Prepared for the release of findutils-4.2.24

[findutils.git] / NEWS

GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes.      -*- outline -*- (allout)
* Major changes in release 4.2.24

** Documentation Changes

The manual now includes a "Worked Examples" section which talks about
the various ways in which findutils can be used to perform common
tasks, and why some of these alternatives are better than others.

The -I option of xargs (which is required by the POSIX standard) is
now documented.

We now document the fact that find ensures that commands run by -ok
and -okdir don't steal find's input.  Find does this by redirecting
the command's standard input from stdin.

Many documentation readability enhancements and proofreading fixes
were contributed by Aaron Hawley.

** Functional Changes

*** Functional changes in locate

The "--regex" option of locate now assumes the regular expression to
be in the same syntax as is used in GNU Emacs, though this can be
changed with the new option --regextype.  This is a change from the
existing behaviour (which was to use POSIX Basic Regular Expressions).
Since this featrue is releatively new anyway, I though it was more
useful to have compatibility between regular expression handling in
find and locate than to maintain the short-lived previous behaviour of
locate.

The locate program now also supports a "--regextype" long option which
controls which regular expression syntax is understood by locate.
This is a long option and has no single-letter 'short option'
equivalent.

*** Functional changes in find

The regular expression syntax understood by "find" can be changed with
the -regextype option; this option is positional, meaning that you can
have several tests, each using a distinct syntax (this is not
recommended practice however).

The default regular expression syntax is substantially the same as
that recognised by GNU Emacs, except for the fact that "." will match
a newline.

The leaf optimisation can be disabled with the configure option
"--disable-leaf-optimisation", which is equivalent to specifying
"-noleaf" on all find command lines.  This is useful for systems
having filesystems which do not provide traditional Unix behaviour for
the link cound on directories (for example Cygwin and the Solaris 9
HSFS implementation).

** Bug Fixes

*** Bug Fixes for find

The -iregex test now works once again on systems that lack
re_search() (that is, systems on which findutils needs to use the
gnulib version of this function).

find -regex now once again uses GNU Emacs-compatible regular
expressions.

If invoked with stderr closed, the -fprint and -fprintf actions now no
longer cause error messages to be sent into the output file.

If the link count of a directory is less that two, the leaf
optimisation is now disabled for that directory.  This should allow
searching of non-Unix filesystems to be more reliable on systems that
don't take the trouble to make their filesystems look like traditional
Unix filesystems.   Some filesystems don't even take the trouble to
have a link count of less than two and for these, -noleaf is still
required unless --disable-leaf-optimisation was used at configure time.

The "%Y" directive for the -orintf action now no longer changes find's
idea of the mode of the file, so this means among other things that
"-printf %Y %y" now works properly.  This is Savannah bug #13973.

* Major changes in release 4.2.23

** Documentation Changes

The -L and -I options of xargs are currently incompatible (but should
not be).

Improved the documentation for -execdir and -okdir.

** Functional Changes to updatedb

File names ending in "/" which are specified as an argument to
--prunepaths (or in $PRUNEPATHS) don't work, so we now issue an error
message if the user tries to do that.  The obvious exception of course
is "/" which does work and is not rejected.


* Major changes in release 4.2.22

** Security Fixes

If a directory entry searched with "find -L" is a symbolic link to
".", we no longer loop indefinitely.  This problem affected find
versions 4.2.19, 4.2.20 and 4.2.21.  This problem allows users to make
"find" loop indefinitely.  This is in effect a denial of service and
could be used to prevent updates to the locate database or to defeat
file security checks based on find.   However, it should be noted that
you should not use "find -L" in security-sensitive scenarios.

** Other Bug Fixes

None in this release.

** Functional Changes to locate

A locate database can now be supplied on stdin, using '-' as a element
of the database-path. If more than one database-path element is '-',
later instances are ignored.

A new option to locate, '--all' ('-A') causes matches to be limited to
entries which match all given patterns, not entries which match
one or more patterns.

** Documentation Changes

Some typos in the manual pages have been fixed.  Various parts of the
manual now point out that it is good practice to quote the argument of
"-name".  The manpage now has a "NON-BUGS" section which explains some
symptoms that look like bugs but aren't.  The explanations of the "%k"
and "%b" directives to "find -printf" have been imrpoved.


* Major changes in release 4.2.21
** Functional Changes to find

The GNU extension "find ... -perm +MODE" has been withdrawn because it
is incompatible with POSIX in obscure cases like "find ... -perm ++r".
Use the new syntax "find ... -perm /MODE" instead.  Old usages will
still continue to work, so long as they don't conflict with POSIX.

If the output is going to a terminal, the -print, -fprint, -printf and
-fprintf actions now quote "unusual" characters to prevent unwanted
effects on the terminal.  See "Unusual Characters in File Names" for
further details.  There is no change to the behaviour when the output
is not going to a terminal.   The locate program does the same thing,
unless the -0 option is in effect (in which case the filenames are 
printed as-is).

** Functional Changes to locate

The locate command will now read each locate database at most once.
This means that if you are using multiple databases and are searching
for more than one name, the results will now be printed in a different
order (and if you specified a small limit with --limit, you may get a
different set of results).

A new option '--print' for locate causes it to print the matching
results even if the '--count' or '--statistics' option is in effect.

** Bug Fixes
find /blah/blah/blah -depth -empty now works once again.

The -regex and -iregex tests of find now correctly accept POSIX Basic
Regular Expressions.  (Savannah bug #12999)

The updatedb program now works on systems where "su" does not support
the "-s" option, for example Solaris.

* Major changes in release 4.2.20
** Internationalization and Localization
Updated Vietnamese and Dutch translations.   

** Bug Fixes
Minor bugfix affecting only those who compile from the CVS repository, 
as opposed to those who compile from the source releases.

* Major changes in release 4.2.19
** Bug Fixes

find should now no longer hang on systems which lack the O_NOFOLLOW
flag to open(2) and which are clients of an unresponsive NFS server
(Savannah bug #12044).

We now avoid inappropriately failing for "find -L foo" or "find -H
foo" if foo is a symbolic link (Savannah bug #12181).  Previously we
used to fail with the error message "Too many levels of symbolic
links".

"find . -false -exec foo {} +" no longer runs an extra instance of foo
when find exits (Savannah bug #12230).

If the chdir() safety check fails but we can no longer get back to 
where we started, exit with an explanatory (fatal) error message.
This does not happen on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD because the safety check
is not needed (the security problem the safety check protects against
is prevented in a cleaner way on those systems).

"make distclean" no longer deletes regex.c (which "make all" needs).

**  Functionality Changes
"find -printf "%h\n" will now print "." for files in the current directory.
Previously it printed nothing (but there was a bug in the %h
implementation anyway).  This fixes Savannah bug #12085.

Should now build (again) on non-C99-compliant systems.

** Documentation enhancements
Fixed some typos and clarified wording in "Working with automounters".

** Internationalization and Localization
New Vietnamese message translation.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.18
** Bug Fixes
*** "find -depth" was missing out non-leaf directories when they contain 
    non-directories.  This affected findutils releases 4.2.15,
    4.2.16 and 4.2.17, but the bug is now fixed.
*** Find no longer hangs on systems which are clients of unresponsive 
    NFS servers.
**  Documentation improvements
*** Improvements and corrections to the find.1 manpage, including corrections to the descriptions of -H and -L.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.17
** Bug Fixes
*** bug #11861  undefined symbol "basename" on IRIX 5.3 
*** bug #11865  xargs -i regression  (as compared to findutils-4.2.12)
*** bug #11866  Typo in pred_okdir renders it useless (affecting 4.2.16 only)
*** patch #3723 fix recent process_top_path change (for -execdir on /)
*** Fixing bug #11866 and applying patch #3723 made -execdir work much better.
*** find bar/baz/ugh now works again if baz is a symbolic link (broken 
    in 4.2.15).
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.16
**  Functionality Changes
*** Updated the message catalogues for the translated messages.
*** The subfs filesystem is now treated the same as the autofs
    filesystem is.
*** New translations:  Belarusian, Catalan, Greek, Esperanto,
    Finnish, Irish, Croatian, Hungarian, Japanese, Luganda,
    Malay, Romanian, Slovenian, Serbian, Chinese (simplified).

**  Bug Fixes
*** The -execdir action now works correctly for files named on the 
    command line.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.15
**  Functionality Changes
*** locate now supports matching regular expression (--regex).
*** --enable-d_type-optimization (introduced in findutils 4.2.13) is now turned on by default.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.14
**  Functionality Changes
*** New options -L, -P, -H for locate.  The work in the same was as the same options for find.
**  Bug Fixes
*** Don't include the "findutils/find/testsuite/find.gnu" subdirectory in the 
    distributed tar file more than once.
*** Should now build on Solaris once again.
*** -xtype and -printf %Y now work correctly for symbolic links once again
**  Documentation improvements
*** All options for "locate" are now documented
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.13
**  Performance Enhancements
*** On Linux and some other systems, a large performance improvement, 
    because we can eliminate many of the calls to lstat() (in extreme
    cases, 99% of them).  Limited testing shows a 2x speedup on NFS
    filesystems.  Other systems which can make use of this enhancement
    include Mac OS X and *BSD.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.12
**  Functionality Changes
*** find is now POSIX-compliant, as far as I know.
*** -exec ... {} + now works.
*** New actions -execdir and -okdir which are like -exec and -ok but more secure.
*** "locate -w" is now a synonym for "locate --wholepath".
*** An empty path entry in the locate database path (for example "::" in 
    $LOCATE_PATH or in the argument to "locate -d") is taken to mean
    the default database, whose name is hard-coded in locate.
**  Bug Fixes
*** If find or xargs cannot write to stdout, for example because 
    output is redirected to a file and the disk is full, the 
    relevant program will return a non-zero exit status.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.11
**  Bug Fixes
*** Compilation fix for systems without EOVERFLOW.
*** More helpful error message if you make a mistake with (, ), -o or -a.
**  Functionality Changes
*** If you have unclosed parentheses on the find command line, 
    or any of a number of similar problems, find will now produce 
    a more helpful error message.
*** locate -b is now a synonym for locate --basename
*** locate now supports a --statistics (or -S) option, which prints some
    statistics about the locate databases.
*** Implemented the -samefile option.
**  Documentation improvements
*** New chapter in the manual, "Security Considerations". 
*** Better documentation for -prune (Mainly thanks to   Stepan Kasal)
**  Bug Fixes
*** locate's options -i and -w now work with the -e option (previously a bug 
    prevented this).
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.10
**  Bug Fixes
*** Portability fix for fstype.c: should now compile on UNICOS, and possibly 
    also produce useful results on BeOS and Dolphin, perhaps other
    systems too.   
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.9
**  Functionality Changes
*** 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_". 
*** xargs now supports the POSIX options -E, -I and -L.   These are synonyms 
    for the existing options -e, -i and -l, but the latter three are
    now deprecated.
**  Bug Fixes
*** xargs -n NUM now invokes a command as soon as it has NUM arguments.  
    Previously, it waited until NUM+1 items had been read, and then
    invoked the command with NUM arguments, saving the remaining one
    for next time. 
*** If "find -L" discovers a symbolic link loop, an error message is issued.
*** If you specify a directory on the find command line, but -prune 
    is applied to it, find will no longer chdir() into it anyway.
**  Documentation improvements
*** The precise interpretation of the arguments to the -atime, -ctime 
    and similar tests in find has been documented more clearly.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.8
*** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.7 automount handling on Solaris.  This 
    worked to some extent in findutils-4.2.7, but is much improved in
    findutils-4.2.8.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.7
**  Functionality Changes
*** xargs can now read a list of arguments from a named file, allowing 
    the invoked program to use the same stdin as xargs started with
    (for example ``xargs --arg-file=todo emacs'').
**  Documentation improvements
*** The Texinfo manual now has an extra chapter, "Error Messages".  Most 
    error messages are self-explanatory, but some of the ones which
    are not are explained in this chapter.
**  Bug Fixes
*** Avoid trying to link against -lsun on UNICOS, which doesn't need it or 
    have it.
*** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.6 automount handling (which hadn't been enabled
    on Solaris).
*** Reenabled internationalisation support (which had been accidentally 
    disabled in findutils-4.2.5).
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.6
**  Bug Fixes
*** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as
    it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount.
    This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change
    directory into them.  This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998,
    #9043.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.5
**  Functionality Changes
*** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported.  These control whether or not
    find will follow symbolic links.
*** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case 
    it is the default).
**  Documentation improvements
***  Better documentation for "xargs -i".
**  Bug Fixes
*** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir.
    (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location
    other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure").
*** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9.
*** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate 
    warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library
    "-lsun".  Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.4
**  Functionality Changes
*** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
    now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
    locate).
*** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system 
    doesn't support that much).
*** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message 
    is now issued.  Options should be specified immediately after the 
    list of paths to search.  These warnings are enabled if you
    specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty.  They are diabled
    by the use of the -nowarn option.  
*** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
    which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
*** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
    output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
    grep -c).
*** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the 
    number of results.  This is useful if you only want to find out if
    there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
    to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
*** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to 
    be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
    database, rather than the whole name.  The default behaviour
    (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
    parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
*** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to 
    pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.
**  Bug Fixes
*** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
    systems that have non-writable string constants.
*** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range 
    values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
    error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
    value).
*** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.3
**  Functionality Changes
*** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches.
*** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately.
*** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number.
*** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names.
*** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility
    with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD.  This option is already
    deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth".   
*** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are 
    %y and %Y.  They indicate the type of the file as a single letter;
    these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test.
*** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find, 
    the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change
    (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the 
    directory we've just returned out of).
** Other Changes
*** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.2
**  Documentation improvements
*** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported.
** Bug Fixes
*** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX
*** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64
*** The built-in internationalisation support now works again.
** Other Changes
*** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used,
    which means among other things that we only have one config.h file
    now.
*** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in 
    gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a".  This is in the lib
    directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory.
*** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.1
** Bug Fixes
*** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard 
     requires it, as explained at
     http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.1
** Bug Fixes
*** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function 
    that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD
*** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers, 
    as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html)
*** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t
** Other Changes
**** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17).
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.0
** Functionality Changes
*** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive.
    The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment 
    data contained more than 20480 bytes.
*** New options -wholename and -iwholename 
    As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over 
    the -path and -ipath options.  Using -ipath now generates a warning,
    though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path).   
*** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored.
*** New option "-ignore_readdir_race"
    silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed
    after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before 
    find stats the file.  There is also an option
    -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect.   
**  Documentation improvements
*** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail
*** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions
    The find manual page also now includes a section 
    which describes the relationship between the features of GNU 
    find and the POSIX standard.  Some other small improvements 
    to the find and xargs manual pages have been made.
*** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented.
    The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now
    documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers
    has been improved.  
*** xargs -i is now more clearly documented.
** Bug Fixes
*** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course)
*** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes
    If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input, 
    it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the 
    list of files that xargs is trying to read.
*** Better support for 64-bit systems.
*** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect, 
    I think this is a strange thing to want to do.  
*** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed 
    Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing.
*** updatedb is now somewhat more robust
    The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty 
    database if it fails.  
*** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb
    Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the 
    locate database.
*** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works
    This was broken in 4.1.20.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.1.20:
** New maintainer, James Youngman <jay@gnu.org>
** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left 
   a gap just in case. 
** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including 
   a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository.   There are no
   differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are 
   building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file
   README-CVS).
** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.1.7:
fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used.
security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.1.6:
correct bug in prune.
added --ignore-case option for locate

* Major changes in release 4.1.5:
Add support for large files

* Major changes in release 4.1.4:
bug fixes, more up-to-date languages.

* Major changes in release 4.1.3:
added internationalization and localization.

* Major changes in release 4.1.1:
attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect
 "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb

* Major changes in release 4.1:

** Distribution renamed to findutils.
** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin
  instead of $exec_prefix/libexec.
** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.0:

** Documentation:
*** Texinfo manual.
*** Man page for updatedb.
*** Man page for the locate database formats.

** find:
*** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend
   trees, so it does fewer inode lookups.
*** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given.
*** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include
   and you configure using the --with-afs option.
*** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE.

** locate:
*** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and
   allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to
   share the databases.  The new locate can also detect and read the
   old database format automatically.  The new databases are typically
   30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in
   file names).  Search times are approximately the same, or faster on
   some systems.
*** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old.

** updatedb:
*** Takes command-line options.

** xargs:
*** Performance improved 10-20%.
*** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given.
*** Now has a test suite.  Some minor bugs fixed as a result.
\f
* Major changes in release 3.8:

** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex:
  -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex
** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type
\f
* Major changes in release 3.7:

** locate can search multiple databases
** locate has an option to specify the database path
** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail

                        --//--
This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el:

LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy
LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake
LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec
LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname
LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf