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 * Wget 1.10.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
10 * Changes in Wget 1.10.
12 ** Downloading files larger than 2GB, sometimes referred to as "large
13 files", now works on systems that support them. This includes the
14 majority of modern Unixes, as well as MS Windows.
16 ** IPv6 is now supported by Wget. Unlike the experimental code in
17 1.9, this version supports dual-family systems. The new flags
18 `--inet4' and `--inet6' (or `-4' and `-6' for short) force the use of
19 IPv4 and IPv6 respectively. Note that IPv6 support has not yet been
22 ** Microsoft's proprietary "NTLM" method of HTTP authentication is now
23 supported. This authentication method is undocumented and only used
24 by IIS. Note that *proxy* authentication is not supported in this
25 release; you can only authenticate to the target web site.
27 ** Wget no longer truncates partially downloaded files when download
28 has to start over because the server doesn't support Range. Instead,
29 with such servers Wget now simply ignores the data up to the byte
30 where the last attempt left off, and only then continues appending to
31 the file. That way the downloaded file never shrinks, and download
32 retries from servers without support for partial downloads work even
33 when downloading to stdout.
37 *** SSL/TLS downloads now attempt to verify the server's certificate
38 against the recognized certificate authorities. This requires CA
39 certificates to have been installed in a location visible to the
40 OpenSSL library. If this is not the case, you can get the bundle
41 yourself from a source you trust (for example, the bundle extracted
42 from Mozilla available at http://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html),
43 and point Wget to the PEM file using the `--ca-certificate'
44 command-line option or the corresponding `.wgetrc' command.
46 *** Secure downloads now verify that the host name in the URL matches
47 the "common name" in the certificate presented by the server.
49 *** Although the above checks provide more secure downloads, they
50 unavoidably break interoperability with some sites that worked with
51 previous versions, particularly those using self-signed, expired, or
52 otherwise invalid certificates. If you encounter "certificate
53 verification" errors or complaints that "common name doesn't match
54 requested host name" and are convinced of the site's authenticity, you
55 can use `--no-check-certificate' to bypass both checks.
57 *** Talking to SSL/TLS servers over proxies now actually works.
58 Previous versions of Wget erroneously sent GET requests for https
59 URLs. Wget 1.10 utilizes the CONNECT method designed for this
62 *** The SSL/TLS-related options have been redesigned and, for the
63 first time, documented in the manual. The old, undocumented, options
64 are no longer supported.
66 ** Passive FTP is now the default FTP transfer mode. Use
67 `--no-passive-ftp' or specify `passive_ftp = off' in your init file to
68 revert to the old behavior.
70 ** The `--header' option can now be used to override generated
71 headers. For example, `wget --header="Host: foo.bar"
72 http://127.0.0.1' tells Wget to connect to localhost, but to specify
73 "foo.bar" in the `Host' header. In previous versions such use of
74 `--header' lead to duplicate headers in HTTP requests.
76 ** The responses without headers, aka "HTTP 0.9" responses, are
77 detected and handled. Although HTTP 0.9 has long been obsolete, it is
78 still occasionally used, sometimes by accident.
80 ** The progress bar is now updated regularly even when the data does
81 not arrive from the network.
83 ** Wget no longer preserves permissions of files retrieved by FTP by
84 default. Anonymous FTP servers frequently use permissions like "664",
85 which might not be what the user wants. The new option
86 `--preserve-permissions' and the corresponding `.wgetrc' variable can
87 be used to revert to the old behavior.
89 ** The new option `--protocol-directories' instructs Wget to also use
90 the protocol name as a directory component of local file names.
92 ** Options that previously unconditionally set or unset various flags
93 are now boolean options that can be invoked as either `--OPTION' or
94 `--no-OPTION'. Options that required an argument "on" or "off" have
95 also been changed this way, but they still accept the old syntax for
96 backward compatibility. For example, instead of `--glob=off' you can
99 Allowing `--no-OPTION' for every `--OPTION' and the other way around
100 is useful because it allows the user to override non-default behavior
101 specified via `.wgetrc'.
