1 GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes. -*- outline -*- (allout)
2 * Major changes in release 4.2.26-CVS
6 The xargs command now supports a new option (--delimiter) which allows
7 input items to be separated by characters other than null and
8 whitespace. This resolves Savannah support request sr #102914.
10 * Major changes in release 4.2.25
14 find -perm /440 (which should succeed if a file is readable by its
15 owner or group) now works. Previously there was a bug which caused
16 this to be treated as "find -perm 440".
18 Some files in the xargs test suite have been renamed to avoid problems
19 on operating systems whoch cannot distinguish filenames on the basis
20 of upper/lower case distinctions.
22 The software now builds on Cygwin, including the generated file
25 Findutils should now build once again on systems supporting AFS, but
26 this support has not recently been fully tested. Findutils should
27 also (once again) build on Cygwin.
31 The test suite for find is now much more extensive.
33 * Major changes in release 4.2.24
35 ** Documentation Changes
37 The manual now includes a "Worked Examples" section which talks about
38 the various ways in which findutils can be used to perform common
39 tasks, and why some of these alternatives are better than others.
41 The -I option of xargs (which is required by the POSIX standard) is
44 We now document the fact that find ensures that commands run by -ok
45 and -okdir don't steal find's input. Find does this by redirecting
46 the command's standard input from stdin.
48 Many documentation readability enhancements and proofreading fixes
49 were contributed by Aaron Hawley.
53 *** Functional changes in locate
55 The "--regex" option of locate now assumes the regular expression to
56 be in the same syntax as is used in GNU Emacs, though this can be
57 changed with the new option --regextype. This is a change from the
58 existing behaviour (which was to use POSIX Basic Regular Expressions).
59 Since this feature is releatively new anyway, I though it was more
60 useful to have compatibility between regular expression handling in
61 find and locate than to maintain the short-lived previous behaviour of
64 The locate program now also supports a "--regextype" long option which
65 controls which regular expression syntax is understood by locate.
66 This is a long option and has no single-letter 'short option'
69 *** Functional changes in find
71 The regular expression syntax understood by "find" can be changed with
72 the -regextype option; this option is positional, meaning that you can
73 have several tests, each using a distinct syntax (this is not
74 recommended practice however).
76 The default regular expression syntax is substantially the same as
77 that recognised by GNU Emacs, except for the fact that "." will match
80 The leaf optimisation can be disabled with the configure option
81 "--disable-leaf-optimisation", which is equivalent to specifying
82 "-noleaf" on all find command lines. This is useful for systems
83 having filesystems which do not provide traditional Unix behaviour for
84 the link count on directories (for example Cygwin and the Solaris 9
89 *** Bug Fixes for find
91 The -iregex test now works once again on systems that lack
92 re_search() (that is, systems on which findutils needs to use the
93 gnulib version of this function).
95 find -regex now once again uses GNU Emacs-compatible regular
98 If invoked with stderr closed, the -fprint and -fprintf actions now no
99 longer cause error messages to be sent into the output file.
101 If the link count of a directory is less that two, the leaf
102 optimisation is now disabled for that directory. This should allow
103 searching of non-Unix filesystems to be more reliable on systems that
104 don't take the trouble to make their filesystems look like traditional
105 Unix filesystems. Some filesystems don't even take the trouble to
106 have a link count of less than two and for these, -noleaf is still
107 required unless --disable-leaf-optimisation was used at configure time.
109 The "%Y" directive for the -printf action now no longer changes find's
110 idea of the mode of the file, so this means among other things that
111 "-printf %Y %y" now works properly. This is Savannah bug #13973.
113 * Major changes in release 4.2.23
115 ** Documentation Changes
117 The -L and -I options of xargs are currently incompatible (but should
120 Improved the documentation for -execdir and -okdir.
122 ** Functional Changes to updatedb
124 File names ending in "/" which are specified as an argument to
125 --prunepaths (or in $PRUNEPATHS) don't work, so we now issue an error
126 message if the user tries to do that. The obvious exception of course
127 is "/" which does work and is not rejected.
130 * Major changes in release 4.2.22
134 If a directory entry searched with "find -L" is a symbolic link to
135 ".", we no longer loop indefinitely. This problem affected find
136 versions 4.2.19, 4.2.20 and 4.2.21. This problem allows users to make
137 "find" loop indefinitely. This is in effect a denial of service and
138 could be used to prevent updates to the locate database or to defeat
139 file security checks based on find. However, it should be noted that
140 you should not use "find -L" in security-sensitive scenarios.
144 None in this release.
146 ** Functional Changes to locate
148 A locate database can now be supplied on stdin, using '-' as a element
149 of the database-path. If more than one database-path element is '-',
150 later instances are ignored.
152 A new option to locate, '--all' ('-A') causes matches to be limited to
153 entries which match all given patterns, not entries which match
154 one or more patterns.
156 ** Documentation Changes
158 Some typos in the manual pages have been fixed. Various parts of the
159 manual now point out that it is good practice to quote the argument of
160 "-name". The manpage now has a "NON-BUGS" section which explains some
161 symptoms that look like bugs but aren't. The explanations of the "%k"
162 and "%b" directives to "find -printf" have been imrpoved.
165 * Major changes in release 4.2.21
166 ** Functional Changes to find
168 The GNU extension "find ... -perm +MODE" has been withdrawn because it
169 is incompatible with POSIX in obscure cases like "find ... -perm ++r".
170 Use the new syntax "find ... -perm /MODE" instead. Old usages will
171 still continue to work, so long as they don't conflict with POSIX.
173 If the output is going to a terminal, the -print, -fprint, -printf and
174 -fprintf actions now quote "unusual" characters to prevent unwanted
175 effects on the terminal. See "Unusual Characters in File Names" for
176 further details. There is no change to the behaviour when the output
177 is not going to a terminal. The locate program does the same thing,
178 unless the -0 option is in effect (in which case the filenames are
181 ** Functional Changes to locate
183 The locate command will now read each locate database at most once.
184 This means that if you are using multiple databases and are searching
185 for more than one name, the results will now be printed in a different
186 order (and if you specified a small limit with --limit, you may get a
187 different set of results).
189 A new option '--print' for locate causes it to print the matching
190 results even if the '--count' or '--statistics' option is in effect.
193 find /blah/blah/blah -depth -empty now works once again.
195 The -regex and -iregex tests of find now correctly accept POSIX Basic
196 Regular Expressions. (Savannah bug #12999)
198 The updatedb program now works on systems where "su" does not support
199 the "-s" option, for example Solaris.
201 * Major changes in release 4.2.20
202 ** Internationalization and Localization
203 Updated Vietnamese and Dutch translations.
206 Minor bugfix affecting only those who compile from the CVS repository,
207 as opposed to those who compile from the source releases.
209 * Major changes in release 4.2.19
212 find should now no longer hang on systems which lack the O_NOFOLLOW
213 flag to open(2) and which are clients of an unresponsive NFS server
214 (Savannah bug #12044).
216 We now avoid inappropriately failing for "find -L foo" or "find -H
217 foo" if foo is a symbolic link (Savannah bug #12181). Previously we
218 used to fail with the error message "Too many levels of symbolic
221 "find . -false -exec foo {} +" no longer runs an extra instance of foo
222 when find exits (Savannah bug #12230).
224 If the chdir() safety check fails but we can no longer get back to
225 where we started, exit with an explanatory (fatal) error message.
226 This does not happen on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD because the safety check
227 is not needed (the security problem the safety check protects against
228 is prevented in a cleaner way on those systems).
230 "make distclean" no longer deletes regex.c (which "make all" needs).
232 ** Functionality Changes
233 "find -printf "%h\n" will now print "." for files in the current directory.
234 Previously it printed nothing (but there was a bug in the %h
235 implementation anyway). This fixes Savannah bug #12085.
237 Should now build (again) on non-C99-compliant systems.
239 ** Documentation enhancements
240 Fixed some typos and clarified wording in "Working with automounters".
242 ** Internationalization and Localization
243 New Vietnamese message translation.
245 * Major changes in release 4.2.18
247 *** "find -depth" was missing out non-leaf directories when they contain
248 non-directories. This affected findutils releases 4.2.15,
249 4.2.16 and 4.2.17, but the bug is now fixed.
250 *** Find no longer hangs on systems which are clients of unresponsive
252 ** Documentation improvements
253 *** Improvements and corrections to the find.1 manpage, including corrections to the descriptions of -H and -L.
255 * Major changes in release 4.2.17
257 *** bug #11861 undefined symbol "basename" on IRIX 5.3
258 *** bug #11865 xargs -i regression (as compared to findutils-4.2.12)
259 *** bug #11866 Typo in pred_okdir renders it useless (affecting 4.2.16 only)
260 *** patch #3723 fix recent process_top_path change (for -execdir on /)
261 *** Fixing bug #11866 and applying patch #3723 made -execdir work much better.
262 *** find bar/baz/ugh now works again if baz is a symbolic link (broken
265 * Major changes in release 4.2.16
266 ** Functionality Changes
267 *** Updated the message catalogues for the translated messages.
268 *** The subfs filesystem is now treated the same as the autofs
270 *** New translations: Belarusian, Catalan, Greek, Esperanto,
271 Finnish, Irish, Croatian, Hungarian, Japanese, Luganda,
272 Malay, Romanian, Slovenian, Serbian, Chinese (simplified).
275 *** The -execdir action now works correctly for files named on the
278 * Major changes in release 4.2.15
279 ** Functionality Changes
280 *** locate now supports matching regular expression (--regex).
281 *** --enable-d_type-optimization (introduced in findutils 4.2.13) is now turned on by default.
283 * Major changes in release 4.2.14
284 ** Functionality Changes
285 *** New options -L, -P, -H for locate. The work in the same was as the same options for find.
287 *** Don't include the "findutils/find/testsuite/find.gnu" subdirectory in the
288 distributed tar file more than once.
289 *** Should now build on Solaris once again.
290 *** -xtype and -printf %Y now work correctly for symbolic links once again
291 ** Documentation improvements
292 *** All options for "locate" are now documented
294 * Major changes in release 4.2.13
295 ** Performance Enhancements
296 *** On Linux and some other systems, a large performance improvement,
297 because we can eliminate many of the calls to lstat() (in extreme
298 cases, 99% of them). Limited testing shows a 2x speedup on NFS
299 filesystems. Other systems which can make use of this enhancement
300 include Mac OS X and *BSD.
302 * Major changes in release 4.2.12
303 ** Functionality Changes
304 *** find is now POSIX-compliant, as far as I know.
305 *** -exec ... {} + now works.
306 *** New actions -execdir and -okdir which are like -exec and -ok but more secure.
307 *** "locate -w" is now a synonym for "locate --wholepath".
308 *** An empty path entry in the locate database path (for example "::" in
309 $LOCATE_PATH or in the argument to "locate -d") is taken to mean
310 the default database, whose name is hard-coded in locate.
312 *** If find or xargs cannot write to stdout, for example because
313 output is redirected to a file and the disk is full, the
314 relevant program will return a non-zero exit status.
316 * Major changes in release 4.2.11
318 *** Compilation fix for systems without EOVERFLOW.
319 *** More helpful error message if you make a mistake with (, ), -o or -a.
320 ** Functionality Changes
321 *** If you have unclosed parentheses on the find command line,
322 or any of a number of similar problems, find will now produce
323 a more helpful error message.
324 *** locate -b is now a synonym for locate --basename
325 *** locate now supports a --statistics (or -S) option, which prints some
326 statistics about the locate databases.
327 *** Implemented the -samefile option.
328 ** Documentation improvements
329 *** New chapter in the manual, "Security Considerations".
330 *** Better documentation for -prune (Mainly thanks to Stepan Kasal)
332 *** locate's options -i and -w now work with the -e option (previously a bug
335 * Major changes in release 4.2.10
337 *** Portability fix for fstype.c: should now compile on UNICOS, and possibly
338 also produce useful results on BeOS and Dolphin, perhaps other
341 * Major changes in release 4.2.9
342 ** Functionality Changes
343 *** 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_".
344 *** xargs now supports the POSIX options -E, -I and -L. These are synonyms
345 for the existing options -e, -i and -l, but the latter three are
348 *** xargs -n NUM now invokes a command as soon as it has NUM arguments.
349 Previously, it waited until NUM+1 items had been read, and then
350 invoked the command with NUM arguments, saving the remaining one
352 *** If "find -L" discovers a symbolic link loop, an error message is issued.
353 *** If you specify a directory on the find command line, but -prune
354 is applied to it, find will no longer chdir() into it anyway.
355 ** Documentation improvements
356 *** The precise interpretation of the arguments to the -atime, -ctime
357 and similar tests in find has been documented more clearly.
359 * Major changes in release 4.2.8
360 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.7 automount handling on Solaris. This
361 worked to some extent in findutils-4.2.7, but is much improved in
364 * Major changes in release 4.2.7
365 ** Functionality Changes
366 *** xargs can now read a list of arguments from a named file, allowing
367 the invoked program to use the same stdin as xargs started with
368 (for example ``xargs --arg-file=todo emacs'').
369 ** Documentation improvements
370 *** The Texinfo manual now has an extra chapter, "Error Messages". Most
371 error messages are self-explanatory, but some of the ones which
372 are not are explained in this chapter.
374 *** Avoid trying to link against -lsun on UNICOS, which doesn't need it or
376 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.6 automount handling (which hadn't been enabled
378 *** Reenabled internationalisation support (which had been accidentally
379 disabled in findutils-4.2.5).
381 * Major changes in release 4.2.6
383 *** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as
384 it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount.
385 This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change
386 directory into them. This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998,
389 * Major changes in release 4.2.5
390 ** Functionality Changes
391 *** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported. These control whether or not
392 find will follow symbolic links.
393 *** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case
395 ** Documentation improvements
396 *** Better documentation for "xargs -i".
398 *** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir.
399 (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location
400 other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure").
401 *** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9.
402 *** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate
403 warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library
404 "-lsun". Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem.
406 * Major changes in release 4.2.4
407 ** Functionality Changes
408 *** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
409 now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
411 *** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system
412 doesn't support that much).
413 *** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message
414 is now issued. Options should be specified immediately after the
415 list of paths to search. These warnings are enabled if you
416 specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty. They are diabled
417 by the use of the -nowarn option.
418 *** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
419 which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
420 *** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
421 output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
423 *** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the
424 number of results. This is useful if you only want to find out if
425 there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
426 to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
427 *** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to
428 be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
429 database, rather than the whole name. The default behaviour
430 (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
431 parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
432 *** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to
433 pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.
435 *** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
436 systems that have non-writable string constants.
437 *** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range
438 values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
439 error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
441 *** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references
443 * Major changes in release 4.2.3
444 ** Functionality Changes
445 *** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches.
446 *** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately.
447 *** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number.
448 *** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names.
449 *** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility
450 with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. This option is already
451 deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth".
452 *** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are
453 %y and %Y. They indicate the type of the file as a single letter;
454 these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test.
455 *** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find,
456 the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change
457 (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the
458 directory we've just returned out of).
460 *** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings.
462 * Major changes in release 4.2.2
463 ** Documentation improvements
464 *** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported.
466 *** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX
467 *** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64
468 *** The built-in internationalisation support now works again.
470 *** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used,
471 which means among other things that we only have one config.h file
473 *** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in
474 gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a". This is in the lib
475 directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory.
476 *** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers.
478 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
480 *** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard
481 requires it, as explained at
482 http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html
484 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
486 *** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function
487 that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD
488 *** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers,
489 as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html)
490 *** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t
492 **** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17).
494 * Major changes in release 4.2.0
495 ** Functionality Changes
496 *** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive.
497 The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment
498 data contained more than 20480 bytes.
499 *** New options -wholename and -iwholename
500 As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over
501 the -path and -ipath options. Using -ipath now generates a warning,
502 though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path).
503 *** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored.
504 *** New option "-ignore_readdir_race"
505 silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed
506 after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before
507 find stats the file. There is also an option
508 -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect.
509 ** Documentation improvements
510 *** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail
511 *** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions
512 The find manual page also now includes a section
513 which describes the relationship between the features of GNU
514 find and the POSIX standard. Some other small improvements
515 to the find and xargs manual pages have been made.
516 *** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented.
517 The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now
518 documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers
520 *** xargs -i is now more clearly documented.
522 *** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course)
523 *** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes
524 If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input,
525 it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the
526 list of files that xargs is trying to read.
527 *** Better support for 64-bit systems.
528 *** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect,
529 I think this is a strange thing to want to do.
530 *** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed
531 Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing.
532 *** updatedb is now somewhat more robust
533 The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty
534 database if it fails.
535 *** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb
536 Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the
538 *** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works
539 This was broken in 4.1.20.
541 * Major changes in release 4.1.20:
542 ** New maintainer, James Youngman <jay@gnu.org>
543 ** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left
545 ** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including
546 a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository. There are no
547 differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are
548 building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file
550 ** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20.
552 * Major changes in release 4.1.7:
553 fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used.
554 security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing.
556 * Major changes in release 4.1.6:
557 correct bug in prune.
558 added --ignore-case option for locate
560 * Major changes in release 4.1.5:
561 Add support for large files
563 * Major changes in release 4.1.4:
564 bug fixes, more up-to-date languages.
566 * Major changes in release 4.1.3:
567 added internationalization and localization.
569 * Major changes in release 4.1.1:
570 attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect
571 "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb
573 * Major changes in release 4.1:
575 ** Distribution renamed to findutils.
576 ** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin
577 instead of $exec_prefix/libexec.
578 ** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected.
580 * Major changes in release 4.0:
584 *** Man page for updatedb.
585 *** Man page for the locate database formats.
588 *** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend
589 trees, so it does fewer inode lookups.
590 *** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given.
591 *** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include
592 and you configure using the --with-afs option.
593 *** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE.
596 *** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and
597 allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to
598 share the databases. The new locate can also detect and read the
599 old database format automatically. The new databases are typically
600 30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in
601 file names). Search times are approximately the same, or faster on
603 *** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old.
606 *** Takes command-line options.
609 *** Performance improved 10-20%.
610 *** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given.
611 *** Now has a test suite. Some minor bugs fixed as a result.
613 * Major changes in release 3.8:
615 ** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex:
616 -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex
617 ** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type
619 * Major changes in release 3.7:
621 ** locate can search multiple databases
622 ** locate has an option to specify the database path
623 ** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail
626 This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el:
628 LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy
629 LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake
630 LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec
631 LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname
632 LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf