly under Windows.
180 * Wget 1.9.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
182 * Changes in Wget 1.9.
184 ** It is now possible to specify that POST method be used for HTTP
185 requests. For example, `wget --post-data="id=foo&data=bar" URL' will
186 send a POST request with the specified contents.
188 ** IPv6 support is available, although it's still experimental.
190 ** The `--timeout' option now also affects DNS lookup and establishing
191 the TCP connection. Previously it only affected reading and writing
192 data. Those three timeouts can be set separately using
193 `--dns-timeout', `--connection-timeout', and `--read-timeout',
196 ** Download speed shown by the progress bar is based on the data
197 recently read, rather than the average speed of the entire download.
198 The ETA projection is still based on the overall average.
200 ** It is now possible to connect to FTP servers through FWTK
201 firewalls. Set ftp_proxy to an FTP URL, and Wget will automatically
202 log on to the proxy as "username@host".
204 ** The new option `--retry-connrefused' makes Wget retry downloads
205 even in the face of refused connections, which are otherwise
206 considered a fatal error.
208 ** The new option `--no-dns-cache' may be used to prevent Wget from
211 ** Wget no longer escapes characters in local file names based on
212 whether they're appropriate in URLs. Escaping can still occur for
213 nonprintable characters or for '/', but no longer for frequent
214 characters such as space. You can use the new option
215 --restrict-file-names to relax or strengthen these rules, which can be
216 useful if you dislike the default or if you're downloading to
217 non-native partitions.
219 ** Handling of HTML comments has been dumbed down to conform to what
220 users expect and other browsers do: instead of being treated as SGML
221 declaration, a comment is terminated at the first occurrence of "-->".
222 Use `--strict-comments' to revert to the old behavior.
224 ** Wget now correctly handles relative URIs that begin with "//", such
225 as "//img.foo.com/foo.jpg".
227 ** Boolean options in `.wgetrc' and on the command line now accept
228 values "yes" and "no" along with the traditional "on" and "off".
230 ** It is now possible to specify decimal values for timeouts, waiting
231 periods, and download rate. For instance, `--wait=0.5' now works as
232 expected, as does `--dns-timeout=0.5' and even `--limit-rate=2.5k'.
234 * Wget 1.8.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
236 * Wget 1.8.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
238 * Changes in Wget 1.8.
240 ** A new progress indicator is now available and used by default.
241 You can choose the progress bar type with `--progress=TYPE'. Two
242 types are available, "bar" (the new default), and "dot" (the old
243 dotted indicator). You can permanently revert to the old progress
244 indicator by putting `progress = dot' in your `.wgetrc'.
246 ** You can limit the download rate of the retrieval using the
247 `--limit-rate' option. For example, `wget --limit-rate=15k URL' will
248 tell Wget not to download the body of the URL faster than 15 kilobytes
251 ** Recursive retrieval and link conversion have been revamped:
253 *** Wget now traverses links breadth-first. This makes the
254 calculation of depth much more reliable than before. Also, recursive
255 downloads are faster and consume *significantly* less memory than
258 *** Links are converted only when the entire retrieval is complete.
259 This is the only safe thing to do, as only then is it known what URLs
260 have been downloaded.
262 *** BASE tags are handled correctly when converting links. Since Wget
263 already resolves <base href="..."> when resolving handling URLs, link
264 conversion now makes the BASE tags point to an empty string.
266 *** HTML anchors are now handled correctly. Links to an anchor in the
267 same document (<a href="#anchorname">), which used to confuse Wget,
268 are now converted correctly.
270 *** When in page-requisites (-p) mode, no-parent (-np) is ignored when
271 retrieving for inline images, stylesheets, and other documents needed
274 *** Page-requisites (-p) mode now works with frames. In other words,
275 `wget -p URL-THAT-USES-FRAMES' will now download the frame HTML files,
276 and all the files that they need to be displayed properly.
278 ** `--base' now works conjunction with `--input-file', providing a
279 base for each URL and thereby allowing the URLs in the file to be
282 ** If a host has more than one IP address, Wget uses the other
283 addresses when accessing the first one fails.
285 ** Host directories now contain port information if the URL is at a
288 ** Wget now supports the robots.txt directives specified in
289 <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt>.
