"wget 1.20 is here!" (never in my life I though I'd say that) 

(this particle is part of the Everyday Code series)

There are tools that just work. Low level tolls doing much of the heavy lifting and one thing you know about them is that they work. You never write


$ mv --version source target

For that matter you also never write

$ cp -- version 1.3 source target
$ ssh --version 1.2.1 use@machine
$ curl --version 773.2  url

Same applies for wget. There are tools that always work. Because they do one thing and they do it well. Not that there are no version. There are. But today was the first time in my career that we had to upgrade a wget version. We moved from version 1.17 to 1.20

Why the change

What could have changed that made it important to update from 1.17 to 1.20?

It was the introduction of support of some mandarin symbols. Mandarin. A language. Users were uploading files names with such symbols and we had to support them.

The internet. What a beautiful place.