103 ** The new option `--keep-session-cookies' causes `--save-cookies' to
104 save session cookies (normally only kept in memory) along with the
105 permanent ones. This is useful because many sites track important
106 information, such as whether the user has authenticated, in session
107 cookies. With this option multiple Wget runs are treated as a single
110 ** Wget now supports the --ftp-user and --ftp-password command
111 switches to set username and password for FTP, and the --user and
112 --password command switches to set username and password for both FTP
113 and HTTP. The --http-passwd and --proxy-passwd command switches have
114 been renamed to --http-password and --proxy-password respectively, and
115 the related http_passwd and proxy_passwd .wgetrc commands to
116 http_password and proxy_password respectively. The login and passwd
117 .wgetrc commands have been deprecated.
119 * `wget -b' now works correctly under Windows.
121 * Wget 1.9.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
123 * Changes in Wget 1.9.
125 ** It is now possible to specify that POST method be used for HTTP
126 requests. For example, `wget --post-data="id=foo&data=bar" URL' will
127 send a POST request with the specified contents.
129 ** IPv6 support is available, although it's still experimental.
131 ** The `--timeout' option now also affects DNS lookup and establishing
132 the TCP connection. Previously it only affected reading and writing
133 data. Those three timeouts can be set separately using
134 `--dns-timeout', `--connection-timeout', and `--read-timeout',
137 ** Download speed shown by the progress bar is based on the data
138 recently read, rather than the average speed of the entire download.
139 The ETA projection is still based on the overall average.
141 ** It is now possible to connect to FTP servers through FWTK
142 firewalls. Set ftp_proxy to an FTP URL, and Wget will automatically
143 log on to the proxy as "username@host".
145 ** The new option `--retry-connrefused' makes Wget retry downloads
146 even in the face of refused connections, which are otherwise
147 considered a fatal error.
149 ** The new option `--no-dns-cache' may be used to prevent Wget from
152 ** Wget no longer escapes characters in local file names based on
153 whether they're appropriate in URLs. Escaping can still occur for
154 nonprintable characters or for '/', but no longer for frequent
155 characters such as space. You can use the new option
156 --restrict-file-names to relax or strengthen these rules, which can be
157 useful if you dislike the default or if you're downloading to
158 non-native partitions.
160 ** Handling of HTML comments has been dumbed down to conform to what
161 users expect and other browsers do: instead of being treated as SGML
162 declaration, a comment is terminated at the first occurrence of "-->".
163 Use `--strict-comments' to revert to the old behavior.
165 ** Wget now correctly handles relative URIs that begin with "//", such
166 as "//img.foo.com/foo.jpg".
168 ** Boolean options in `.wgetrc' and on the command line now accept
169 values "yes" and "no" along with the traditional "on" and "off".
171 ** It is now possible to specify decimal values for timeouts, waiting
172 periods, and download rate. For instance, `--wait=0.5' now works as
173 expected, as does `--dns-timeout=0.5' and even `--limit-rate=2.5k'.
175 * Wget 1.8.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
177 * Wget 1.8.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
179 * Changes in Wget 1.8.
181 ** A new progress indicator is now available and used by default.
182 You can choose the progress bar type with `--progress=TYPE'. Two
183 types are available, "bar" (the new default), and "dot" (the old
184 dotted indicator). You can permanently revert to the old progress
185 indicator by putting `progress = dot' in your `.wgetrc'.
187 ** You can limit the download rate of the retrieval using the
188 `--limit-rate' option. For example, `wget --limit-rate=15k URL' will
189 tell Wget not to download the body of the URL faster than 15 kilobytes
192 ** Recursive retrieval and link conversion have been revamped:
194 *** Wget now traverses links breadth-first. This makes the
195 calculation of depth much more reliable than before. Also, recursive
196 downloads are faster and consume *significantly* less memory than
199 *** Links are converted only when the entire retrieval is complete.
200 This is the only safe thing to do, as only then is it known what URLs
201 have been downloaded.
203 *** BASE tags are handled correctly when converting links. Since Wget
204 already resolves <base href="..."> when resolving handling URLs, link
205 conversion now makes the BASE tags point to an empty string.
207 *** HTML anchors are now handled correctly. Links to an anchor in the
208 same document (<a href="#anchorname">), which used to confuse Wget,
209 are now converted correctly.
211 *** When in page-requisites (-p) mode, no-parent (-np) is ignored when
212 retrieving for inline images, stylesheets, and other documents needed
215 *** Page-requisites (-p) mode now works with frames. In other words,
216 `wget -p URL-THAT-USES-FRAMES' will now download the frame HTML files,
217 and all the files that they need to be displayed properly.
219 ** `--base' now works conjunction with `--input-file', providing a
220 base for each URL and thereby allowing the URLs in the file to be
223 ** If a host has more than one IP address, Wget uses the other
224 addresses when accessing the first one fails.
226 ** Host directories now contain port information if the URL is at a
229 ** Wget now supports the robots.txt directives specified in
230 <http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt>.
232 ** URL parser has been fixed, especially the infamous overzealous
233 quoting. Wget no longer dequotes reserved characters, e.g. `%3F' is
234 no longer translated to `?', nor `%2B' to `+'. Unsafe characters
235 which are not reserved are still escaped, of course.
237 ** No more than 20 successive redirections are allowed.
239 * Wget 1.7.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
241 * Changes in Wget 1.7.
243 ** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
244 use the `--with-ssl' configure flag. You need to have OpenSSL
247 ** Cookies are now supported. Wget will accept cookies sent by the
248 server and return them in later requests. Additionally, it can load
249 and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.
251 ** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
252 Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
253 many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
254 stressing for the server and the network.
256 ** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
259 ** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
260 puts you in some directory other than '/'.
262 ** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'. For
263 example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
266 ** The HTML parser has been rewritten. The new one works more
267 reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
268 are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
269 skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc. It is
272 ** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.
274 ** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
275 where appropriate. This results in huge speedups when retrieving
276 large sites (thousands of documents).
278 ** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
279 documentation. (The last version that shipped with a man page was
280 1.4.5). To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
281 distribution installed on your system.
283 * Changes in Wget 1.6
285 ** Administrative changes.
287 *** Maintainership. Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
288 Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
289 real job as well). Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
290 are being helped by many other people.
292 *** Web page. Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
295 http://sunsite.dk/wget/
297 *** Anonymous CVS. Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
298 sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server. Take a look at
299 the web page for downloading instructions.
301 ** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
302 modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed. When
303 using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.
305 ** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
306 Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
307 retrieval. -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
308 opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.
310 ** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
311 of failed downloads. Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
312 first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS. waitretry is set to 10 by
313 default in the system wgetrc.
315 ** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
316 Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
317 page properly (e.g. inlined images).
319 ** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
320 to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
321 "\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".
323 ** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean". Can be set to on, off,
324 always, or never. This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline. So far,
325 passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.
327 ** A number of new translation files have been added.
329 ** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts
330 bound to multiple IP addresses.
332 ** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.
334 * Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
336 * Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
338 * Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
340 * Changes in Wget 1.5.0
342 ** Wget speaks many languages!
344 On systems with gettext(), Wget will output messages in the language
345 set by the current locale, if available. At this time we support
346 Czech, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
348 ** Opie (Skey) is now supported with FTP.
350 ** HTTP Digest Access Authentication (RFC2069) is now supported.
352 ** The new `-b' option makes Wget go to background automatically.
354 ** The `-I' and `-X' options now accept wildcard arguments.
356 ** The `-w' option now accepts suffixes `s' for seconds, `m' for
357 minutes, `h' for hours, `d' for days and `w' for weeks.
359 ** Upon getting SIGHUP, the whole previous log is now copied to
362 ** Wget now understands proxy settings with explicit usernames and
363 passwords, e.g. `http://user:password@proxy.foo.com/'.
365 ** You can use the new `--cut-dirs' option to make Wget create less
368 ** The `;type=a' appendix to FTP URLs is now recognized. For
369 instance, the following command will retrieve the welcoming message in
372 wget "ftp://ftp.somewhere.com/welcome.msg;type=a"
374 ** `--help' and `--version' options have been redone to to conform to
375 standards set by other GNU utilities.
377 ** Wget should now be compilable under MS Windows environment. MS
378 Visual C++ and Watcom C have been used successfully.
380 ** If the file length is known, percentages are displayed during
383 ** The manual page, now hopelessly out of date, is no longer
384 distributed with Wget.
386 * Wget 1.4.5 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
388 * Wget 1.4.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
390 * Changes in Wget 1.4.3
392 ** Wget is now a GNU utility.
394 ** Can do passive FTP.
398 ** Info documentation expanded.
400 ** Compiles on pre-ANSI compilers.
402 ** Global wgetrc now goes to /usr/local/etc (i.e. $sysconfdir).
406 * Changes in Wget 1.4.2
408 ** New mirror site at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/,
409 thanks to Karsten Thygesen.
411 ** Mailing list! Mail to wget-request@sunsite.auc.dk to subscribe.
413 ** New option --delete-after for proxy prefetching.
415 ** New option --retr-symlinks to retrieve symbolic links like plain
418 ** rmold.pl -- script to remove files deleted on the remote server
420 ** --convert-links should work now.
424 * Changes in Wget 1.4.1
428 ** Added -I (the opposite of -X).
430 ** Dot tracing is now customizable; try wget --dot-style=binary
432 * Changes in Wget 1.4.0
434 ** Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of
435 Geturl. Although many things look suspiciously similar, most of the
436 stuff was rewritten, like recursive retrieval, HTTP, FTP and mostly
437 everything else. Wget should be now easier to debug, maintain and,
438 most importantly, use.
440 ** Recursive HTTP should now work without glitches, even with Location
441 changes, server-generated directory listings and other naughty stuff.
443 ** HTTP regetting is supported on servers that support Range
444 specification. WWW authorization is supported -- try
445 wget http://user:password@hostname/
447 ** FTP support was rewritten and widely enhanced. Globbing should now
448 work flawlessly. Symbolic links are created locally. All the
449 information the Unix-style ls listing can give is now recognized.
451 ** Recursive FTP is supported, e.g.
452 wget -r ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/
454 ** You can specify "rejected" directories, to which you do not want to
455 enter, e.g. with wget -X /pub
457 ** Time-stamping is supported, with both HTTP and FTP. Try wget -N URL.
459 ** A new texinfo reference manual is provided. It can be read with
460 Emacs, standalone info, or converted to HTML, dvi or postscript.
462 ** Fixed a long-standing bug, so that Wget now works over SLIP
465 ** You can have a system-wide wgetrc (/usr/local/lib/wgetrc by
466 default). Settings in $HOME/.wgetrc override the global ones, of
469 ** You can set up quota in .wgetrc to prevent sucking too much
470 data. Try `quota = 5M' in .wgetrc (or quota = 100K if you want your
471 sysadmin to like you).
473 ** Download rate is printed after retrieval.
475 ** Wget now sends the `Referer' header when retrieving
478 ** With the new --no-parent option Wget can retrieve FTP recursively
479 through a proxy server.
481 ** HTML parser, as well as the whole of Wget was rewritten to be much
482 faster and less memory-consuming (yes, both).
484 ** Absolute links can be converted to relative links locally. Check
487 ** Wget catches hangup, filtering the output to a log file and
488 resuming work. Try kill -HUP %?wget.
490 ** User-defined headers can be sent. Try
492 wget http://fly.cc.her.hr/ --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2'
494 ** Acceptance/Rejection lists may contain wildcards.
496 ** Wget can display HTTP headers and/or FTP server response with the
497 new `-S' option. It can save the original HTTP headers with `-s'.
499 ** socks library is now supported (thanks to Antonio Rosella
500 <Antonio.Rosella@agip.it>). Configure with --with-socks.
502 ** There is a nicer display of REST-ed output.
504 ** Many new options (like -x to force directory hierarchy, or -m to
505 turn on mirroring options).
507 ** Wget is now distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
509 ** Lots of small features I can't remember. :-)
511 ** A host of bugfixes.
513 * Changes in Geturl 1.3
515 ** Added FTP globbing support (ftp://fly.cc.fer.hr/*)
517 ** Added support for no_proxy
519 ** Added support for ftp://user:password@host/
521 ** Added support for %xx in URL syntax
523 ** More natural command-line options
525 ** Added -e switch to execute .geturlrc commands from the command-line
527 ** Added support for robots.txt
529 ** Fixed some minor bugs
531 * Geturl 1.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
533 * Changes in Geturl 1.1
535 ** REST supported in FTP
537 ** Proxy servers supported
539 ** GNU getopt used, which enables command-line arguments to be ordered
540 as you wish, e.g. geturl http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -vo log is the same as
541 geturl -vo log http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
543 ** Netscape-compatible URL syntax for HTTP supported: host[:port]/dir/file
545 ** NcFTP-compatible colon URL syntax for FTP supported: host:/dir/file
547 ** <base href="xxx"> supported
549 ** autoconf supported
551 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
552 Copyright information:
554 Copyright (C) 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
556 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
557 copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that
558 the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus
559 giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
561 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this
562 document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions,
563 provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last