1 GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes. -*- outline -*- (allout)
2 * Major changes in release 4.3.9-CVS
6 Findutils version 4.3.9 is released under version 3 of the GNU General
11 #20834: Avoid segmentation violation for -execdir when $PATH is
12 unset. Assume that the PATH is safe in this situation.
14 #20310: configure uses hosts's support status for "sort -z" when
15 generating the updatedb script for use on the target. This is
16 inappropriate when cross-compiling, so avoid doing that.
18 #20263: Compilation fix for DEC Alpha OSF/1 cc, which forbids the
19 ordering comparison of function pointers.
21 #20139: find -[acm]time -N (wrongly) includes files from N days ago,
22 as well as (correctly) from less than N days ago.
24 #20273: When xargs is successful without consuming all of stdin (for
25 example, with the -E option), and stdin is seekable, xargs now
26 correctly restores the file position, even on platforms where exit()
27 does not follow the POSIX rules of doing likewise. Likewise for find
28 (for example, with the -ok action).
30 #20547: The version information printed by find, xargs, locate,
31 updatedb, frcode and code now complies with the GNU Project's coding
34 #20662: Avoid memory leak in find -name and other places affected by
35 gnulib dirname module. The leak had been present since 4.3.1.
37 #20751: Avoid memory corruption in find -ls that has been present
40 #20871: Assertion failure introduced in 4.3.3, when oldfind is invoked
41 in a directory where the parent directory lacks search permission.
45 #20594: Allow fine-tuning of the default argument size used by xargs
46 and find at ./configure time.
48 #20688: The warning printed by -name or -iname when the pattern to
49 match contains a slash can now be silenced by -nowarn. This warning
50 was originally introduced unconditionally in 4.2.21.
52 Translation of locate --limit problems is improved.
54 POSIX will standardise -path, so the documentation no longer claims
55 that -wholename is the 'canonical' test, and -ipath no longer
58 ** Documentation Fixes
60 Point out more explicitly that the subsecond timestamp support
61 introduced by findutils-4.3.3 introduces a change in the format of
64 Also explain that when reporting a bug, you should check the most
65 recent findutils release first.
67 Introduced doc/find-maint.texi, a maintenance manual for findutils.
69 Added an extra worked example for find (copying a subset of files).
71 The locate command's manual page now has a HISTORY section.
73 #20552: Fixed typos, formatting and section ordering issues in the
76 #20529: removed spurious 'o' in description of "xargs -a" in
81 Updated Dutch translation.
84 * Major changes in release 4.3.8, 2007-06-12
88 #20157: Avoid segfault in locate when run as root. This is caused by
89 a buffer overrun, but at this time no exploit mechanism is known.
91 * Major changes in release 4.3.7, 2007-06-09
95 Locate can now read old-format locate databases generated on machines
96 with a different byte order. It does this by guessing the byte order,
97 so the result is not completely reliable. If you need to share
98 databases between machines of different architectures, you should use
99 the LOCATE02 format (which has other advantages, as explained in the
104 #20014: Findutils-4.3.7 includes a patch for a potential security
105 problem in locate. When locate read an old-format database, it read
106 file names into a fixed-length buffer allocated on the heap without
107 checking for overflow. Although overflowing a heap buffer is often
108 somewhat safer than overflowing a buffer on the stack, this bug still
109 has potential security implications.
111 This bug also affected the following previous findutils releases:
113 - All releases prior to 4.2.31
114 - Findutils 4.3.0 to 4.3.6.
116 This bug has been assigned CVE number CVE-2007-2452.
120 #20128: Fix compilation error of find/tree.c on AIX with GCC.
122 #20005: Tests -mtime -n and -mtime +n incorrectly treated like -mtime n.
124 #19983: include_next causes compilation failure in findutils 4.3.6 on
127 #19981: Don't call setgroups if the function isn't available. This
128 fixes Savannah bug# 19981.
130 #19980: Don't use the functions putw() or getw() since these are not
131 in current POSIX. Use the gnulib version of wcwidth() where the
132 system does not provide it.
134 #19979: Compilation errors on BeOS
136 #19970: Cannot cast from pointer to bool using gnulib's <stdbool.h>
138 #19967: Use of __attribute((__noreturn__)) makes compilation fail with
139 some non-GCC compilers
141 #19966: find should link against -lm for modf() and fabs()
143 #19965: Compilation failure on OSF/1 4.0; non-declaration of uintmax_t
145 #19948: Assertion failure O_NOFOLLOW != 0 on IRIX 6.5
147 #19871: Typos in find.1
149 #19596: Fixed this bug again, this time in the Texinfo manual (the
150 discussion should compare %b with %s/512, not %s/1024).
152 #19416: _FORTIFY_SOURCE warn_unused_result warnings
154 * Major changes in release 4.3.6, 2007-05-21
158 #19948: Fixed an assertion failure on IRIX 6.5 (O_NOFOLLOW is defined
161 #19923: Fixed an array overrun in groups[] array of 'locate' when run by
162 or as root. This bug appears not to be exploitable. If locate is not
163 installed setuid, the bug is not exploitable. For setuid
164 installations, it is concievable that there could be an information
165 leak if the user uses the -d option or the -e option, though the
166 maintainer has been unable to provoke this on an x86 system.
168 #19871: Spurious .R directives in manpage produced error messages from
169 GNU troff. This is now fixed (they are corrected to .B).
171 #19416: The result of I/O operations in print-related actions is now
172 checked, and failures are reported. Any failure will cause find's
173 exit status to be nonzero. The predicate itself will continue to
178 A variety of changes were made to allow compilation to succeed on
181 #19983: Now compiles on DEC C V5.9-005 on Digital UNIX V4.0 (or at
184 #19970: Compile correctly on C89 systems where the "_Bool" type is not
185 provided, taking into account the limitations of the gnulib
186 replacement for stdbool.h.
188 #19967: Build successfully with C compilers that don't support the GCC
189 construct __attribute__((__noreturn__)).
191 #19966: Findutils should now build on systems which have the modf()
192 and fabs() functions in the maths library, -lm. This includes some
193 versions of HP-UX and Solaris.
195 #19965: Fixed a compilation failure on OSF/1 4.0 (no definition of the
199 * Major changes in release 4.3.5, 2007-05-05
201 ** Functional changes
203 Updatedb can now support he generation of file name databases which
204 are compatible with slocate. For some time, GNU locate has been able
207 The /proc filesystem is excluded from the locate database (by
208 default; change PRUNEPATHS to modify this behaviour).
212 #19806: The -samefile predicate might get fooled by inode reuse. We
213 now hold open a file descriptor on the reference file to prevent this.
215 #19768: Better detection of corrupted old-style locate databases
216 (e.g. if the database is too short to include a complete bigram
219 #19766: The frcode and code programs now detect write errors more
222 #19371: Fix compilation failure on systems which #define open to
223 open64 (and similarly with the close system call). This fixes
224 Savannah bug #19371, affecting AIX 5.3.
226 #19658: When cross-compiling, "make clean" no longer deletes the
227 generated file doc/regexprops.texi, because there is no way to
230 #19391: When xargs knows that the system's actual exec limit is larger
231 than the compiled-in ARG_MAX, use the system's limit without
232 generating an assertion failure.
234 #18203: A duplicate report of bug #17478.
236 #17478: Error messages from find can garble the console.
238 #16378: Assertion failure if stat() returns 00000 as the mode
239 of a file. This apparently can happen occasionally with broken NFS
242 #11668: FreeBSD extensions for time specification are now
243 implemented. In fact, these were included in findutils-4.3.3. The
244 change was listed as a functional change (whcih it is) and this bug
245 report was not mentioned.
247 ** Documentation Fixes
249 The locatedb.5 manpage now documents the (default) LOCATE02 format
250 more clearly, and also documents the slocate database format.
252 The maximum and default values applying to the -s option of xargs are
253 now documented more clearly in the manual page.
255 * Major changes in release 4.3.4, 2007-04-21
259 #19634: Test suite now passes (again) if "." is on your $PATH.
261 #19619: Findutils builds once again on Cygwin.
263 #19617: Nonexistent start points are (once again) diagnosed in
264 ftsfind. This bug affected only findutils-4.3.3.
266 #19616: Fix leaf optimisation and loop detection (which were
267 unreliable in findutils 4.3.3). This bug affected only
270 #19615: find --version no longer claims to be using FTS_CWDFD when it
271 isn't. This bug affected only findutils-4.3.3.
273 #19613: "find -L . -type f" no longer causes an assertion failure when
274 it encounters a symbolic link loop. This bug affected only
277 #19605: Issue an error message (and later return nonzero exit status)
278 if a symbolic link loop was encountered during directory traversal.
280 #19484: bigram.c and code.c fail if the first pathname recorded begins
283 #19483: Inconsistent option highlighting in updatedb manpage
285 #18414: Tests for "find -readable" are skipped for the superuser, as
286 on some systems (e.g. Cygwin with an Administrative user) users can
291 Findutils 4.3.4 includes a translation for the Ukranian language.
294 * Major changes in release 4.3.3, 2007-04-15
296 Fiundutils-4.3.3 was released on 2007-04-15.
300 #19596: Correct the comparison in the find manpage between %b and %s
301 (the divisor is 512 not 1024).
303 #18714: In the POSIX locale, vertical tabs and form feeds are not
306 #18713: Quoted but empty arguments which occur last on an xargs input
307 line are no longer ignored, but instead produce an empty argument.
309 #18554: Documented the construct -exec sh -c 'foo "$@" bar' {} +
311 #18466: we now avoid this bug by limiting "-execdir ...+"
312 to just one argument for the time being. There is a performance
313 penalty for doing this. We hope to make a better fix in a later
316 #18384: excess bracket in xargs --help
318 #18320: Zero bytes in input should give warning
320 #17437: Corrected the handling of X in symbolic permissions (such
321 as-u+w,a+X). This change actually occurred in findutils-4.3.2, but
322 the NEWS file for that release didn't mention it.
324 #17396: find -mtime -atime -ctime does not support fractional part
325 (see "Functional changes" below)
327 #14748: find -perm /zzz gives wrong result when zzz evaluates to an
330 #14535: correctly support case-folding in locate (that is, "locate
331 -i") for multibyte character environments such as UTF-8. Previously,
332 if your search string contained a character which was outside the
333 single-byte-encoding range for UTF-8 for example, then the
334 case-folding behaviour failed to work and only exact matches would be
339 ** Functional changes
341 The -printf action (and similar related actions) now support %S,
342 which is a measurement of the sparseness of a file.
344 The test "-perm /000" now matches all files instead of no files. For
345 over a year find has been issuing warning messages indicating that
346 this change will happen. We now issue a warning indicating that the
347 change has already happened (in 4.3.x only, there is no plan to make
348 this change in the 4.2.x series).
350 The tests -newer, -anewer, -cnewer, -mtime, -atime, -ctime, -amin,
351 -cmin, -mmin and -used now support sub-second timestamps, including
352 the ability to specify times with non-integer arguments.
354 The -printf format specifiers also support sub-second timestamps:
363 The new test -newerXY supports comparison between status times for
364 files. One of the status times for a file being considered (denoted
365 X) is checked against a reference time (denoted Y) for the file whose
366 name id the argument. X and Y can be:
369 B Birth time (st_birthtime, currently unsupported)
372 t Valid only for the reference time; instead of comparison
373 against a file status time, the argument is a time string.
376 For example, -newermm is equivalent to -newer, and -neweram is true if
377 the file being considered was accessed more recently than the
378 reference file was modified. The -newerXY test supports subsecond
379 timestamps where these are available. The X=B variant is not yet
382 If you configure the sourec code and then run the tests with "make
383 check", the test suite fails rather than defaulting to testing the
387 * Major changes in release 4.3.2, 2006-11-25
391 #18222: find -printf '%H %P' once again prints the right result if
392 more than one start point was given on the command line.
394 #17782: find -execdir now correctly puts the prefix "./" before the
395 expansion of "{}" rather than at the start of the argument it appears
396 in. Please note that if you use the -exec or -execdir actions with a
397 shell, then you may be vulnerable to shell code injection attacks, so
398 don't do that. It's not a security defect in find - you should not be
399 passing untrusted data (such as file names chosen by other people) to
402 #17490: find -regex generated a segfault in findutils-4.3.1, but this
403 is fixed in findutils-4.3.2.
405 #17477: find -printf '%' (that is, where the format has a trailing %)
406 now generates an error message.
408 #17372: The fts-based find executable (the default configuration uses
409 fts) is now much faster when -maxdepth is used on filesystems with
412 #15531: The -prune action now behaves correctly when applied to a file.
414 ** Functional changes
416 The slocate database format is now supported. Preliminary changes
417 intended to eventually allow setuid operation of locate have also been
418 made. For the moment, please don't install GNU locate as a
419 set-user-ID program (except for testing purposes; if you do so, please
420 make sure that untrusted users cannot execute the set-user-ID locate
423 Use of an slocate database which was built with a nonzero security
424 mode (at the moment, GNU updatedb will not do this) forces locate's
425 "-e" option to be turned on, which has an effect on the "-S" option
426 which is probably surprising for most users.
429 ** Documentation Fixes
431 The global effect of options (other than -daystart and -follow) is now
432 explained more clearly in the manual page. Savannah bug #15360.
435 * Major changes in release 4.3.1, 2006-08-06
439 Find now follows POSIX rules for determining where directories end and
440 expressions start. This means that "find \(1 \!2 \, \)" now searches
441 in the four named directories, rather than trying to parse an
442 expression. (Savannah bug #15235).
444 You now get a more helpful error message when you use command lines
445 which have missing expressions, such as
452 Savannah bug #15800: If find finds more subdirectories within a parent
453 directory than it previously expected to based on the link count of
454 the parent, the resulting error message now gives the correct
455 directory name (previously an error message was issued but it
456 specified the wrong directory).
458 Savannah bug #16738: "find .... -exec ... {} +" now works if you have
459 a large environment and many files must be passed to the -exec
460 action. The same problem affected the -execdir action, though since
461 the number of files in a given directory will normally be smaller, the
462 problem was worse for -exec.
464 Savannah bug #16579: Updatedb now works if it is running as a user
465 whose login shell is not actually a shell.
467 There have also been a number of documentation improvements (includng
468 Savannah bug #16269).
470 ** Functional changes
472 For find, debug output can now be enabled at runtime with the -D
473 option. This causes the printing of various sorts of information
474 about find's internal state and progress.
476 The find option -nowarn cannot itself produce a warning (this used to
477 happen with commands like "find . -name quux -nowarn -print").
479 ** Performance Enhancements
481 Find now has a rudimentary cost-based optimiser. It has an idea of
482 the basic cost of each test (i.e. that -name is very cheap while -size
483 is more expensive). It re-orders tests bearing in mind the cost of
484 each test and its likely success. Predicates with side effects (for
485 example -delete or -exec) are not reordered. The optimiser is not
486 yet enabled by default, but the new option -O controls the query
487 optimisation level. To see this in action, try
488 find -D opt -O3 . -type f -o -type c -o -size 555 -name Z
489 and compare the optimised query with:
490 find -D opt -O3 . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z
492 find -D opt . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z
494 Over time, as optimisations are proven to be robust and correct, they
495 will be moved to lower optimisation levels. Some optimisations have
496 always been performed by find (for example -name is always done early
501 Findutils 4.3.1 includes updated translations for the following
503 Vietnamese, Belarusian, Catalan, Danish, German, Greek, Esperanto,
504 Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Irish, Galician, Croatian, Hungarian,
505 Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Luganda, Malay, Dutch, Polish,
506 Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Kinyarwanda,
507 Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish, Chinese (simplified),
508 Chinese (traditional), Bulgarian
510 * Major changes in release 4.3.0, 2005-12-12
512 The 4.3.x release series are currently 'development' releases. Please
513 test it, but think carefully before installing it in a production
514 system. New features in findutils-4.3.x are under development; they
515 may change or go away.
517 All changes up to and including findutils-4.2.27 are included in this
518 release. In addition the following changes are new in this release:
520 ** Functional Changes
522 By default, find now uses the fts() function to search the file
523 system. The use of fts greatly increases find's ability to search
524 extremely deep directory hierarchites.
526 You can tell that the version of find you are using uses FTS, because
527 the output of "find --version" will include the word "FTS".
529 Currently two binaries for 'find' are built. The configure option
530 --without-fts can be used to select whether 'find' uses fts:
533 default configuration find oldfind
534 configure --with-fts find oldfind
535 configure --without-fts ftsfind find
537 New tests, -readable, -writable, -executable. These check that a file
538 can be read, written or executed respectively.
540 * Major changes in release 4.2.27, 2005-12-06
542 ** Warnings of Future Changes
544 The test -perm /000 currently matches no files, but for greater
545 consistency with -perm -000, this will be changed to match all files;
546 this change will probably be made in early 2006. Meanwhile, a warning
547 message is given if you do this.
551 If xargs is invoked with many short arguments on PPC systems running
552 the Linux kernel, we no longer get an "argument list too long" error
553 from the operating system.
555 Fixed a bug in the test suite which caused it to spuriously fail on
556 systems where ARG_MAX is different to the value used by the Linux
557 kernel on 32-bit x86-architecture systems.
559 On systems running the Linux kernel, "find -printf %F" no longer
560 produces the wrong answer for files on filesystems that have been
561 remounted elsewhere using "mount --bind". (Savannah bug #14921).
563 ** Documentation Changes
565 Following some extensive and detailed review comments from Aaron
566 Hawley, the material in the manual pages and the Texinfo manual are
569 The %M format specifier of "find -printf" is now documented, although
570 it has existed since release 4.2.5.
572 The 'find' manual page now correctly documents the fact that -regex
573 defaults to using Emacs-style regular expressions (though this can be
576 * Major changes in release 4.2.26, 2005-11-19
578 ** Public Service Announcements
580 I'd like to point out a second time that the interpretation of '-perm
581 +mode' has changed to be more POSIX-compliant. If you want the old
582 behaviour of the GNU extension you should use '-perm /mode'. See the
583 NEWS entry for findutils version 4.2.21 for details.
585 ** Functional Changes
587 The xargs command now supports a new option (--delimiter) which allows
588 input items to be separated by characters other than null and
589 whitespace. This resolves Savannah support request sr #102914.
591 Sometimes find needs to read the /etc/mtab file (or perform the
592 equivalent operation on systems not using /etc/mtab). If this
593 information is needed but not available, find now exits with an error
594 message non-zero status. If the information is not needed, find will
597 A new xargs option --delimiter allows the input delimiter to be
598 changed (previously \0 was the only choice unless you use the -L
599 option, which changes other semantics too).
603 If the environment size is too large to allow xargs to operate
604 normally, 'xargs --help' still works (now).
606 If the input to xargs is a large number of very short options (for
607 example, one character each), earlier versions of xargs would fail
608 with 'Argument list too long'. However, since this is precisely the
609 problem that xargs was invented to solve, this is a bug. Hence on
610 those systems we now correctly use a shorter command line. This
611 problem particularly affected 64-bit Linux systems because of the
612 larger size of pointers, although 32-bit Linux systems were also
613 affected (albeit for longer command lines). In theory the same
614 problem could affect 'find -exec {} +', but that's much less likely
615 (even so, the bug is fixed there too).
617 Bugfix for an unusual failure mode (Savannah bug #14842) where an
618 attempt to allocate more space for directory contents succeeds but is
619 incorrectly diagnosed as a failure. The likelihood of you
620 experiencing this depends on your architecture, operating system and
621 resource limits. This failure has been observed in a directory
622 containing 35396 entries.
624 ** Documentation Changes
626 The EXAMPLES section of the find manual page now correctly describes
627 the symbolic and octal modes for the -perm test.
629 The documentation and "--help" usage information for the -L, -l, -I
630 and -i options have been clarified (but the behaviour has not changed).
632 The documentation now explains more clearly what happens when you use
635 * Major changes in release 4.2.25, 2005-09-03
639 find -perm /440 (which should succeed if a file is readable by its
640 owner or group) now works. Previously there was a bug which caused
641 this to be treated as "find -perm 440".
643 Some files in the xargs test suite have been renamed to avoid problems
644 on operating systems whoch cannot distinguish filenames on the basis
645 of upper/lower case distinctions.
647 The software now builds on Cygwin, including the generated file
650 Findutils should now build once again on systems supporting AFS, but
651 this support has not recently been fully tested. Findutils should
652 also (once again) build on Cygwin.
656 The test suite for find is now much more extensive.
658 * Major changes in release 4.2.24, 2005-07-29
660 ** Documentation Changes
662 The manual now includes a "Worked Examples" section which talks about
663 the various ways in which findutils can be used to perform common
664 tasks, and why some of these alternatives are better than others.
666 The -I option of xargs (which is required by the POSIX standard) is
669 We now document the fact that find ensures that commands run by -ok
670 and -okdir don't steal find's input. Find does this by redirecting
671 the command's standard input from stdin.
673 Many documentation readability enhancements and proofreading fixes
674 were contributed by Aaron Hawley.
676 ** Functional Changes
678 *** Functional changes in locate
680 The "--regex" option of locate now assumes the regular expression to
681 be in the same syntax as is used in GNU Emacs, though this can be
682 changed with the new option --regextype. This is a change from the
683 existing behaviour (which was to use POSIX Basic Regular Expressions).
684 Since this feature is releatively new anyway, I though it was more
685 useful to have compatibility between regular expression handling in
686 find and locate than to maintain the short-lived previous behaviour of
689 The locate program now also supports a "--regextype" long option which
690 controls which regular expression syntax is understood by locate.
691 This is a long option and has no single-letter 'short option'
694 *** Functional changes in find
696 The regular expression syntax understood by "find" can be changed with
697 the -regextype option; this option is positional, meaning that you can
698 have several tests, each using a distinct syntax (this is not
699 recommended practice however).
701 The default regular expression syntax is substantially the same as
702 that recognised by GNU Emacs, except for the fact that "." will match
705 The leaf optimisation can be disabled with the configure option
706 "--disable-leaf-optimisation", which is equivalent to specifying
707 "-noleaf" on all find command lines. This is useful for systems
708 having filesystems which do not provide traditional Unix behaviour for
709 the link count on directories (for example Cygwin and the Solaris 9
710 HSFS implementation).
714 *** Bug Fixes for find
716 The -iregex test now works once again on systems that lack
717 re_search() (that is, systems on which findutils needs to use the
718 gnulib version of this function).
720 find -regex now once again uses GNU Emacs-compatible regular
723 If invoked with stderr closed, the -fprint and -fprintf actions now no
724 longer cause error messages to be sent into the output file.
726 If the link count of a directory is less that two, the leaf
727 optimisation is now disabled for that directory. This should allow
728 searching of non-Unix filesystems to be more reliable on systems that
729 don't take the trouble to make their filesystems look like traditional
730 Unix filesystems. Some filesystems don't even take the trouble to
731 have a link count of less than two and for these, -noleaf is still
732 required unless --disable-leaf-optimisation was used at configure time.
734 The "%Y" directive for the -printf action now no longer changes find's
735 idea of the mode of the file, so this means among other things that
736 "-printf %Y %y" now works properly. This is Savannah bug #13973.
738 * Major changes in release 4.2.23, 2005-06-19
740 ** Documentation Changes
742 The -L and -I options of xargs are currently incompatible (but should
745 Improved the documentation for -execdir and -okdir.
747 ** Functional Changes to updatedb
749 File names ending in "/" which are specified as an argument to
750 --prunepaths (or in $PRUNEPATHS) don't work, so we now issue an error
751 message if the user tries to do that. The obvious exception of course
752 is "/" which does work and is not rejected.
755 * Major changes in release 4.2.22, 2005-06-12
759 If a directory entry searched with "find -L" is a symbolic link to
760 ".", we no longer loop indefinitely. This problem affected find
761 versions 4.2.19, 4.2.20 and 4.2.21. This problem allows users to make
762 "find" loop indefinitely. This is in effect a denial of service and
763 could be used to prevent updates to the locate database or to defeat
764 file security checks based on find. However, it should be noted that
765 you should not use "find -L" in security-sensitive scenarios.
769 None in this release.
771 ** Functional Changes to locate
773 A locate database can now be supplied on stdin, using '-' as a element
774 of the database-path. If more than one database-path element is '-',
775 later instances are ignored.
777 A new option to locate, '--all' ('-A') causes matches to be limited to
778 entries which match all given patterns, not entries which match
779 one or more patterns.
781 ** Documentation Changes
783 Some typos in the manual pages have been fixed. Various parts of the
784 manual now point out that it is good practice to quote the argument of
785 "-name". The manpage now has a "NON-BUGS" section which explains some
786 symptoms that look like bugs but aren't. The explanations of the "%k"
787 and "%b" directives to "find -printf" have been imrpoved.
790 * Major changes in release 4.2.21, 2005-06-07
791 ** Functional Changes to find
793 The GNU extension "find ... -perm +MODE" has been withdrawn because it
794 is incompatible with POSIX in obscure cases like "find ... -perm ++r".
795 Use the new syntax "find ... -perm /MODE" instead. Old usages will
796 still continue to work, so long as they don't conflict with POSIX.
798 If the output is going to a terminal, the -print, -fprint, -printf and
799 -fprintf actions now quote "unusual" characters to prevent unwanted
800 effects on the terminal. See "Unusual Characters in File Names" for
801 further details. There is no change to the behaviour when the output
802 is not going to a terminal. The locate program does the same thing,
803 unless the -0 option is in effect (in which case the filenames are
806 ** Functional Changes to locate
808 The locate command will now read each locate database at most once.
809 This means that if you are using multiple databases and are searching
810 for more than one name, the results will now be printed in a different
811 order (and if you specified a small limit with --limit, you may get a
812 different set of results).
814 A new option '--print' for locate causes it to print the matching
815 results even if the '--count' or '--statistics' option is in effect.
818 find /blah/blah/blah -depth -empty now works once again.
820 The -regex and -iregex tests of find now correctly accept POSIX Basic
821 Regular Expressions. (Savannah bug #12999)
823 The updatedb program now works on systems where "su" does not support
824 the "-s" option, for example Solaris.
826 * Major changes in release 4.2.20, 2005-03-17
827 ** Internationalization and Localization
828 Updated Vietnamese and Dutch translations.
831 Minor bugfix affecting only those who compile from the CVS repository,
832 as opposed to those who compile from the source releases.
834 * Major changes in release 4.2.19, 2005-03-07
837 find should now no longer hang on systems which lack the O_NOFOLLOW
838 flag to open(2) and which are clients of an unresponsive NFS server
839 (Savannah bug #12044).
841 We now avoid inappropriately failing for "find -L foo" or "find -H
842 foo" if foo is a symbolic link (Savannah bug #12181). Previously we
843 used to fail with the error message "Too many levels of symbolic
846 "find . -false -exec foo {} +" no longer runs an extra instance of foo
847 when find exits (Savannah bug #12230).
849 If the chdir() safety check fails but we can no longer get back to
850 where we started, exit with an explanatory (fatal) error message.
851 This does not happen on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD because the safety check
852 is not needed (the security problem the safety check protects against
853 is prevented in a cleaner way on those systems).
855 "make distclean" no longer deletes regex.c (which "make all" needs).
857 ** Functionality Changes
858 "find -printf "%h\n" will now print "." for files in the current directory.
859 Previously it printed nothing (but there was a bug in the %h
860 implementation anyway). This fixes Savannah bug #12085.
862 Should now build (again) on non-C99-compliant systems.
864 ** Documentation enhancements
865 Fixed some typos and clarified wording in "Working with automounters".
867 ** Internationalization and Localization
868 New Vietnamese message translation.
870 * Major changes in release 4.2.18, 2005-02-16
872 *** "find -depth" was missing out non-leaf directories when they contain
873 non-directories. This affected findutils releases 4.2.15,
874 4.2.16 and 4.2.17, but the bug is now fixed.
875 *** Find no longer hangs on systems which are clients of unresponsive
877 ** Documentation improvements
878 *** Improvements and corrections to the find.1 manpage, including corrections to the descriptions of -H and -L.
880 * Major changes in release 4.2.17, 2005-02-08
882 *** bug #11861 undefined symbol "basename" on IRIX 5.3
883 *** bug #11865 xargs -i regression (as compared to findutils-4.2.12)
884 *** bug #11866 Typo in pred_okdir renders it useless (affecting 4.2.16 only)
885 *** patch #3723 fix recent process_top_path change (for -execdir on /)
886 *** Fixing bug #11866 and applying patch #3723 made -execdir work much better.
887 *** find bar/baz/ugh now works again if baz is a symbolic link (broken
890 * Major changes in release 4.2.16, 2005-02-05
891 ** Functionality Changes
892 *** Updated the message catalogues for the translated messages.
893 *** The subfs filesystem is now treated the same as the autofs
895 *** New translations: Belarusian, Catalan, Greek, Esperanto,
896 Finnish, Irish, Croatian, Hungarian, Japanese, Luganda,
897 Malay, Romanian, Slovenian, Serbian, Chinese (simplified).
900 *** The -execdir action now works correctly for files named on the
903 * Major changes in release 4.2.15, 2005-01-29
904 ** Functionality Changes
905 *** locate now supports matching regular expression (--regex).
906 *** --enable-d_type-optimization (introduced in findutils 4.2.13) is now turned on by default.
908 * Major changes in release 4.2.14, 2005-01-25
909 ** Functionality Changes
910 *** New options -L, -P, -H for locate. The work in the same was as the same options for find.
912 *** Don't include the "findutils/find/testsuite/find.gnu" subdirectory in the
913 distributed tar file more than once.
914 *** Should now build on Solaris once again.
915 *** -xtype and -printf %Y now work correctly for symbolic links once again
916 ** Documentation improvements
917 *** All options for "locate" are now documented
919 * Major changes in release 4.2.13, 2005-01-23
920 ** Performance Enhancements
921 *** On Linux and some other systems, a large performance improvement,
922 because we can eliminate many of the calls to lstat() (in extreme
923 cases, 99% of them). Limited testing shows a 2x speedup on NFS
924 filesystems. Other systems which can make use of this enhancement
925 include Mac OS X and *BSD.
927 * Major changes in release 4.2.12, 2005-01-22
928 ** Functionality Changes
929 *** find is now POSIX-compliant, as far as I know.
930 *** -exec ... {} + now works.
931 *** New actions -execdir and -okdir which are like -exec and -ok but more secure.
932 *** "locate -w" is now a synonym for "locate --wholepath".
933 *** An empty path entry in the locate database path (for example "::" in
934 $LOCATE_PATH or in the argument to "locate -d") is taken to mean
935 the default database, whose name is hard-coded in locate.
937 *** If find or xargs cannot write to stdout, for example because
938 output is redirected to a file and the disk is full, the
939 relevant program will return a non-zero exit status.
941 * Major changes in release 4.2.11, 2004-12-12
943 *** Compilation fix for systems without EOVERFLOW.
944 *** More helpful error message if you make a mistake with (, ), -o or -a.
945 ** Functionality Changes
946 *** If you have unclosed parentheses on the find command line,
947 or any of a number of similar problems, find will now produce
948 a more helpful error message.
949 *** locate -b is now a synonym for locate --basename
950 *** locate now supports a --statistics (or -S) option, which prints some
951 statistics about the locate databases.
952 *** Implemented the -samefile option.
953 ** Documentation improvements
954 *** New chapter in the manual, "Security Considerations".
955 *** Better documentation for -prune (Mainly thanks to Stepan Kasal)
957 *** locate's options -i and -w now work with the -e option (previously a bug
960 * Major changes in release 4.2.10, 2004-12-06
962 *** Portability fix for fstype.c: should now compile on UNICOS, and possibly
963 also produce useful results on BeOS and Dolphin, perhaps other
966 * Major changes in release 4.2.9, 2004-12-05
967 ** Functionality Changes
968 *** 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_".
969 *** xargs now supports the POSIX options -E, -I and -L. These are synonyms
970 for the existing options -e, -i and -l, but the latter three are
973 *** xargs -n NUM now invokes a command as soon as it has NUM arguments.
974 Previously, it waited until NUM+1 items had been read, and then
975 invoked the command with NUM arguments, saving the remaining one
977 *** If "find -L" discovers a symbolic link loop, an error message is issued.
978 *** If you specify a directory on the find command line, but -prune
979 is applied to it, find will no longer chdir() into it anyway.
980 ** Documentation improvements
981 *** The precise interpretation of the arguments to the -atime, -ctime
982 and similar tests in find has been documented more clearly.
984 * Major changes in release 4.2.8, 2004-11-24
985 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.7 automount handling on Solaris. This
986 worked to some extent in findutils-4.2.7, but is much improved in
989 * Major changes in release 4.2.7, 2004-11-21
990 ** Functionality Changes
991 *** xargs can now read a list of arguments from a named file, allowing
992 the invoked program to use the same stdin as xargs started with
993 (for example ``xargs --arg-file=todo emacs'').
994 ** Documentation improvements
995 *** The Texinfo manual now has an extra chapter, "Error Messages". Most
996 error messages are self-explanatory, but some of the ones which
997 are not are explained in this chapter.
999 *** Avoid trying to link against -lsun on UNICOS, which doesn't need it or
1001 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.6 automount handling (which hadn't been enabled
1003 *** Reenabled internationalisation support (which had been accidentally
1004 disabled in findutils-4.2.5).
1006 * Major changes in release 4.2.6, 2004-11-21
1008 *** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as
1009 it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount.
1010 This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change
1011 directory into them. This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998,
1014 * Major changes in release 4.2.5, 2004-11-11
1015 ** Functionality Changes
1016 *** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported. These control whether or not
1017 find will follow symbolic links.
1018 *** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case
1020 ** Documentation improvements
1021 *** Better documentation for "xargs -i".
1023 *** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir.
1024 (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location
1025 other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure").
1026 *** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9.
1027 *** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate
1028 warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library
1029 "-lsun". Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem.
1031 * Major changes in release 4.2.4, 2004-11-08
1032 ** Functionality Changes
1033 *** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
1034 now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
1036 *** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system
1037 doesn't support that much).
1038 *** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message
1039 is now issued. Options should be specified immediately after the
1040 list of paths to search. These warnings are enabled if you
1041 specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty. They are diabled
1042 by the use of the -nowarn option.
1043 *** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
1044 which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
1045 *** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
1046 output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
1048 *** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the
1049 number of results. This is useful if you only want to find out if
1050 there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
1051 to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
1052 *** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to
1053 be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
1054 database, rather than the whole name. The default behaviour
1055 (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
1056 parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
1057 *** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to
1058 pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.
1060 *** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
1061 systems that have non-writable string constants.
1062 *** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range
1063 values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
1064 error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
1066 *** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references
1068 * Major changes in release 4.2.3, 2004-10-30
1069 ** Functionality Changes
1070 *** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches.
1071 *** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately.
1072 *** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number.
1073 *** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names.
1074 *** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility
1075 with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. This option is already
1076 deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth".
1077 *** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are
1078 %y and %Y. They indicate the type of the file as a single letter;
1079 these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test.
1080 *** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find,
1081 the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change
1082 (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the
1083 directory we've just returned out of).
1085 *** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings.
1087 * Major changes in release 4.2.2, 2004-10-24
1088 ** Documentation improvements
1089 *** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported.
1091 *** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX
1092 *** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64
1093 *** The built-in internationalisation support now works again.
1095 *** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used,
1096 which means among other things that we only have one config.h file
1098 *** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in
1099 gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a". This is in the lib
1100 directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory.
1101 *** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers.
1103 * Major changes in release 4.2.1, 2004-10-17
1105 *** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard
1106 requires it, as explained at
1107 http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html
1109 * Major changes in release 4.2.1, 2004-10-17
1111 *** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function
1112 that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD
1113 *** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers,
1114 as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html)
1115 *** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t
1117 **** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17).
1119 * Major changes in release 4.2.0, 2003-06-14
1120 ** Functionality Changes
1121 *** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive.
1122 The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment
1123 data contained more than 20480 bytes.
1124 *** New options -wholename and -iwholename
1125 As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over
1126 the -path and -ipath options. Using -ipath now generates a warning,
1127 though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path).
1128 *** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored.
1129 *** New option "-ignore_readdir_race"
1130 silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed
1131 after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before
1132 find stats the file. There is also an option
1133 -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect.
1134 ** Documentation improvements
1135 *** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail
1136 *** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions
1137 The find manual page also now includes a section
1138 which describes the relationship between the features of GNU
1139 find and the POSIX standard. Some other small improvements
1140 to the find and xargs manual pages have been made.
1141 *** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented.
1142 The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now
1143 documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers
1145 *** xargs -i is now more clearly documented.
1147 *** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course)
1148 *** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes
1149 If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input,
1150 it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the
1151 list of files that xargs is trying to read.
1152 *** Better support for 64-bit systems.
1153 *** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect,
1154 I think this is a strange thing to want to do.
1155 *** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed
1156 Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing.
1157 *** updatedb is now somewhat more robust
1158 The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty
1159 database if it fails.
1160 *** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb
1161 Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the
1163 *** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works
1164 This was broken in 4.1.20.
1166 * Major changes in release 4.1.20, 2003-06-14:
1167 ** New maintainer, James Youngman <jay@gnu.org>
1168 ** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left
1170 ** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including
1171 a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository. There are no
1172 differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are
1173 building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file
1175 ** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20.
1177 * Major changes in release 4.1.7, 2001-05-20:
1178 fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used.
1179 security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing.
1181 * Major changes in release 4.1.6, 2000-10-10:
1182 correct bug in prune.
1183 added --ignore-case option for locate
1185 * Major changes in release 4.1.5, 2000-04-12:
1186 Add support for large files
1188 * Major changes in release 4.1.4, 2000-02-26:
1189 bug fixes, more up-to-date languages.
1191 * Major changes in release 4.1.3, 2000-01-27:
1192 added internationalization and localization.
1194 * Major changes in release 4.1.2, 2000-01-18:
1197 * Major changes in release 4.1.1, 1999-08-8:
1198 attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect
1199 "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb
1201 * Major changes in release 4.1, 1994-11-3:
1203 ** Distribution renamed to findutils.
1204 ** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin
1205 instead of $exec_prefix/libexec.
1206 ** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected.
1208 * Major changes in release 4.0, 1994-11-2:
1212 *** Man page for updatedb.
1213 *** Man page for the locate database formats.
1216 *** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend
1217 trees, so it does fewer inode lookups.
1218 *** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given.
1219 *** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include
1220 and you configure using the --with-afs option.
1221 *** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE.
1224 *** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and
1225 allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to
1226 share the databases. The new locate can also detect and read the
1227 old database format automatically. The new databases are typically
1228 30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in
1229 file names). Search times are approximately the same, or faster on
1231 *** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old.
1234 *** Takes command-line options.
1237 *** Performance improved 10-20%.
1238 *** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given.
1239 *** Now has a test suite. Some minor bugs fixed as a result.
1241 * Major changes in release 3.8, 1993-03-29:
1243 ** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex:
1244 -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex
1245 ** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type
1247 * Major changes in release 3.7:
1249 ** locate can search multiple databases
1250 ** locate has an option to specify the database path
1251 ** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail
1253 * No NEWS was kept for earlier releases. Known release dates include:
1254 ** release 3.2, 1991-08-28
1255 ** release 3.1, 1991-08-21
1256 ** release 3.0, 1991-08-21
1257 ** release 2.2, 1991-04-05
1258 ** release 2.1, 1991-01-01
1259 ** release 2.0, 1990-11-20
1260 ** release 1.2, 1990-07-03
1261 ** release 1.1, 1990-06-24
1262 ** release 1.0, 1990-06-22
1263 ** beginning of findutils history, 1987-02-21
1266 This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el:
1268 LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy
1269 LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake
1270 LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec
1271 LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname
1272 LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf