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