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1 GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes. -*- outline -*- (allout)
2 * Major changes in release 4.3.0-CVS
4 All changes up to and including findutils-4.2.27 are included in this
5 release. In addition the following changes are new in this release:
7 ** Functional Changes
9 By default, find now uses the fts() function to search the file
10 system, which means that it can search deeper directory hierarchies.
11 You can go back to the old filesystem search implementation by using
12 the configure option '--without-fts'.
14 New tests, -readable, -writable, -executable. These check that a file
15 can be read, written or executed respectively.
17 * Major changes in release 4.2.27-CVS
19 ** Bug Fixes
21 Fixed a bug in the test suite which caused it to spuriously fail on
22 systems where ARG_MAX is different to the value used by the Linux
23 kernel on 32-bit x86-architecture systems.
25 On systems running the Linux kernel, "find -printf %F" no longer
26 produces the wrong answer for files on filesystems that have been
27 remounted elsewhere using "mount --bind". (Savannah bug #14921).
29 ** Documentation Changes
31 The %M format specifier of "find -printf" is now documented, although
32 it has existed since release 4.2.5.
34 * Major changes in release 4.2.26
36 ** Public Service Announcements
38 I'd like to point out a second time that the interpretation of '-perm
39 +mode' has changed to be more POSIX-compliant. If you want the old
40 behaviour of the GNU extension you should use '-perm /mode'. See the
41 NEWS entry for findutils version 4.2.21 for details.
43 ** Functional Changes
45 The xargs command now supports a new option (--delimiter) which allows
46 input items to be separated by characters other than null and
47 whitespace. This resolves Savannah support request sr #102914.
49 Sometimes find needs to read the /etc/mtab file (or perform the
50 equivalent operation on systems not using /etc/mtab). If this
51 information is needed butnot available, find now exits with an error
52 message non-zero status. If the information is not needed, find will
53 not spuriously fail.
55 A new xargs option --delimiter allows the input delimiter to be
56 changed (previously \0 was the only choice unless you use the -L
57 option, which changes other semantics too).
59 ** Bug Fixes
61 If the environment size is too large to allow xargs to operate
62 normally, 'xargs --help' still works (now).
64 If the input to xargs is a large number of very short options (for
65 example, one character each), earlier versions of xargs would fail
66 with 'Argument list too long'. However, since this is precisely the
67 problem that xargs was invented to solve, this is a bug. Hence on
68 those systems we now correctly use a shorter command line. This
69 problem particularly affected 64-bit Linux systems because of the
70 larger size of pointers, although 32-bit Linux systems were also
71 affected (albeit for longer command lines). In theory the same
72 problem could affect 'find -exec {} +', but that's much less likely
73 (even so, the bug is fixed there too).
76 ** Documentation Changes
78 The EXAMPLES section of the find manual page now correctly describes
79 the symbolic and octal modes for the -perm test.
81 The documentation and "--help" usage information for the -L, -l, -I
82 and -i options have been clarified (but the behaviour has not changed).
84 The documentation now explains more clearly what happens when you use
85 "-L -type l".
87 * Major changes in release 4.2.25
89 ** Bug Fixes
91 find -perm /440 (which should succeed if a file is readable by its
92 owner or group) now works. Previously there was a bug which caused
93 this to be treated as "find -perm 440".
95 Some files in the xargs test suite have been renamed to avoid problems
96 on operating systems whoch cannot distinguish filenames on the basis
97 of upper/lower case distinctions.
99 The software now builds on Cygwin, including the generated file
100 regexprops.texi.
102 Findutils should now build once again on systems supporting AFS, but
103 this support has not recently been fully tested. Findutils should
104 also (once again) build on Cygwin.
106 ** Other Changes
108 The test suite for find is now much more extensive.
110 * Major changes in release 4.2.24
112 ** Documentation Changes
114 The manual now includes a "Worked Examples" section which talks about
115 the various ways in which findutils can be used to perform common
116 tasks, and why some of these alternatives are better than others.
118 The -I option of xargs (which is required by the POSIX standard) is
119 now documented.
121 We now document the fact that find ensures that commands run by -ok
122 and -okdir don't steal find's input. Find does this by redirecting
123 the command's standard input from stdin.
125 Many documentation readability enhancements and proofreading fixes
126 were contributed by Aaron Hawley.
128 ** Functional Changes
130 *** Functional changes in locate
132 The "--regex" option of locate now assumes the regular expression to
133 be in the same syntax as is used in GNU Emacs, though this can be
134 changed with the new option --regextype. This is a change from the
135 existing behaviour (which was to use POSIX Basic Regular Expressions).
136 Since this feature is releatively new anyway, I though it was more
137 useful to have compatibility between regular expression handling in
138 find and locate than to maintain the short-lived previous behaviour of
139 locate.
141 The locate program now also supports a "--regextype" long option which
142 controls which regular expression syntax is understood by locate.
143 This is a long option and has no single-letter 'short option'
144 equivalent.
146 *** Functional changes in find
148 The regular expression syntax understood by "find" can be changed with
149 the -regextype option; this option is positional, meaning that you can
150 have several tests, each using a distinct syntax (this is not
151 recommended practice however).
153 The default regular expression syntax is substantially the same as
154 that recognised by GNU Emacs, except for the fact that "." will match
155 a newline.
157 The leaf optimisation can be disabled with the configure option
158 "--disable-leaf-optimisation", which is equivalent to specifying
159 "-noleaf" on all find command lines. This is useful for systems
160 having filesystems which do not provide traditional Unix behaviour for
161 the link count on directories (for example Cygwin and the Solaris 9
162 HSFS implementation).
164 ** Bug Fixes
166 *** Bug Fixes for find
168 The -iregex test now works once again on systems that lack
169 re_search() (that is, systems on which findutils needs to use the
170 gnulib version of this function).
172 find -regex now once again uses GNU Emacs-compatible regular
173 expressions.
175 If invoked with stderr closed, the -fprint and -fprintf actions now no
176 longer cause error messages to be sent into the output file.
178 If the link count of a directory is less that two, the leaf
179 optimisation is now disabled for that directory. This should allow
180 searching of non-Unix filesystems to be more reliable on systems that
181 don't take the trouble to make their filesystems look like traditional
182 Unix filesystems. Some filesystems don't even take the trouble to
183 have a link count of less than two and for these, -noleaf is still
184 required unless --disable-leaf-optimisation was used at configure time.
186 The "%Y" directive for the -printf action now no longer changes find's
187 idea of the mode of the file, so this means among other things that
188 "-printf %Y %y" now works properly. This is Savannah bug #13973.
190 * Major changes in release 4.2.23
192 ** Documentation Changes
194 The -L and -I options of xargs are currently incompatible (but should
195 not be).
197 Improved the documentation for -execdir and -okdir.
199 ** Functional Changes to updatedb
201 File names ending in "/" which are specified as an argument to
202 --prunepaths (or in $PRUNEPATHS) don't work, so we now issue an error
203 message if the user tries to do that. The obvious exception of course
204 is "/" which does work and is not rejected.
207 * Major changes in release 4.2.22
209 ** Security Fixes
211 If a directory entry searched with "find -L" is a symbolic link to
212 ".", we no longer loop indefinitely. This problem affected find
213 versions 4.2.19, 4.2.20 and 4.2.21. This problem allows users to make
214 "find" loop indefinitely. This is in effect a denial of service and
215 could be used to prevent updates to the locate database or to defeat
216 file security checks based on find. However, it should be noted that
217 you should not use "find -L" in security-sensitive scenarios.
219 ** Other Bug Fixes
221 None in this release.
223 ** Functional Changes to locate
225 A locate database can now be supplied on stdin, using '-' as a element
226 of the database-path. If more than one database-path element is '-',
227 later instances are ignored.
229 A new option to locate, '--all' ('-A') causes matches to be limited to
230 entries which match all given patterns, not entries which match
231 one or more patterns.
233 ** Documentation Changes
235 Some typos in the manual pages have been fixed. Various parts of the
236 manual now point out that it is good practice to quote the argument of
237 "-name". The manpage now has a "NON-BUGS" section which explains some
238 symptoms that look like bugs but aren't. The explanations of the "%k"
239 and "%b" directives to "find -printf" have been imrpoved.
242 * Major changes in release 4.2.21
243 ** Functional Changes to find
245 The GNU extension "find ... -perm +MODE" has been withdrawn because it
246 is incompatible with POSIX in obscure cases like "find ... -perm ++r".
247 Use the new syntax "find ... -perm /MODE" instead. Old usages will
248 still continue to work, so long as they don't conflict with POSIX.
250 If the output is going to a terminal, the -print, -fprint, -printf and
251 -fprintf actions now quote "unusual" characters to prevent unwanted
252 effects on the terminal. See "Unusual Characters in File Names" for
253 further details. There is no change to the behaviour when the output
254 is not going to a terminal. The locate program does the same thing,
255 unless the -0 option is in effect (in which case the filenames are
256 printed as-is).
258 ** Functional Changes to locate
260 The locate command will now read each locate database at most once.
261 This means that if you are using multiple databases and are searching
262 for more than one name, the results will now be printed in a different
263 order (and if you specified a small limit with --limit, you may get a
264 different set of results).
266 A new option '--print' for locate causes it to print the matching
267 results even if the '--count' or '--statistics' option is in effect.
269 ** Bug Fixes
270 find /blah/blah/blah -depth -empty now works once again.
272 The -regex and -iregex tests of find now correctly accept POSIX Basic
273 Regular Expressions. (Savannah bug #12999)
275 The updatedb program now works on systems where "su" does not support
276 the "-s" option, for example Solaris.
278 * Major changes in release 4.2.20
279 ** Internationalization and Localization
280 Updated Vietnamese and Dutch translations.
282 ** Bug Fixes
283 Minor bugfix affecting only those who compile from the CVS repository,
284 as opposed to those who compile from the source releases.
286 * Major changes in release 4.2.19
287 ** Bug Fixes
289 find should now no longer hang on systems which lack the O_NOFOLLOW
290 flag to open(2) and which are clients of an unresponsive NFS server
291 (Savannah bug #12044).
293 We now avoid inappropriately failing for "find -L foo" or "find -H
294 foo" if foo is a symbolic link (Savannah bug #12181). Previously we
295 used to fail with the error message "Too many levels of symbolic
296 links".
298 "find . -false -exec foo {} +" no longer runs an extra instance of foo
299 when find exits (Savannah bug #12230).
301 If the chdir() safety check fails but we can no longer get back to
302 where we started, exit with an explanatory (fatal) error message.
303 This does not happen on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD because the safety check
304 is not needed (the security problem the safety check protects against
305 is prevented in a cleaner way on those systems).
307 "make distclean" no longer deletes regex.c (which "make all" needs).
309 ** Functionality Changes
310 "find -printf "%h\n" will now print "." for files in the current directory.
311 Previously it printed nothing (but there was a bug in the %h
312 implementation anyway). This fixes Savannah bug #12085.
314 Should now build (again) on non-C99-compliant systems.
316 ** Documentation enhancements
317 Fixed some typos and clarified wording in "Working with automounters".
319 ** Internationalization and Localization
320 New Vietnamese message translation.
321 \f
322 * Major changes in release 4.2.18
323 ** Bug Fixes
324 *** "find -depth" was missing out non-leaf directories when they contain
325 non-directories. This affected findutils releases 4.2.15,
326 4.2.16 and 4.2.17, but the bug is now fixed.
327 *** Find no longer hangs on systems which are clients of unresponsive
328 NFS servers.
329 ** Documentation improvements
330 *** Improvements and corrections to the find.1 manpage, including corrections to the descriptions of -H and -L.
331 \f
332 * Major changes in release 4.2.17
333 ** Bug Fixes
334 *** bug #11861 undefined symbol "basename" on IRIX 5.3
335 *** bug #11865 xargs -i regression (as compared to findutils-4.2.12)
336 *** bug #11866 Typo in pred_okdir renders it useless (affecting 4.2.16 only)
337 *** patch #3723 fix recent process_top_path change (for -execdir on /)
338 *** Fixing bug #11866 and applying patch #3723 made -execdir work much better.
339 *** find bar/baz/ugh now works again if baz is a symbolic link (broken
340 in 4.2.15).
341 \f
342 * Major changes in release 4.2.16
343 ** Functionality Changes
344 *** Updated the message catalogues for the translated messages.
345 *** The subfs filesystem is now treated the same as the autofs
346 filesystem is.
347 *** New translations: Belarusian, Catalan, Greek, Esperanto,
348 Finnish, Irish, Croatian, Hungarian, Japanese, Luganda,
349 Malay, Romanian, Slovenian, Serbian, Chinese (simplified).
351 ** Bug Fixes
352 *** The -execdir action now works correctly for files named on the
353 command line.
354 \f
355 * Major changes in release 4.2.15
356 ** Functionality Changes
357 *** locate now supports matching regular expression (--regex).
358 *** --enable-d_type-optimization (introduced in findutils 4.2.13) is now turned on by default.
359 \f
360 * Major changes in release 4.2.14
361 ** Functionality Changes
362 *** New options -L, -P, -H for locate. The work in the same was as the same options for find.
363 ** Bug Fixes
364 *** Don't include the "findutils/find/testsuite/find.gnu" subdirectory in the
365 distributed tar file more than once.
366 *** Should now build on Solaris once again.
367 *** -xtype and -printf %Y now work correctly for symbolic links once again
368 ** Documentation improvements
369 *** All options for "locate" are now documented
370 \f
371 * Major changes in release 4.2.13
372 ** Performance Enhancements
373 *** On Linux and some other systems, a large performance improvement,
374 because we can eliminate many of the calls to lstat() (in extreme
375 cases, 99% of them). Limited testing shows a 2x speedup on NFS
376 filesystems. Other systems which can make use of this enhancement
377 include Mac OS X and *BSD.
378 \f
379 * Major changes in release 4.2.12
380 ** Functionality Changes
381 *** find is now POSIX-compliant, as far as I know.
382 *** -exec ... {} + now works.
383 *** New actions -execdir and -okdir which are like -exec and -ok but more secure.
384 *** "locate -w" is now a synonym for "locate --wholepath".
385 *** An empty path entry in the locate database path (for example "::" in
386 $LOCATE_PATH or in the argument to "locate -d") is taken to mean
387 the default database, whose name is hard-coded in locate.
388 ** Bug Fixes
389 *** If find or xargs cannot write to stdout, for example because
390 output is redirected to a file and the disk is full, the
391 relevant program will return a non-zero exit status.
392 \f
393 * Major changes in release 4.2.11
394 ** Bug Fixes
395 *** Compilation fix for systems without EOVERFLOW.
396 *** More helpful error message if you make a mistake with (, ), -o or -a.
397 ** Functionality Changes
398 *** If you have unclosed parentheses on the find command line,
399 or any of a number of similar problems, find will now produce
400 a more helpful error message.
401 *** locate -b is now a synonym for locate --basename
402 *** locate now supports a --statistics (or -S) option, which prints some
403 statistics about the locate databases.
404 *** Implemented the -samefile option.
405 ** Documentation improvements
406 *** New chapter in the manual, "Security Considerations".
407 *** Better documentation for -prune (Mainly thanks to Stepan Kasal)
408 ** Bug Fixes
409 *** locate's options -i and -w now work with the -e option (previously a bug
410 prevented this).
411 \f
412 * Major changes in release 4.2.10
413 ** Bug Fixes
414 *** Portability fix for fstype.c: should now compile on UNICOS, and possibly
415 also produce useful results on BeOS and Dolphin, perhaps other
416 systems too.
417 \f
418 * Major changes in release 4.2.9
419 ** Functionality Changes
420 *** 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_".
421 *** xargs now supports the POSIX options -E, -I and -L. These are synonyms
422 for the existing options -e, -i and -l, but the latter three are
423 now deprecated.
424 ** Bug Fixes
425 *** xargs -n NUM now invokes a command as soon as it has NUM arguments.
426 Previously, it waited until NUM+1 items had been read, and then
427 invoked the command with NUM arguments, saving the remaining one
428 for next time.
429 *** If "find -L" discovers a symbolic link loop, an error message is issued.
430 *** If you specify a directory on the find command line, but -prune
431 is applied to it, find will no longer chdir() into it anyway.
432 ** Documentation improvements
433 *** The precise interpretation of the arguments to the -atime, -ctime
434 and similar tests in find has been documented more clearly.
435 \f
436 * Major changes in release 4.2.8
437 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.7 automount handling on Solaris. This
438 worked to some extent in findutils-4.2.7, but is much improved in
439 findutils-4.2.8.
440 \f
441 * Major changes in release 4.2.7
442 ** Functionality Changes
443 *** xargs can now read a list of arguments from a named file, allowing
444 the invoked program to use the same stdin as xargs started with
445 (for example ``xargs --arg-file=todo emacs'').
446 ** Documentation improvements
447 *** The Texinfo manual now has an extra chapter, "Error Messages". Most
448 error messages are self-explanatory, but some of the ones which
449 are not are explained in this chapter.
450 ** Bug Fixes
451 *** Avoid trying to link against -lsun on UNICOS, which doesn't need it or
452 have it.
453 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.6 automount handling (which hadn't been enabled
454 on Solaris).
455 *** Reenabled internationalisation support (which had been accidentally
456 disabled in findutils-4.2.5).
457 \f
458 * Major changes in release 4.2.6
459 ** Bug Fixes
460 *** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as
461 it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount.
462 This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change
463 directory into them. This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998,
464 #9043.
465 \f
466 * Major changes in release 4.2.5
467 ** Functionality Changes
468 *** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported. These control whether or not
469 find will follow symbolic links.
470 *** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case
471 it is the default).
472 ** Documentation improvements
473 *** Better documentation for "xargs -i".
474 ** Bug Fixes
475 *** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir.
476 (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location
477 other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure").
478 *** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9.
479 *** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate
480 warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library
481 "-lsun". Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem.
482 \f
483 * Major changes in release 4.2.4
484 ** Functionality Changes
485 *** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
486 now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
487 locate).
488 *** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system
489 doesn't support that much).
490 *** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message
491 is now issued. Options should be specified immediately after the
492 list of paths to search. These warnings are enabled if you
493 specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty. They are diabled
494 by the use of the -nowarn option.
495 *** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
496 which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
497 *** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
498 output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
499 grep -c).
500 *** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the
501 number of results. This is useful if you only want to find out if
502 there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
503 to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
504 *** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to
505 be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
506 database, rather than the whole name. The default behaviour
507 (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
508 parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
509 *** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to
510 pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.
511 ** Bug Fixes
512 *** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
513 systems that have non-writable string constants.
514 *** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range
515 values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
516 error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
517 value).
518 *** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references
519 \f
520 * Major changes in release 4.2.3
521 ** Functionality Changes
522 *** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches.
523 *** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately.
524 *** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number.
525 *** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names.
526 *** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility
527 with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. This option is already
528 deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth".
529 *** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are
530 %y and %Y. They indicate the type of the file as a single letter;
531 these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test.
532 *** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find,
533 the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change
534 (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the
535 directory we've just returned out of).
536 ** Other Changes
537 *** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings.
538 \f
539 * Major changes in release 4.2.2
540 ** Documentation improvements
541 *** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported.
542 ** Bug Fixes
543 *** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX
544 *** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64
545 *** The built-in internationalisation support now works again.
546 ** Other Changes
547 *** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used,
548 which means among other things that we only have one config.h file
549 now.
550 *** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in
551 gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a". This is in the lib
552 directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory.
553 *** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers.
554 \f
555 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
556 ** Bug Fixes
557 *** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard
558 requires it, as explained at
559 http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html
560 \f
561 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
562 ** Bug Fixes
563 *** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function
564 that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD
565 *** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers,
566 as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html)
567 *** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t
568 ** Other Changes
569 **** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17).
570 \f
571 * Major changes in release 4.2.0
572 ** Functionality Changes
573 *** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive.
574 The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment
575 data contained more than 20480 bytes.
576 *** New options -wholename and -iwholename
577 As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over
578 the -path and -ipath options. Using -ipath now generates a warning,
579 though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path).
580 *** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored.
581 *** New option "-ignore_readdir_race"
582 silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed
583 after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before
584 find stats the file. There is also an option
585 -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect.
586 ** Documentation improvements
587 *** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail
588 *** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions
589 The find manual page also now includes a section
590 which describes the relationship between the features of GNU
591 find and the POSIX standard. Some other small improvements
592 to the find and xargs manual pages have been made.
593 *** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented.
594 The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now
595 documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers
596 has been improved.
597 *** xargs -i is now more clearly documented.
598 ** Bug Fixes
599 *** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course)
600 *** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes
601 If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input,
602 it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the
603 list of files that xargs is trying to read.
604 *** Better support for 64-bit systems.
605 *** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect,
606 I think this is a strange thing to want to do.
607 *** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed
608 Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing.
609 *** updatedb is now somewhat more robust
610 The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty
611 database if it fails.
612 *** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb
613 Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the
614 locate database.
615 *** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works
616 This was broken in 4.1.20.
617 \f
618 * Major changes in release 4.1.20:
619 ** New maintainer, James Youngman <jay@gnu.org>
620 ** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left
621 a gap just in case.
622 ** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including
623 a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository. There are no
624 differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are
625 building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file
626 README-CVS).
627 ** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20.
628 \f
629 * Major changes in release 4.1.7:
630 fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used.
631 security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing.
632 \f
633 * Major changes in release 4.1.6:
634 correct bug in prune.
635 added --ignore-case option for locate
637 * Major changes in release 4.1.5:
638 Add support for large files
640 * Major changes in release 4.1.4:
641 bug fixes, more up-to-date languages.
643 * Major changes in release 4.1.3:
644 added internationalization and localization.
646 * Major changes in release 4.1.1:
647 attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect
648 "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb
650 * Major changes in release 4.1:
652 ** Distribution renamed to findutils.
653 ** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin
654 instead of $exec_prefix/libexec.
655 ** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected.
656 \f
657 * Major changes in release 4.0:
659 ** Documentation:
660 *** Texinfo manual.
661 *** Man page for updatedb.
662 *** Man page for the locate database formats.
664 ** find:
665 *** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend
666 trees, so it does fewer inode lookups.
667 *** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given.
668 *** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include
669 and you configure using the --with-afs option.
670 *** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE.
672 ** locate:
673 *** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and
674 allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to
675 share the databases. The new locate can also detect and read the
676 old database format automatically. The new databases are typically
677 30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in
678 file names). Search times are approximately the same, or faster on
679 some systems.
680 *** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old.
682 ** updatedb:
683 *** Takes command-line options.
685 ** xargs:
686 *** Performance improved 10-20%.
687 *** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given.
688 *** Now has a test suite. Some minor bugs fixed as a result.
689 \f
690 * Major changes in release 3.8:
692 ** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex:
693 -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex
694 ** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type
695 \f
696 * Major changes in release 3.7:
698 ** locate can search multiple databases
699 ** locate has an option to specify the database path
700 ** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail
702 --//--
703 This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el:
705 LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy
706 LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake
707 LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec
708 LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname
709 LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf