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1 GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes. -*- outline -*- (allout)
3 * Major changes in release 4.2.19
4 ** Bug Fixes
6 find should now no longer hang on systems which lack the O_NOFOLLOW
7 flag to open(2) and which are clients of an unresponsive NFS server
8 (Savannah bug #12044).
10 We now avoid inappropriately failing for "find -L foo" or "find -H
11 foo" if foo is a symbolic link (Savannah bug #12181). Previously we
12 used to fail with the error message "Too many levels of symbolic
13 links".
15 "find . -false -exec foo {} +" no longer runs an extra instance of foo
16 when find exits (Savannah bug #12230).
18 If the chdir() safety check fails but we can no longer get back to
19 where we started, exit with an explanatory (fatal) error message.
20 This does not happen on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD because the safety check
21 is not needed (the security problem the safety check protects against
22 is prevented in a cleaner way on those systems).
24 "make distclean" no longer deletes regex.c (which "make all" needs).
26 ** Functionality Changes
27 "find -printf "%h\n" will now print "." for files in the current directory.
28 Previously it printed nothing (but there was a bug in the %h
29 implementation anyway). This fixes Savannah bug #12085.
31 Should now build (again) on non-C99-compliant systems.
33 ** Documentation enhancements
34 Fixed some typos and clarified wording in "Working with automounters".
36 ** Internationalization and Localization
37 New Vietnamese message translation.
38 \f
39 * Major changes in release 4.2.18
40 ** Bug Fixes
41 *** "find -depth" was missing out non-leaf directories when they contain
42 non-directories. This affected findutils releases 4.2.15,
43 4.2.16 and 4.2.17, but the bug is now fixed.
44 *** Find no longer hangs on systems which are clients of unresponsive
45 NFS servers.
46 ** Documentation improvements
47 *** Improvements and corrections to the find.1 manpage, including corrections to the descriptions of -H and -L.
48 \f
49 * Major changes in release 4.2.17
50 ** Bug Fixes
51 *** bug #11861 undefined symbol "basename" on IRIX 5.3
52 *** bug #11865 xargs -i regression (as compared to findutils-4.2.12)
53 *** bug #11866 Typo in pred_okdir renders it useless (affecting 4.2.16 only)
54 *** patch #3723 fix recent process_top_path change (for -execdir on /)
55 *** Fixing bug #11866 and applying patch #3723 made -execdir work much better.
56 *** find bar/baz/ugh now works again if baz is a symbolic link (broken
57 in 4.2.15).
58 \f
59 * Major changes in release 4.2.16
60 ** Functionality Changes
61 *** Updated the message catalogues for the translated messages.
62 *** The subfs filesystem is now treated the same as the autofs
63 filesystem is.
64 *** New translations: Belarusian, Catalan, Greek, Esperanto,
65 Finnish, Irish, Croatian, Hungarian, Japanese, Luganda,
66 Malay, Romanian, Slovenian, Serbian, Chinese (simplified).
68 ** Bug Fixes
69 *** The -execdir action now works correctly for files named on the
70 command line.
71 \f
72 * Major changes in release 4.2.15
73 ** Functionality Changes
74 *** locate now supports matching regular expression (--regex).
75 *** --enable-d_type-optimization (introduced in findutils 4.2.13) is now turned on by default.
76 \f
77 * Major changes in release 4.2.14
78 ** Functionality Changes
79 *** New options -L, -P, -H for locate. The work in the same was as the same options for find.
80 ** Bug Fixes
81 *** Don't include the "findutils/find/testsuite/find.gnu" subdirectory in the
82 distributed tar file more than once.
83 *** Should now build on Solaris once again.
84 *** -xtype and -printf %Y now work correctly for symbolic links once again
85 ** Documentation improvements
86 *** All options for "locate" are now documented
87 \f
88 * Major changes in release 4.2.13
89 ** Performance Enhancements
90 *** On Linux and some other systems, a large performance improvement,
91 because we can eliminate many of the calls to lstat() (in extreme
92 cases, 99% of them). Limited testing shows a 2x speedup on NFS
93 filesystems. Other systems which can make use of this enhancement
94 include Mac OS X and *BSD.
95 \f
96 * Major changes in release 4.2.12
97 ** Functionality Changes
98 *** find is now POSIX-compliant, as far as I know.
99 *** -exec ... {} + now works.
100 *** New actions -execdir and -okdir which are like -exec and -ok but more secure.
101 *** "locate -w" is now a synonym for "locate --wholepath".
102 *** An empty path entry in the locate database path (for example "::" in
103 $LOCATE_PATH or in the argument to "locate -d") is taken to mean
104 the default database, whose name is hard-coded in locate.
105 ** Bug Fixes
106 *** If find or xargs cannot write to stdout, for example because
107 output is redirected to a file and the disk is full, the
108 relevant program will return a non-zero exit status.
109 \f
110 * Major changes in release 4.2.11
111 ** Bug Fixes
112 *** Compilation fix for systems without EOVERFLOW.
113 *** More helpful error message if you make a mistake with (, ), -o or -a.
114 ** Functionality Changes
115 *** If you have unclosed parentheses on the find command line,
116 or any of a number of similar problems, find will now produce
117 a more helpful error message.
118 *** locate -b is now a synonym for locate --basename
119 *** locate now supports a --statistics (or -S) option, which prints some
120 statistics about the locate databases.
121 *** Implemented the -samefile option.
122 ** Documentation improvements
123 *** New chapter in the manual, "Security Considerations".
124 *** Better documentation for -prune (Mainly thanks to Stepan Kasal)
125 ** Bug Fixes
126 *** locate's options -i and -w now work with the -e option (previously a bug
127 prevented this).
128 \f
129 * Major changes in release 4.2.10
130 ** Bug Fixes
131 *** Portability fix for fstype.c: should now compile on UNICOS, and possibly
132 also produce useful results on BeOS and Dolphin, perhaps other
133 systems too.
134 \f
135 * Major changes in release 4.2.9
136 ** Functionality Changes
137 *** 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_".
138 *** xargs now supports the POSIX options -E, -I and -L. These are synonyms
139 for the existing options -e, -i and -l, but the latter three are
140 now deprecated.
141 ** Bug Fixes
142 *** xargs -n NUM now invokes a command as soon as it has NUM arguments.
143 Previously, it waited until NUM+1 items had been read, and then
144 invoked the command with NUM arguments, saving the remaining one
145 for next time.
146 *** If "find -L" discovers a symbolic link loop, an error message is issued.
147 *** If you specify a directory on the find command line, but -prune
148 is applied to it, find will no longer chdir() into it anyway.
149 ** Documentation improvements
150 *** The precise interpretation of the arguments to the -atime, -ctime
151 and similar tests in find has been documented more clearly.
152 \f
153 * Major changes in release 4.2.8
154 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.7 automount handling on Solaris. This
155 worked to some extent in findutils-4.2.7, but is much improved in
156 findutils-4.2.8.
157 \f
158 * Major changes in release 4.2.7
159 ** Functionality Changes
160 *** xargs can now read a list of arguments from a named file, allowing
161 the invoked program to use the same stdin as xargs started with
162 (for example ``xargs --arg-file=todo emacs'').
163 ** Documentation improvements
164 *** The Texinfo manual now has an extra chapter, "Error Messages". Most
165 error messages are self-explanatory, but some of the ones which
166 are not are explained in this chapter.
167 ** Bug Fixes
168 *** Avoid trying to link against -lsun on UNICOS, which doesn't need it or
169 have it.
170 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.6 automount handling (which hadn't been enabled
171 on Solaris).
172 *** Reenabled internationalisation support (which had been accidentally
173 disabled in findutils-4.2.5).
174 \f
175 * Major changes in release 4.2.6
176 ** Bug Fixes
177 *** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as
178 it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount.
179 This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change
180 directory into them. This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998,
181 #9043.
182 \f
183 * Major changes in release 4.2.5
184 ** Functionality Changes
185 *** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported. These control whether or not
186 find will follow symbolic links.
187 *** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case
188 it is the default).
189 ** Documentation improvements
190 *** Better documentation for "xargs -i".
191 ** Bug Fixes
192 *** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir.
193 (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location
194 other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure").
195 *** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9.
196 *** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate
197 warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library
198 "-lsun". Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem.
199 \f
200 * Major changes in release 4.2.4
201 ** Functionality Changes
202 *** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
203 now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
204 locate).
205 *** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system
206 doesn't support that much).
207 *** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message
208 is now issued. Options should be specified immediately after the
209 list of paths to search. These warnings are enabled if you
210 specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty. They are diabled
211 by the use of the -nowarn option.
212 *** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
213 which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
214 *** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
215 output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
216 grep -c).
217 *** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the
218 number of results. This is useful if you only want to find out if
219 there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
220 to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
221 *** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to
222 be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
223 database, rather than the whole name. The default behaviour
224 (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
225 parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
226 *** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to
227 pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.
228 ** Bug Fixes
229 *** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
230 systems that have non-writable string constants.
231 *** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range
232 values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
233 error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
234 value).
235 *** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references
236 \f
237 * Major changes in release 4.2.3
238 ** Functionality Changes
239 *** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches.
240 *** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately.
241 *** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number.
242 *** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names.
243 *** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility
244 with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. This option is already
245 deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth".
246 *** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are
247 %y and %Y. They indicate the type of the file as a single letter;
248 these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test.
249 *** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find,
250 the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change
251 (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the
252 directory we've just returned out of).
253 ** Other Changes
254 *** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings.
255 \f
256 * Major changes in release 4.2.2
257 ** Documentation improvements
258 *** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported.
259 ** Bug Fixes
260 *** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX
261 *** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64
262 *** The built-in internationalisation support now works again.
263 ** Other Changes
264 *** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used,
265 which means among other things that we only have one config.h file
266 now.
267 *** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in
268 gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a". This is in the lib
269 directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory.
270 *** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers.
271 \f
272 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
273 ** Bug Fixes
274 *** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard
275 requires it, as explained at
276 http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html
277 \f
278 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
279 ** Bug Fixes
280 *** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function
281 that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD
282 *** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers,
283 as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html)
284 *** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t
285 ** Other Changes
286 **** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17).
287 \f
288 * Major changes in release 4.2.0
289 ** Functionality Changes
290 *** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive.
291 The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment
292 data contained more than 20480 bytes.
293 *** New options -wholename and -iwholename
294 As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over
295 the -path and -ipath options. Using -ipath now generates a warning,
296 though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path).
297 *** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored.
298 *** New option "-ignore_readdir_race"
299 silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed
300 after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before
301 find stats the file. There is also an option
302 -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect.
303 ** Documentation improvements
304 *** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail
305 *** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions
306 The find manual page also now includes a section
307 which describes the relationship between the features of GNU
308 find and the POSIX standard. Some other small improvements
309 to the find and xargs manual pages have been made.
310 *** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented.
311 The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now
312 documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers
313 has been improved.
314 *** xargs -i is now more clearly documented.
315 ** Bug Fixes
316 *** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course)
317 *** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes
318 If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input,
319 it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the
320 list of files that xargs is trying to read.
321 *** Better support for 64-bit systems.
322 *** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect,
323 I think this is a strange thing to want to do.
324 *** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed
325 Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing.
326 *** updatedb is now somewhat more robust
327 The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty
328 database if it fails.
329 *** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb
330 Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the
331 locate database.
332 *** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works
333 This was broken in 4.1.20.
334 \f
335 * Major changes in release 4.1.20:
336 ** New maintainer, James Youngman <jay@gnu.org>
337 ** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left
338 a gap just in case.
339 ** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including
340 a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository. There are no
341 differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are
342 building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file
343 README-CVS).
344 ** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20.
345 \f
346 * Major changes in release 4.1.7:
347 fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used.
348 security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing.
349 \f
350 * Major changes in release 4.1.6:
351 correct bug in prune.
352 added --ignore-case option for locate
354 * Major changes in release 4.1.5:
355 Add support for large files
357 * Major changes in release 4.1.4:
358 bug fixes, more up-to-date languages.
360 * Major changes in release 4.1.3:
361 added internationalization and localization.
363 * Major changes in release 4.1.1:
364 attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect
365 "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb
367 * Major changes in release 4.1:
369 ** Distribution renamed to findutils.
370 ** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin
371 instead of $exec_prefix/libexec.
372 ** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected.
373 \f
374 * Major changes in release 4.0:
376 ** Documentation:
377 *** Texinfo manual.
378 *** Man page for updatedb.
379 *** Man page for the locate database formats.
381 ** find:
382 *** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend
383 trees, so it does fewer inode lookups.
384 *** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given.
385 *** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include
386 and you configure using the --with-afs option.
387 *** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE.
389 ** locate:
390 *** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and
391 allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to
392 share the databases. The new locate can also detect and read the
393 old database format automatically. The new databases are typically
394 30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in
395 file names). Search times are approximately the same, or faster on
396 some systems.
397 *** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old.
399 ** updatedb:
400 *** Takes command-line options.
402 ** xargs:
403 *** Performance improved 10-20%.
404 *** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given.
405 *** Now has a test suite. Some minor bugs fixed as a result.
406 \f
407 * Major changes in release 3.8:
409 ** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex:
410 -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex
411 ** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type
412 \f
413 * Major changes in release 3.7:
415 ** locate can search multiple databases
416 ** locate has an option to specify the database path
417 ** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail
419 --//--
420 This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el:
422 LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy
423 LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake
424 LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec
425 LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname
426 LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf