1GNU Wget NEWS -- history of user-visible changes.
3Copyright (C) 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005,
42006, 2007, 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5See the end for copying conditions.
7Please send GNU Wget bug reports to <bug-wget@gnu.org>.
9* Changes in Wget 1.11.4
11** Fixed an issue (apparently a regression) where -O would refuse to
12download when -nc was given, even though the file didn't exist.
14** Fixed a situation where Wget could abort with --continue if the
15remote server gives a content-length of zero when the file exists
18** Fixed a crash on some systems, due to Wget casting a pointer-to-long
19to a pointer-to-time_t.
21** Translation updates for Catalan.
23* Changes in Wget 1.11.3
25** Downgraded -N with -O to a warning, rather than an error.
29* Changes in Wget 1.11.2
31** Fixed a problem in authenticating over HTTPS through a proxy.
32(Regression in 1.11 over 1.10.2.)
34** The combination of -r or -p with -O, which was disallowed in 1.11,
35has been downgraded to a warning in 1.11.2. (-O and -N, which was never
36meaningful, is still an error.)
38** Further improvements to progress bar displays in non-English locales
39(too many spaces could be inserted, causing the display to scroll).
41** Successive invocations of Wget on FTP URLS, with --no-remove-listing
42and --continue, was causing Wget to append, rather than replace,
43information in the .listing file, and thereby download the same files
44multiple times. This has been fixed in 1.11.2.
46** Wget 1.11 no longer allowed ".." to persist at the beginning of URLs,
47for improved conformance with RFC 3986. However, this behavior presents
48problems for some FTP setups, and so they are now preserved again, for
51* Changes in Wget 1.11.1.
53** Interrupted downloads no longer result in renaming the file
54(regression in 1.11 over 1.10.2).
56** Progress bar now displays correctly in non-English locales (and a
57related assertion failure was fixed).
59** Wget no longer issues a GET request over HTTP for files it should
60know it's not going to download (regression in 1.11 over 1.10.2).
62** Added option --auth-no-challenge, to support broken pre-1.11
63authentication-before-server-challenge, which turns out to still be
64useful for some limited cases.
66** Documentation of accept/reject lists in the manual's "Types of
67Files" section now explains various aspects of their behavior that may
68be surprising, and notes that they may change in the future.
70** Documentation of --no-parents now explains how a trailing slash, or
71lack thereof, in the specified URL, will affect behavior.
73* Changes in Wget 1.11.
75** Timestamping now uses the value from the most recent HTTP response,
76rather than the first one it got.
78** Authentication information is no longer sent as part of the Referer
79header in recursive fetches.
81** No authentication credentials are sent until a challenge is issued,
82for improved security. Authentication handling is still not
83RFC-compliant, as once a Basic challenge has been received, it will
84assume it can send credentials to any URL at that same host, and not
85just the ones at or below the original authenticated location.
86Credentials for Digest authentication are still never saved or issued
87automatically, and continue to require a challenge for each resource.
89** Added --max-redirect option, allowing the user to specify what should
90be the maximum number of HTTP redirects to follow.
92** Wget now supports saving HTTP downloads using file names specified by
93the `Content-Disposition' header. This is a standard way of specifying
94the file name used by many web dynamically generated pages. However, the
95current implementation is inefficient, and known to have bugs. It is
96EXPERIMENTAL only, and not enabled by default. Use --content-disposition
99** The new option `--ignore-case' makes Wget ignore case when
100matching files, directories, and wildcards. This affects the -X, -I,
101-A, and -R options, as well as globbing in FTP URLs.
103** ETA projection is now displayed in "dot" progress output as well as
104in the default progress bar. (The dot progress is used by default when
105logging Wget's output to file using the `-o' option.)
107** The "lockable boolean" argument type is no longer supported. It
108was only used by the passive_ftp .wgetrc setting. If you're running
109broken scripts or Perl modules that unconditionally specify
110`--passive-ftp' and your firewall disallows it, you can override them
111by replacing wget with a script that execs wget "$@" --no-passive-ftp.
113** The source code has been migrated to Mercurial. The repositories are
114available at http://hg.addictivecode.org/. Prior to this, the source
115code was hosted on Subversion (migrated from the original CVS); you can
116still get access to older tags and branches for Wget in the Subversion
117repository at http://addictivecode.org/svn/wget/.
119* Changes in Wget 1.10.
121** Downloading files larger than 2GB, sometimes referred to as "large
122files", now works on systems that support them. This includes the
123majority of modern Unixes, as well as MS Windows.
125** IPv6 is now supported by Wget. Unlike the experimental code in
1261.9, this version supports dual-family systems. The new flags
127`--inet4' and `--inet6' (or `-4' and `-6' for short) force the use of
128IPv4 and IPv6 respectively. Note that IPv6 support has not yet been
131** Microsoft's proprietary "NTLM" method of HTTP authentication is now
132supported. This authentication method is undocumented and only used
133by IIS. Note that *proxy* authentication is not supported in this
134release; you can only authenticate to the target web site.
136** Wget no longer truncates partially downloaded files when download
137has to start over because the server doesn't support Range. Instead,
138with such servers Wget now simply ignores the data up to the byte
139where the last attempt left off, and only then continues appending to
140the file. That way the downloaded file never shrinks, and download
141retries from servers without support for partial downloads work even
142when downloading to stdout.
146*** SSL/TLS downloads now attempt to verify the server's certificate
147against the recognized certificate authorities. This requires CA
148certificates to have been installed in a location visible to the
149OpenSSL library. If this is not the case, you can get the bundle
150yourself from a source you trust (for example, the bundle extracted
151from Mozilla available at http://curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html),
152and point Wget to the PEM file using the `--ca-certificate'
153command-line option or the corresponding `.wgetrc' command.
155*** Secure downloads now verify that the host name in the URL matches
156the "common name" in the certificate presented by the server.
158*** Although the above checks provide more secure downloads, they
159unavoidably break interoperability with some sites that worked with
160previous versions, particularly those using self-signed, expired, or
161otherwise invalid certificates. If you encounter "certificate
162verification" errors or complaints that "common name doesn't match
163requested host name" and are convinced of the site's authenticity, you
164can use `--no-check-certificate' to bypass both checks.
166*** Talking to SSL/TLS servers over proxies now actually works.
167Previous versions of Wget erroneously sent GET requests for https
168URLs. Wget 1.10 utilizes the CONNECT method designed for this
171*** The SSL/TLS-related options have been redesigned and, for the
172first time, documented in the manual. The old, undocumented, options
173are no longer supported.
175** Passive FTP is now the default FTP transfer mode. Use
176`--no-passive-ftp' or specify `passive_ftp = off' in your init file to
177revert to the old behavior.
179** The `--header' option can now be used to override generated
180headers. For example, `wget --header="Host: foo.bar"
181http://127.0.0.1' tells Wget to connect to localhost, but to specify
182"foo.bar" in the `Host' header. In previous versions such use of
183`--header' lead to duplicate headers in HTTP requests.
185** The responses without headers, aka "HTTP 0.9" responses, are
186detected and handled. Although HTTP 0.9 has long been obsolete, it is
187still occasionally used, sometimes by accident.
189** The progress bar is now updated regularly even when the data does
190not arrive from the network.
192** Wget no longer preserves permissions of files retrieved by FTP by
193default. Anonymous FTP servers frequently use permissions like "664",
194which might not be what the user wants. The new option
195`--preserve-permissions' and the corresponding `.wgetrc' variable can
196be used to revert to the old behavior.
198** The new option `--protocol-directories' instructs Wget to also use
199the protocol name as a directory component of local file names.
201** Options that previously unconditionally set or unset various flags
202are now boolean options that can be invoked as either `--OPTION' or
203`--no-OPTION'. Options that required an argument "on" or "off" have
204also been changed this way, but they still accept the old syntax for
205backward compatibility. For example, instead of `--glob=off' you can
208Allowing `--no-OPTION' for every `--OPTION' and the other way around
209is useful because it allows the user to override non-default behavior
210specified via `.wgetrc'.
212** The new option `--keep-session-cookies' causes `--save-cookies' to
213save session cookies (normally only kept in memory) along with the
214permanent ones. This is useful because many sites track important
215information, such as whether the user has authenticated, in session
216cookies. With this option multiple Wget runs are treated as a single
219** Wget now supports the --ftp-user and --ftp-password command
220switches to set username and password for FTP, and the --user and
221--password command switches to set username and password for both FTP
222and HTTP. The --http-passwd and --proxy-passwd command switches have
223been renamed to --http-password and --proxy-password respectively, and
224the related http_passwd and proxy_passwd .wgetrc commands to
225http_password and proxy_password respectively. The login and passwd
226.wgetrc commands have been deprecated.
228* `wget -b' now works correctly under Windows.
230* Wget 1.9.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
232* Changes in Wget 1.9.
234** It is now possible to specify that POST method be used for HTTP
235requests. For example, `wget --post-data="id=foo&data=bar" URL' will
236send a POST request with the specified contents.
238** IPv6 support is available, although it's still experimental.
240** The `--timeout' option now also affects DNS lookup and establishing
241the TCP connection. Previously it only affected reading and writing
242data. Those three timeouts can be set separately using
243`--dns-timeout', `--connection-timeout', and `--read-timeout',
246** Download speed shown by the progress bar is based on the data
247recently read, rather than the average speed of the entire download.
248The ETA projection is still based on the overall average.
250** It is now possible to connect to FTP servers through FWTK
251firewalls. Set ftp_proxy to an FTP URL, and Wget will automatically
252log on to the proxy as "username@host".
254** The new option `--retry-connrefused' makes Wget retry downloads
255even in the face of refused connections, which are otherwise
256considered a fatal error.
258** The new option `--no-dns-cache' may be used to prevent Wget from
261** Wget no longer escapes characters in local file names based on
262whether they're appropriate in URLs. Escaping can still occur for
263nonprintable characters or for '/', but no longer for frequent
264characters such as space. You can use the new option
265--restrict-file-names to relax or strengthen these rules, which can be
266useful if you dislike the default or if you're downloading to
267non-native partitions.
269** Handling of HTML comments has been dumbed down to conform to what
270users expect and other browsers do: instead of being treated as SGML
271declaration, a comment is terminated at the first occurrence of "-->".
272Use `--strict-comments' to revert to the old behavior.
274** Wget now correctly handles relative URIs that begin with "//", such
275as "//img.foo.com/foo.jpg".
277** Boolean options in `.wgetrc' and on the command line now accept
278values "yes" and "no" along with the traditional "on" and "off".
280** It is now possible to specify decimal values for timeouts, waiting
281periods, and download rate. For instance, `--wait=0.5' now works as
282expected, as does `--dns-timeout=0.5' and even `--limit-rate=2.5k'.
284* Wget 1.8.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
286* Wget 1.8.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
288* Changes in Wget 1.8.
290** A new progress indicator is now available and used by default.
291You can choose the progress bar type with `--progress=TYPE'. Two
292types are available, "bar" (the new default), and "dot" (the old
293dotted indicator). You can permanently revert to the old progress
294indicator by putting `progress = dot' in your `.wgetrc'.
296** You can limit the download rate of the retrieval using the
297`--limit-rate' option. For example, `wget --limit-rate=15k URL' will
298tell Wget not to download the body of the URL faster than 15 kilobytes
301** Recursive retrieval and link conversion have been revamped:
303*** Wget now traverses links breadth-first. This makes the
304calculation of depth much more reliable than before. Also, recursive
305downloads are faster and consume *significantly* less memory than
308*** Links are converted only when the entire retrieval is complete.
309This is the only safe thing to do, as only then is it known what URLs
312*** BASE tags are handled correctly when converting links. Since Wget
313already resolves <base href="..."> when resolving handling URLs, link
314conversion now makes the BASE tags point to an empty string.
316*** HTML anchors are now handled correctly. Links to an anchor in the
317same document (<a href="#anchorname">), which used to confuse Wget,
318are now converted correctly.
320*** When in page-requisites (-p) mode, no-parent (-np) is ignored when
321retrieving for inline images, stylesheets, and other documents needed
324*** Page-requisites (-p) mode now works with frames. In other words,
325`wget -p URL-THAT-USES-FRAMES' will now download the frame HTML files,
326and all the files that they need to be displayed properly.
328** `--base' now works conjunction with `--input-file', providing a
329base for each URL and thereby allowing the URLs in the file to be
332** If a host has more than one IP address, Wget uses the other
333addresses when accessing the first one fails.
335** Host directories now contain port information if the URL is at a
338** Wget now supports the robots.txt directives specified in
339<http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots-rfc.txt>.
341** URL parser has been fixed, especially the infamous overzealous
342quoting. Wget no longer dequotes reserved characters, e.g. `%3F' is
343no longer translated to `?', nor `%2B' to `+'. Unsafe characters
344which are not reserved are still escaped, of course.
346** No more than 20 successive redirections are allowed.
348* Wget 1.7.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
350* Changes in Wget 1.7.
352** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
353use the `--with-ssl' configure flag. You need to have OpenSSL
356** Cookies are now supported. Wget will accept cookies sent by the
357server and return them in later requests. Additionally, it can load
358and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.
360** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
361Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
362many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
363stressing for the server and the network.
365** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
368** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
369puts you in some directory other than '/'.
371** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'. For
372example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
375** The HTML parser has been rewritten. The new one works more
376reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
377are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
378skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc. It is
381** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.
383** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
384where appropriate. This results in huge speedups when retrieving
385large sites (thousands of documents).
387** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
388documentation. (The last version that shipped with a man page was
3891.4.5). To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
390distribution installed on your system.
394** Administrative changes.
396*** Maintainership. Due to Hrvoje being plagued with a "real job",
397Dan Harkless is the most active maintainer (not that he doesn't have a
398real job as well). Hrvoje still participates occasionally, and both
399are being helped by many other people.
401*** Web page. Thanks to Jan Prikryl, Wget has an "official" web page.
404 http://sunsite.dk/wget/
406*** Anonymous CVS. Thanks to ever-helpful Karsten Thygesen, Wget
407sources are now available at an anonymous CVS server. Take a look at
408the web page for downloading instructions.
410** New -K / --backup-converted / backup_converted = on option causes files
411modified due to -k to be saved with a .orig prefix before being changed. When
412using -N as well, it is these .orig files that are compared against the server.
414** New --follow-tags / follow_tags = ... option allows you to restrict
415Wget to following only certain HTML tags when doing a recursive
416retrieval. -G / --ignore-tags / ignore_tags = ... is just the
417opposite -- all tags but the ones you specify will be followed.
419** New --waitretry / waitretry = SECONDS option allows waiting between retries
420of failed downloads. Wget will use "linear" backoff, waiting 1 second after the
421first failure, 2 after the second, up to SECONDS. waitretry is set to 10 by
422default in the system wgetrc.
424** New -p / --page-requisites / page_requisites = on option causes
425Wget to download all ancillary files necessary to display a given HTML
426page properly (e.g. inlined images).
428** New -E / --html-extension / html_extension = on option causes Wget
429to append ".html" to text/html filenames not ending in regexp
430"\.[Hh][Tt][Mm][Ll]?".
432** New type of .wgetrc command -- "lockable Boolean". Can be set to on, off,
433always, or never. This allows the .wgetrc to override the commandline. So far,
434passive_ftp is the only .wgetrc command which takes a lockable Boolean.
436** A number of new translation files have been added.
438** New --bind-address / bind_address = <address> option for people on hosts
439bound to multiple IP addresses.
441** wget now accepts (illegal per HTTP spec) relative URLs in HTTP redirects.
443* Wget 1.5.3 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
445* Wget 1.5.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
447* Wget 1.5.1 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
449* Changes in Wget 1.5.0
451** Wget speaks many languages!
453On systems with gettext(), Wget will output messages in the language
454set by the current locale, if available. At this time we support
455Czech, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese.
457** Opie (Skey) is now supported with FTP.
459** HTTP Digest Access Authentication (RFC2069) is now supported.
461** The new `-b' option makes Wget go to background automatically.
463** The `-I' and `-X' options now accept wildcard arguments.
465** The `-w' option now accepts suffixes `s' for seconds, `m' for
466minutes, `h' for hours, `d' for days and `w' for weeks.
468** Upon getting SIGHUP, the whole previous log is now copied to
471** Wget now understands proxy settings with explicit usernames and
472passwords, e.g. `http://user:password@proxy.foo.com/'.
474** You can use the new `--cut-dirs' option to make Wget create less
477** The `;type=a' appendix to FTP URLs is now recognized. For
478instance, the following command will retrieve the welcoming message in
481 wget "ftp://ftp.somewhere.com/welcome.msg;type=a"
483** `--help' and `--version' options have been redone to to conform to
484standards set by other GNU utilities.
486** Wget should now be compilable under MS Windows environment. MS
487Visual C++ and Watcom C have been used successfully.
489** If the file length is known, percentages are displayed during
492** The manual page, now hopelessly out of date, is no longer
493distributed with Wget.
495* Wget 1.4.5 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
497* Wget 1.4.4 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
499* Changes in Wget 1.4.3
501** Wget is now a GNU utility.
503** Can do passive FTP.
507** Info documentation expanded.
509** Compiles on pre-ANSI compilers.
511** Global wgetrc now goes to /usr/local/etc (i.e. $sysconfdir).
515* Changes in Wget 1.4.2
517** New mirror site at ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/infosystems/wget/,
518thanks to Karsten Thygesen.
520** Mailing list! Mail to wget-request@sunsite.auc.dk to subscribe.
522** New option --delete-after for proxy prefetching.
524** New option --retr-symlinks to retrieve symbolic links like plain
527** rmold.pl -- script to remove files deleted on the remote server
529** --convert-links should work now.
533* Changes in Wget 1.4.1
537** Added -I (the opposite of -X).
539** Dot tracing is now customizable; try wget --dot-style=binary
541* Changes in Wget 1.4.0
543** Wget 1.4.0 [formerly known as Geturl] is an extensive rewrite of
544Geturl. Although many things look suspiciously similar, most of the
545stuff was rewritten, like recursive retrieval, HTTP, FTP and mostly
546everything else. Wget should be now easier to debug, maintain and,
547most importantly, use.
549** Recursive HTTP should now work without glitches, even with Location
550changes, server-generated directory listings and other naughty stuff.
552** HTTP regetting is supported on servers that support Range
553specification. WWW authorization is supported -- try
554wget http://user:password@hostname/
556** FTP support was rewritten and widely enhanced. Globbing should now
557work flawlessly. Symbolic links are created locally. All the
558information the Unix-style ls listing can give is now recognized.
560** Recursive FTP is supported, e.g.
561 wget -r ftp://gnjilux.cc.fer.hr/pub/unix/util/
563** You can specify "rejected" directories, to which you do not want to
564enter, e.g. with wget -X /pub
566** Time-stamping is supported, with both HTTP and FTP. Try wget -N URL.
568** A new texinfo reference manual is provided. It can be read with
569Emacs, standalone info, or converted to HTML, dvi or postscript.
571** Fixed a long-standing bug, so that Wget now works over SLIP
574** You can have a system-wide wgetrc (/usr/local/lib/wgetrc by
575default). Settings in $HOME/.wgetrc override the global ones, of
578** You can set up quota in .wgetrc to prevent sucking too much
579data. Try `quota = 5M' in .wgetrc (or quota = 100K if you want your
580sysadmin to like you).
582** Download rate is printed after retrieval.
584** Wget now sends the `Referer' header when retrieving
587** With the new --no-parent option Wget can retrieve FTP recursively
588through a proxy server.
590** HTML parser, as well as the whole of Wget was rewritten to be much
591faster and less memory-consuming (yes, both).
593** Absolute links can be converted to relative links locally. Check
596** Wget catches hangup, filtering the output to a log file and
597resuming work. Try kill -HUP %?wget.
599** User-defined headers can be sent. Try
601 wget http://fly.cc.her.hr/ --header='Accept-Charset: iso-8859-2'
603** Acceptance/Rejection lists may contain wildcards.
605** Wget can display HTTP headers and/or FTP server response with the
606new `-S' option. It can save the original HTTP headers with `-s'.
608** socks library is now supported (thanks to Antonio Rosella
609<Antonio.Rosella@agip.it>). Configure with --with-socks.
611** There is a nicer display of REST-ed output.
613** Many new options (like -x to force directory hierarchy, or -m to
614turn on mirroring options).
616** Wget is now distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
618** Lots of small features I can't remember. :-)
620** A host of bugfixes.
622* Changes in Geturl 1.3
624** Added FTP globbing support (ftp://fly.cc.fer.hr/*)
626** Added support for no_proxy
628** Added support for ftp://user:password@host/
630** Added support for %xx in URL syntax
632** More natural command-line options
634** Added -e switch to execute .geturlrc commands from the command-line
636** Added support for robots.txt
638** Fixed some minor bugs
640* Geturl 1.2 is a bugfix release with no user-visible changes.
642* Changes in Geturl 1.1
644** REST supported in FTP
646** Proxy servers supported
648** GNU getopt used, which enables command-line arguments to be ordered
649as you wish, e.g. geturl http://fly.cc.fer.hr/ -vo log is the same as
650geturl -vo log http://fly.cc.fer.hr/
652** Netscape-compatible URL syntax for HTTP supported: host[:port]/dir/file
654** NcFTP-compatible colon URL syntax for FTP supported: host:/dir/file
656** <base href="xxx"> supported
660----------------------------------------------------------------------
661Copyright information:
663Copyright (C) 1997-2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
665 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim
666 copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that
667 the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved, thus
668 giving the recipient permission to redistribute in turn.
670 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this
671 document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions,
672 provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last