GNU Wget 1.7 is released

[Hrvoje Niksic]

GNU Wget 1.7 has been released.  It is available from
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/wget/wget-1.7.tar.gz and mirrors of that
site (see list of mirror sites at http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html).

Wget is a utility for noninteractive download of files from the WWW.
It supports HTTP and FTP protocols, as well as retrieval through HTTP
proxies.  It can follow HTML links and download many pages, as well as
convert the links for local viewing.  It can also mirror FTP
hierarchies, or only those files that have changed.  Wget has been
designed for robustness over slow network connections; if a download
fails due to a network problem, Wget will keep retrying until the
whole file has been retrieved.

Wget is written in C and has little or no dependencies on non-standard
programs and libraries.  It is portable and should compile and run on
most Unix systems as well as various flavors of MS Windows.

Wget's home page is currently at <http://sunsite.dk/wget/>, but is
about to be moved to <http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/>.

Please send bug reports and suggestions to <address@hidden>.


* Changes in Wget 1.7.

** SSL (`https') pages now work if you compile Wget with SSL support;
use the `--with-ssl' configure flag.  You need to have OpenSSL
installed.

** Cookies are now supported.  Wget will accept cookies sent by the
server and return them in later requests.  Additionally, it can load
and save cookies to disk, in the same format that Netscape uses.

** "Keep-alive" (persistent) HTTP connections are now supported.
Using keep-alive allows Wget to share one TCP/IP connection for
many retrievals, making multiple-file downloads faster and less
stressing for the server and the network.

** Wget now recognizes FTP directory listings generated by NT and VMS
servers.

** It is now possible to recurse through FTP sites where logging in
puts you in some directory other than '/'.

** You may now use `~' to mean home directory in `.wgetrc'.  For
example, `load_cookies = ~/.netscape/cookies.txt' works as you would
expect.

** The HTML parser has been rewritten.  The new one works more
reliably, allows finer-grained control over which tags and attributes
are detected, and has better support for some features like correctly
skipping comments and declarations, decoding entities, etc.  It is
also more general.

** <meta name="robots"> tags are now respected.

** Wget's internal tables now use hash tables instead of linked lists
where appropriate.  This results in huge speedups when retrieving
large sites (thousands of documents).

** Wget now has a man page, automatically generated from the Texinfo
documentation.  (The last version that shipped with a man page was
1.4.5).  To get this, you need to have pod2man from the Perl
distribution installed on your system.