1 GNU Wget NEWS -- history of user-visible changes.
3 Copyright (C) 2005 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 1.10.
10 ** Downloading files greater than 2GB, also known as "large files",
11 now works on systems that support them. This includes most modern
12 Unix variants, as well as Windows.
14 ** IPv6 is now supported by Wget. Unlike the experimental code in
15 1.9, this version has no problems with dual-family systems. The new
16 flags `--inet4' and `--inet6' (or `-4' and `-6' for short) force the
17 use of IPv4 and IPv6 respectively.
19 ** Talking to SSL servers over proxies now actually works.
21 ** Wget no longer truncates partially downloaded files when download
22 has to start over because the server doesn't support Range. Instead,
23 with such servers Wget now simply ignores the data up to the byte
24 where the last attempt left off, and only then continues appending to
25 the file. That way the downloaded file never shrinks, and "start
26 over" retries work correctly even when downloading to stdout.
28 ** The `--header' option can now be used to override generated
29 headers. For example, `wget --header="Host: foo.bar"
30 http://127.0.0.1' tells Wget to connect to localhost, but to specify
31 "foo.bar" in the `Host' header. In previous versions such use of
32 `--header' lead to duplicate headers in HTTP requests.
34 ** The responses without headers, aka "HTTP 0.9" responses, are
35 detected and handled. Although HTTP 0.9 has long been obsolete, it is
36 still occasionally used, sometimes by accident.
38 ** The progress bar is now updated regularly even when the data does
39 not arrive from the network.
41 ** Wget no longer preserves permissions of files retrieved by FTP by
42 default. Anonymous FTP servers frequently use permissions like "664",
43 which might not be what the user wants. The new option
44 `--preserve-permissions' and the corresponding `.wgetrc' variable can
45 be used to revert to the old behavior.
47 ** The new option `--protocol-directories' instructs Wget to also use
48 the protocol name as a directory component of local file names.
50 ** Many options that previously unconditionally set or unset various
51 flags are now boolean options that can be invoked as either `--OPTION'
52 or `--no-OPTION'. Options that required an argument "on" or "off"
53 have also been changed this way, but they still accept the old syntax
54 for backward compatibility. For example, instead of `--glob=off' you
55 can write `--no-glob'.
57 Allowing `--no-OPTION' for every `--OPTION' is useful because it
58 allows the user to override non-default behavior specified via
61 ** The new option `--keep-session-cookies' causes `--save-cookies' to
62 save session cookies along with the permanent ones. This is useful on
63 sites that require you to log in before you can access some pages.
64 With this option, multiple Wget runs will be treated as a single
67 * `wget -b' now works correctly under Windows.
69 * Wget 1.9.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
71 * Changes in Wget 1.9.
73 ** It is now possible to specify that POST method be used for HTTP
74 requests. For example, `wget --post-data="id=foo&data=bar" URL' will
75 send a POST request with the specified contents.
77 ** IPv6 support is available, although it's still experimental.
79 ** The `--timeout' option now also affects DNS lookup and establishing
80 the TCP connection. Previously it only affected reading and writing
81 data. Those three timeouts can be set separately using
82 `--dns-timeout', `--connection-timeout', and `--read-timeout',
85 ** Download speed shown by the progress bar is based on the data
86 recently read, rather than the average speed of the entire download.
87 The ETA projection is still based on the overall average.
89 ** It is now possible to connect to FTP servers through FWTK
90 firewalls. Set ftp_proxy to an FTP URL, and Wget will automatically
91 log on to the proxy as "username@host".
93 ** The new option `--retry-connrefused' makes Wget retry downloads
94 even in the face of refused connections, which are otherwise
95 considered a fatal error.
97 ** The new option `--dns-cache=off' may be used to prevent Wget from
100 ** Wget no longer escapes characters in local file names based on
101 whether they're appropriate in URLs. Escaping can still occur for
102 nonprintable characters or for '/', but no longer for frequent
103 characters such as space. You can use the new option
104 --restrict-file-names to relax or strengthen these rules, which can be
105 useful if you dislike the default or if you're downloading to
106 non-native partitions.
108 ** Handling of HTML comments has been dumbed down to conform to what
109 users expect and other browsers do: instead of being treated as SGML
110 declaration, a comment is terminated at the first occurrence of "-->".
111 Use `--strict-comments' to revert to the old behavior.
113 ** Wget now correctly handles relative URIs that begin with "//", such
114 as "//img.foo.com/foo.jpg".
116 ** Boolean options in `.wgetrc' and on the command line now accept
117 values "yes" and "no" along with the traditional "on" and "off".
119 ** It is now possible to specify decimal values for timeouts, waiting
120 periods, and download rate. For instance, `--wait=0.5' now works as
121 expected, as does `--dns-timeout=0.5' and even `--limit-rate=2.5k'.
123 * Wget 1.8.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
125 * Wget 1.8.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
127 * Changes in Wget 1.8.
129 ** A new progress indicator is now available and used by default.
130 You can choose the progress bar type with `--progress=TYPE'. Two
131 types are available, "bar" (the new default), and "dot" (the old
132 dotted indicator). You can permanently revert to the old progress
133 indicator by putting `progress = dot' in your `.wgetrc'.
135 ** You can limit the download rate of the retrieval using the
136 `--limit-rate' option. For example, `wget --limit-rate=15k URL' will
137 tell Wget not to download the body of the URL faster than 15 kilobytes
140 ** Recursive retrieval and link conversion have been revamped:
142 *** Wget now traverses links breadth-first. This makes the
143 calculation of depth much more reliable than before. Also, recursive
144 downloads are faster and consume *significantly* less memory than
147 *** Links are converted only when the entire retrieval is complete.
148 This is the only safe thing to do, as only then is it known what URLs
149 have been downloaded.
151 *** BASE tags are handled correctly when converting links. Since Wget
152 already resolves <base href="..."> when resolving handling URLs, link
153 conversion now makes the BASE tags point to an empty string.
155 *** HTML anchors are now handled correctly. Links to an anchor in the
156 same document (<a href="#anchorname">), which used to confuse Wget,
157 are now converted correctly.
159 *** When in page-requisites (-p) mode, no-parent (-np) is ignored when
160 retrieving for inline images, stylesheets, and other documents needed
163 *** Page-requisites (-p) mode now works with frames. In other words,
164 `wget -p URL-THAT-USES-FRAMES' will now download the frame HTML files,
165 and all the files that they need to be displayed properly.
167 ** `--base' now works conjunction with `--input-file', providing a
168 base for each URL and thereby allowing the URLs in the file to be
171 ** If a host has more than one IP address, Wget uses the other
172 addresses when accessing the first one fails.
174 ** Host directories now contain port information if the URL is at a
177 ** Wget now supports the robots.txt directives specified in
178 <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt>.
180 ** URL parser has been fixed, especially the infamous overzealous
181 quoting. Wget no longer dequotes reserved characters, e.g. `%3F' is
182 no longer translated to `?', nor `%2B' to `+'. Unsafe characters
183 which are not reserved are still escaped, of course.
185 ** No more than 20 successive redirections are allowed.
187 * Wget 1.7.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
189 * Changes in Wget 1.7.
191 ** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
192 use the `--with-ssl' configure flag. You need to have OpenSSL
195 ** Cookies are now supported. Wget will accept cookies sent by the
196 server and return them in later requests. Additionally, it can load
197 and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.
199 ** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
200 Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
201 many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
202 stressing for the server and the network.
204 ** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
207 ** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
208 puts you in some directory other than '/'.
210 ** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'. For
211 example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
214 ** The HTML parser has been rewritten. The new one works more
215 reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
216 are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
217 skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc. It is
220 ** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.
222 ** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
223 where appropriate. This results in huge speedups when retrieving
224 large sites (thousands of documents).
226 ** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
227 documentation. (The last version that shipped with a man page was
228 1.4.5). To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
229 distribution installed on your system.
231 * Changes in Wget 1.6
233 ** Administrative changes.
235 *** Maintainership. Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
236 Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
237 real job as well). Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
238 are being helped by many other people.
240 *** Web page. Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
243 http://sunsite.dk/wget/
245 *** Anonymous CVS. Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
246 sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server. Take a look at
247 the web page for downloading instructions.
249 ** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
250 modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed. When
251 using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.
253 ** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
254 Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
255 retrieval. -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
256 opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.
258 ** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
259 of failed downloads. Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
260 first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS. waitretry is set to 10 by
261 default in the system wgetrc.
263 ** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
264 Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
265 page properly (e.g. inlined images).
267 ** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
268 to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
269 "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".
271 ** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean". Can be set to on, off,
272 always, or never. This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline. So far,
273 passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.
275 ** A number of new translation files have been added.
277 ** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts
278 bound to multiple IP addresses.
280 ** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.
282 * Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
284 * Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
286 * Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
288 * Changes in Wget 1.5.0
290 ** Wget speaks many languages!
292 On systems with gettext(), Wget will output messages in the language
293 set by the current locale, if available. At this time we support
294 Czech, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
296 ** Opie (Skey) is now supported with FTP.
298 ** HTTP Digest Access Authentication (RFC2069) is now supported.
300 ** The new `-b' option makes Wget go to background automatically.
302 ** The `-I' and `-X' options now accept wildcard arguments.
304 ** The `-w' option now accepts suffixes `s' for seconds, `m' for
305 minutes, `h' for hours, `d' for days and `w' for weeks.
307 ** Upon getting SIGHUP, the whole previous log is now copied to
310 ** Wget now understands proxy settings with explicit usernames and
311 passwords, e.g. `http://user:password@proxy.foo.com/'.
313 ** You can use the new `--cut-dirs' option to make Wget create less
316 ** The `;type=a' appendix to FTP URLs is now recognized. For
317 instance, the following command will retrieve the welcoming message in
320 wget "ftp://ftp.somewhere.com/welcome.msg;type=a"
322 ** `--help' and `--version' options have been redone to to conform to
323 standards set by other GNU utilities.
325 ** Wget should now be compilable under MS Windows environment. MS
326 Visual C++ and Watcom C have been used successfully.
328 ** If the file length is known, percentages are displayed during
331 ** The manual page, now hopelessly out of date, is no longer
332 distributed with Wget.
334 * Wget 1.4.5 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
336 * Wget 1.4.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
338 * Changes in Wget 1.4.3
340 ** Wget is now a GNU utility.
342 ** Can do passive FTP.
346 ** Info documentation expanded.
348 ** Compiles on pre-ANSI compilers.
350 ** Global wgetrc now goes to /usr/local/etc (i.e. $sysconfdir).
354 * Changes in Wget 1.4.2
356 ** New mirror site at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/,
357 thanks to Karsten Thygesen.
359 ** Mailing list! Mail to wget-request@sunsite.auc.dk to subscribe.
361 ** New option --delete-after for proxy prefetching.
363 ** New option --retr-symlinks to retrieve symbolic links like plain
366 ** rmold.pl -- script to remove files deleted on the remote server
368 ** --convert-links should work now.
372 * Changes in Wget 1.4.1
376 ** Added -I (the opposite of -X).
378 ** Dot tracing is now customizable; try wget --dot-style=binary
380 * Changes in Wget 1.4.0
382 ** Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of
383 Geturl. Although many things look suspiciously similar, most of the
384 stuff was rewritten, like recursive retrieval, HTTP, FTP and mostly
385 everything else. Wget should be now easier to debug, maintain and,
386 most importantly, use.
388 ** Recursive HTTP should now work without glitches, even with Location
389 changes, server-generated directory listings and other naughty stuff.
391 ** HTTP regetting is supported on servers that support Range
392 specification. WWW authorization is supported -- try
393 wget http://user:password@hostname/
395 ** FTP support was rewritten and widely enhanced. Globbing should now
396 work flawlessly. Symbolic links are created locally. All the
397 information the Unix-style ls listing can give is now recognized.
399 ** Recursive FTP is supported, e.g.
400 wget -r ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/
402 ** You can specify "rejected" directories, to which you do not want to
403 enter, e.g. with wget -X /pub
405 ** Time-stamping is supported, with both HTTP and FTP. Try wget -N URL.
407 ** A new texinfo reference manual is provided. It can be read with
408 Emacs, standalone info, or converted to HTML, dvi or postscript.
410 ** Fixed a long-standing bug, so that Wget now works over SLIP
413 ** You can have a system-wide wgetrc (/usr/local/lib/wgetrc by
414 default). Settings in $HOME/.wgetrc override the global ones, of
417 ** You can set up quota in .wgetrc to prevent sucking too much
418 data. Try `quota = 5M' in .wgetrc (or quota = 100K if you want your
419 sysadmin to like you).
421 ** Download rate is printed after retrieval.
423 ** Wget now sends the `Referer' header when retrieving
426 ** With the new --no-parent option Wget can retrieve FTP recursively
427 through a proxy server.
429 ** HTML parser, as well as the whole of Wget was rewritten to be much
430 faster and less memory-consuming (yes, both).
432 ** Absolute links can be converted to relative links locally. Check
435 ** Wget catches hangup, filtering the output to a log file and
436 resuming work. Try kill -HUP %?wget.
438 ** User-defined headers can be sent. Try
440 wget http://fly.cc.her.hr/ --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2'
442 ** Acceptance/Rejection lists may contain wildcards.
444 ** Wget can display HTTP headers and/or FTP server response with the
445 new `-S' option. It can save the original HTTP headers with `-s'.
447 ** socks library is now supported (thanks to Antonio Rosella
448 <Antonio.Rosella@agip.it>). Configure with --with-socks.
450 ** There is a nicer display of REST-ed output.
452 ** Many new options (like -x to force directory hierarchy, or -m to
453 turn on mirroring options).
455 ** Wget is now distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
457 ** Lots of small features I can't remember. :-)
459 ** A host of bugfixes.
461 * Changes in Geturl 1.3
463 ** Added FTP globbing support (ftp://fly.cc.fer.hr/*)
465 ** Added support for no_proxy
467 ** Added support for ftp://user:password@host/
469 ** Added support for %xx in URL syntax
471 ** More natural command-line options
473 ** Added -e switch to execute .geturlrc commands from the command-line
475 ** Added support for robots.txt
477 ** Fixed some minor bugs
479 * Geturl 1.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
481 * Changes in Geturl 1.1
483 ** REST supported in FTP
485 ** Proxy servers supported
487 ** GNU getopt used, which enables command-line arguments to be ordered
488 as you wish, e.g. geturl http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -vo log is the same as
489 geturl -vo log http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
491 ** Netscape-compatible URL syntax for HTTP supported: host[:port]/dir/file
493 ** NcFTP-compatible colon URL syntax for FTP supported: host:/dir/file
495 ** <base href="xxx"> supported
497 ** autoconf supported
499 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
500 Copyright information:
502 Copyright (C) 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
504 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
505 copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that
506 the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus
507 giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
509 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this
510 document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions,
511 provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last