291 ** URL parser has been fixed, especially the infamous overzealous
292 quoting. Wget no longer dequotes reserved characters, e.g. `%3F' is
293 no longer translated to `?', nor `%2B' to `+'. Unsafe characters
294 which are not reserved are still escaped, of course.
296 ** No more than 20 successive redirections are allowed.
298 * Wget 1.7.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
300 * Changes in Wget 1.7.
302 ** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
303 use the `--with-ssl' configure flag. You need to have OpenSSL
306 ** Cookies are now supported. Wget will accept cookies sent by the
307 server and return them in later requests. Additionally, it can load
308 and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.
310 ** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
311 Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
312 many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
313 stressing for the server and the network.
315 ** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
318 ** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
319 puts you in some directory other than '/'.
321 ** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'. For
322 example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
325 ** The HTML parser has been rewritten. The new one works more
326 reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
327 are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
328 skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc. It is
331 ** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.
333 ** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
334 where appropriate. This results in huge speedups when retrieving
335 large sites (thousands of documents).
337 ** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
338 documentation. (The last version that shipped with a man page was
339 1.4.5). To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
340 distribution installed on your system.
342 * Changes in Wget 1.6
344 ** Administrative changes.
346 *** Maintainership. Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
347 Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
348 real job as well). Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
349 are being helped by many other people.
351 *** Web page. Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
354 http://sunsite.dk/wget/
356 *** Anonymous CVS. Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
357 sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server. Take a look at
358 the web page for downloading instructions.
360 ** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
361 modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed. When
362 using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.
364 ** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
365 Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
366 retrieval. -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
367 opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.
369 ** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
370 of failed downloads. Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
371 first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS. waitretry is set to 10 by
372 default in the system wgetrc.
374 ** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
375 Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
376 page properly (e.g. inlined images).
378 ** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
379 to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
380 "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".
382 ** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean". Can be set to on, off,
383 always, or never. This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline. So far,
384 passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.
386 ** A number of new translation files have been added.
388 ** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts
389 bound to multiple IP addresses.
391 ** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.
393 * Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
395 * Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
397 * Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
399 * Changes in Wget 1.5.0
401 ** Wget speaks many languages!
403 On systems with gettext(), Wget will output messages in the language
404 set by the current locale, if available. At this time we support
405 Czech, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
407 ** Opie (Skey) is now supported with FTP.
409 ** HTTP Digest Access Authentication (RFC2069) is now supported.
411 ** The new `-b' option makes Wget go to background automatically.
413 ** The `-I' and `-X' options now accept wildcard arguments.
415 ** The `-w' option now accepts suffixes `s' for seconds, `m' for
416 minutes, `h' for hours, `d' for days and `w' for weeks.
418 ** Upon getting SIGHUP, the whole previous log is now copied to
421 ** Wget now understands proxy settings with explicit usernames and
422 passwords, e.g. `http://user:password@proxy.foo.com/'.
424 ** You can use the new `--cut-dirs' option to make Wget create less
427 ** The `;type=a' appendix to FTP URLs is now recognized. For
428 instance, the following command will retrieve the welcoming message in
431 wget "ftp://ftp.somewhere.com/welcome.msg;type=a"
433 ** `--help' and `--version' options have been redone to to conform to
434 standards set by other GNU utilities.
436 ** Wget should now be compilable under MS Windows environment. MS
437 Visual C++ and Watcom C have been used successfully.
439 ** If the file length is known, percentages are displayed during
442 ** The manual page, now hopelessly out of date, is no longer
443 distributed with Wget.
445 * Wget 1.4.5 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
447 * Wget 1.4.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
449 * Changes in Wget 1.4.3
451 ** Wget is now a GNU utility.
453 ** Can do passive FTP.
457 ** Info documentation expanded.
459 ** Compiles on pre-ANSI compilers.
461 ** Global wgetrc now goes to /usr/local/etc (i.e. $sysconfdir).
465 * Changes in Wget 1.4.2
467 ** New mirror site at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/,
468 thanks to Karsten Thygesen.
470 ** Mailing list! Mail to wget-request@sunsite.auc.dk to subscribe.
472 ** New option --delete-after for proxy prefetching.
474 ** New option --retr-symlinks to retrieve symbolic links like plain
477 ** rmold.pl -- script to remove files deleted on the remote server
479 ** --convert-links should work now.
483 * Changes in Wget 1.4.1
487 ** Added -I (the opposite of -X).
489 ** Dot tracing is now customizable; try wget --dot-style=binary
491 * Changes in Wget 1.4.0
493 ** Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of
494 Geturl. Although many things look suspiciously similar, most of the
495 stuff was rewritten, like recursive retrieval, HTTP, FTP and mostly
496 everything else. Wget should be now easier to debug, maintain and,
497 most importantly, use.
499 ** Recursive HTTP should now work without glitches, even with Location
500 changes, server-generated directory listings and other naughty stuff.
502 ** HTTP regetting is supported on servers that support Range
503 specification. WWW authorization is supported -- try
504 wget http://user:password@hostname/
506 ** FTP support was rewritten and widely enhanced. Globbing should now
507 work flawlessly. Symbolic links are created locally. All the
508 information the Unix-style ls listing can give is now recognized.
510 ** Recursive FTP is supported, e.g.
511 wget -r ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/
513 ** You can specify "rejected" directories, to which you do not want to
514 enter, e.g. with wget -X /pub
516 ** Time-stamping is supported, with both HTTP and FTP. Try wget -N URL.
518 ** A new texinfo reference manual is provided. It can be read with
519 Emacs, standalone info, or converted to HTML, dvi or postscript.
521 ** Fixed a long-standing bug, so that Wget now works over SLIP
524 ** You can have a system-wide wgetrc (/usr/local/lib/wgetrc by
525 default). Settings in $HOME/.wgetrc override the global ones, of
528 ** You can set up quota in .wgetrc to prevent sucking too much
529 data. Try `quota = 5M' in .wgetrc (or quota = 100K if you want your
530 sysadmin to like you).
532 ** Download rate is printed after retrieval.
534 ** Wget now sends the `Referer' header when retrieving
537 ** With the new --no-parent option Wget can retrieve FTP recursively
538 through a proxy server.
540 ** HTML parser, as well as the whole of Wget was rewritten to be much
541 faster and less memory-consuming (yes, both).
543 ** Absolute links can be converted to relative links locally. Check
546 ** Wget catches hangup, filtering the output to a log file and
547 resuming work. Try kill -HUP %?wget.
549 ** User-defined headers can be sent. Try
551 wget http://fly.cc.her.hr/ --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2'
553 ** Acceptance/Rejection lists may contain wildcards.
555 ** Wget can display HTTP headers and/or FTP server response with the
556 new `-S' option. It can save the original HTTP headers with `-s'.
558 ** socks library is now supported (thanks to Antonio Rosella
559 <Antonio.Rosella@agip.it>). Configure with --with-socks.
561 ** There is a nicer display of REST-ed output.
563 ** Many new options (like -x to force directory hierarchy, or -m to
564 turn on mirroring options).
566 ** Wget is now distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
568 ** Lots of small features I can't remember. :-)
570 ** A host of bugfixes.
572 * Changes in Geturl 1.3
574 ** Added FTP globbing support (ftp://fly.cc.fer.hr/*)
576 ** Added support for no_proxy
578 ** Added support for ftp://user:password@host/
580 ** Added support for %xx in URL syntax
582 ** More natural command-line options
584 ** Added -e switch to execute .geturlrc commands from the command-line
586 ** Added support for robots.txt
588 ** Fixed some minor bugs
590 * Geturl 1.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
592 * Changes in Geturl 1.1
594 ** REST supported in FTP
596 ** Proxy servers supported
598 ** GNU getopt used, which enables command-line arguments to be ordered
599 as you wish, e.g. geturl http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -vo log is the same as
600 geturl -vo log http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
602 ** Netscape-compatible URL syntax for HTTP supported: host[:port]/dir/file
604 ** NcFTP-compatible colon URL syntax for FTP supported: host:/dir/file
606 ** <base href="xxx"> supported
608 ** autoconf supported
610 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
611 Copyright information:
613 Copyright (C) 1997-2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
615 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
616 copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that
617 the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus
618 giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
620 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this
621 document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions,
622 provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last