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1 GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes. -*- outline -*- (allout)
2 * Major changes in release 4.2.12
3 ** Functionality Changes
4 *** find is now POSIX-compliant, as far as I know.
5 *** -exec ... {} + now works.
6 *** New actions -execdir and -okdir which are like -exec and -ok but more secure.
7 *** "locate -w" is now a synonym for "locate --wholepath".
8 *** An empty path entry in the locate database path (for example "::" in
9 $LOCATE_PATH or in the argument to "locate -d") is taken to mean
10 the default database, whose name is hard-coded in locate.
11 ** Bug Fixes
12 *** If find or xargs cannot write to stdout, for example because
13 output is redirected to a file and the disk is full, the
14 relevant program will return a non-zero exit status.
16 * Major changes in release 4.2.11
17 ** Bug Fixes
18 *** Compilation fix for systems without EOVERFLOW.
19 *** More helpful error message if you make a mistake with (, ), -o or -a.
20 ** Functionality Changes
21 *** If you have unclosed parentheses on the find command line,
22 or any of a number of similar problems, find will now produce
23 a more helpful error message.
24 *** locate -b is now a synonym for locate --basename
25 *** locate now supports a --statistics (or -S) option, which prints some
26 statistics about the locate databases.
27 *** Implemented the -samefile option.
28 ** Documentation improvements
29 *** New chapter in the manual, "Security Considerations".
30 *** Better documentation for -prune (Mainly thanks to Stepan Kasal)
31 ** Bug Fixes
32 *** locate's options -i and -w now work with the -e option (previously a bug
33 prevented this).
35 * Major changes in release 4.2.10
36 ** Bug Fixes
37 *** Portability fix for fstype.c: should now compile on UNICOS, and possibly
38 also produce useful results on BeOS and Dolphin, perhaps other
39 systems too.
41 * Major changes in release 4.2.9
42 ** Functionality Changes
43 *** xargs no longer treats a line containing only an underscore as a logical end-of-file. To obtain the behaviour that was previously the default, use "-E_".
44 *** xargs now supports the POSIX options -E, -I and -L. These are synonyms
45 for the existing options -e, -i and -l, but the latter three are
46 now deprecated.
47 ** Bug Fixes
48 *** xargs -n NUM now invokes a command as soon as it has NUM arguments.
49 Previously, it waited until NUM+1 items had been read, and then
50 invoked the command with NUM arguments, saving the remaining one
51 for next time.
52 *** If "find -L" discovers a symbolic link loop, an error message is issued.
53 *** If you specify a directory on the find command line, but -prune
54 is applied to it, find will no longer chdir() into it anyway.
55 ** Documentation improvements
56 *** The precise interpretation of the arguments to the -atime, -ctime
57 and similar tests in find has been documented more clearly.
59 * Major changes in release 4.2.8
60 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.7 automount handling on Solaris. This
61 worked to some extent in findutils-4.2.7, but is much improved in
62 findutils-4.2.8.
64 * Major changes in release 4.2.7
65 ** Functionality Changes
66 *** xargs can now read a list of arguments from a named file, allowing
67 the invoked program to use the same stdin as xargs started with
68 (for example ``xargs --arg-file=todo emacs'').
69 ** Documentation improvements
70 *** The Texinfo manual now has an extra chapter, "Error Messages". Most
71 error messages are self-explanatory, but some of the ones which
72 are not are explained in this chapter.
73 ** Bug Fixes
74 *** Avoid trying to link against -lsun on UNICOS, which doesn't need it or
75 have it.
76 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.6 automount handling (which hadn't been enabled
77 on Solaris).
78 *** Reenabled internationalisation support (which had been accidentally
79 disabled in findutils-4.2.5).
81 * Major changes in release 4.2.6
82 ** Bug Fixes
83 *** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as
84 it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount.
85 This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change
86 directory into them. This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998,
87 #9043.
89 * Major changes in release 4.2.5
90 ** Functionality Changes
91 *** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported. These control whether or not
92 find will follow symbolic links.
93 *** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case
94 it is the default).
95 ** Documentation improvements
96 *** Better documentation for "xargs -i".
97 ** Bug Fixes
98 *** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir.
99 (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location
100 other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure").
101 *** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9.
102 *** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate
103 warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library
104 "-lsun". Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem.
106 * Major changes in release 4.2.4
107 ** Functionality Changes
108 *** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
109 now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
110 locate).
111 *** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system
112 doesn't support that much).
113 *** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message
114 is now issued. Options should be specified immediately after the
115 list of paths to search. These warnings are enabled if you
116 specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty. They are diabled
117 by the use of the -nowarn option.
118 *** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
119 which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
120 *** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
121 output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
122 grep -c).
123 *** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the
124 number of results. This is useful if you only want to find out if
125 there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
126 to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
127 *** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to
128 be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
129 database, rather than the whole name. The default behaviour
130 (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
131 parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
132 *** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to
133 pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.
134 ** Bug Fixes
135 *** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
136 systems that have non-writable string constants.
137 *** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range
138 values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
139 error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
140 value).
141 *** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references
143 * Major changes in release 4.2.3
144 ** Functionality Changes
145 *** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches.
146 *** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately.
147 *** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number.
148 *** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names.
149 *** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility
150 with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. This option is already
151 deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth".
152 *** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are
153 %y and %Y. They indicate the type of the file as a single letter;
154 these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test.
155 *** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find,
156 the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change
157 (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the
158 directory we've just returned out of).
159 ** Other Changes
160 *** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings.
162 * Major changes in release 4.2.2
163 ** Documentation improvements
164 *** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported.
165 ** Bug Fixes
166 *** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX
167 *** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64
168 *** The built-in internationalisation support now works again.
169 ** Other Changes
170 *** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used,
171 which means among other things that we only have one config.h file
172 now.
173 *** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in
174 gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a". This is in the lib
175 directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory.
176 *** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers.
178 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
179 ** Bug Fixes
180 *** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard
181 requires it, as explained at
182 http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html
184 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
185 ** Bug Fixes
186 *** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function
187 that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD
188 *** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers,
189 as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html)
190 *** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t
191 ** Other Changes
192 **** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17).
194 * Major changes in release 4.2.0
195 ** Functionality Changes
196 *** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive.
197 The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment
198 data contained more than 20480 bytes.
199 *** New options -wholename and -iwholename
200 As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over
201 the -path and -ipath options. Using -ipath now generates a warning,
202 though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path).
203 *** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored.
204 *** New option "-ignore_readdir_race"
205 silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed
206 after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before
207 find stats the file. There is also an option
208 -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect.
209 ** Documentation improvements
210 *** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail
211 *** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions
212 The find manual page also now includes a section
213 which describes the relationship between the features of GNU
214 find and the POSIX standard. Some other small improvements
215 to the find and xargs manual pages have been made.
216 *** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented.
217 The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now
218 documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers
219 has been improved.
220 *** xargs -i is now more clearly documented.
221 ** Bug Fixes
222 *** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course)
223 *** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes
224 If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input,
225 it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the
226 list of files that xargs is trying to read.
227 *** Better support for 64-bit systems.
228 *** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect,
229 I think this is a strange thing to want to do.
230 *** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed
231 Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing.
232 *** updatedb is now somewhat more robust
233 The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty
234 database if it fails.
235 *** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb
236 Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the
237 locate database.
238 *** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works
239 This was broken in 4.1.20.
241 * Major changes in release 4.1.20:
242 ** New maintainer, James Youngman <jay@gnu.org>
243 ** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left
244 a gap just in case.
245 ** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including
246 a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository. There are no
247 differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are
248 building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file
249 README-CVS).
250 ** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20.
252 * Major changes in release 4.1.7:
253 fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used.
254 security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing.
256 * Major changes in release 4.1.6:
257 correct bug in prune.
258 added --ignore-case option for locate
260 * Major changes in release 4.1.5:
261 Add support for large files
263 * Major changes in release 4.1.4:
264 bug fixes, more up-to-date languages.
266 * Major changes in release 4.1.3:
267 added internationalization and localization.
269 * Major changes in release 4.1.1:
270 attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect
271 "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb
273 * Major changes in release 4.1:
275 ** Distribution renamed to findutils.
276 ** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin
277 instead of $exec_prefix/libexec.
278 ** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected.
279 \f
280 * Major changes in release 4.0:
282 ** Documentation:
283 *** Texinfo manual.
284 *** Man page for updatedb.
285 *** Man page for the locate database formats.
287 ** find:
288 *** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend
289 trees, so it does fewer inode lookups.
290 *** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given.
291 *** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include
292 and you configure using the --with-afs option.
293 *** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE.
295 ** locate:
296 *** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and
297 allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to
298 share the databases. The new locate can also detect and read the
299 old database format automatically. The new databases are typically
300 30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in
301 file names). Search times are approximately the same, or faster on
302 some systems.
303 *** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old.
305 ** updatedb:
306 *** Takes command-line options.
308 ** xargs:
309 *** Performance improved 10-20%.
310 *** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given.
311 *** Now has a test suite. Some minor bugs fixed as a result.
312 \f
313 * Major changes in release 3.8:
315 ** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex:
316 -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex
317 ** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type
318 \f
319 * Major changes in release 3.7:
321 ** locate can search multiple databases
322 ** locate has an option to specify the database path
323 ** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail
325 --//--
326 This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el:
328 LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy
329 LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake
330 LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec
331 LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname
332 LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf