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1 GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes. -*- outline -*- (allout)
2 * Major changes in release 4.2.11
3 ** Functionality Changes
4 *** If you have unclosed parentheses on the find command line,
5 or any of a number of similar problems, find will now produce
6 a more helpful error message.
7 ** Documentation improvements
8 *** Better documentation for -prune
10 * Major changes in release 4.2.10
11 ** Bug Fixes
12 *** Portability fix for fstype.c: should now compile on UNICOS, and possibly
13 also produce useful results on BeOS and Dolphin, perhaps other
14 systems too.
16 * Major changes in release 4.2.9
17 ** Functionality Changes
18 *** 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_".
19 *** xargs now supports the POSIX options -E, -I and -L. These are synonyms
20 for the existing options -e, -i and -l, but the latter three are
21 now deprecated.
22 ** Bug Fixes
23 *** xargs -n NUM now invokes a command as soon as it has NUM arguments.
24 Previously, it waited until NUM+1 items had been read, and then
25 invoked the command with NUM arguments, saving the remaining one
26 for next time.
27 *** If "find -L" discovers a symbolic link loop, an error message is issued.
28 *** If you specify a directory on the find command line, but -prune
29 is applied to it, find will no longer chdir() into it anyway.
30 ** Documentation improvements
31 *** The precise interpretation of the arguments to the -atime, -ctime
32 and similar tests in find has been documented more clearly.
34 * Major changes in release 4.2.8
35 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.7 automount handling on Solaris. This
36 worked to some extent in findutils-4.2.7, but is much improved in
37 findutils-4.2.8.
39 * Major changes in release 4.2.7
40 ** Functionality Changes
41 *** xargs can now read a list of arguments from a named file, allowing
42 the invoked program to use the same stdin as xargs started with
43 (for example ``xargs --arg-file=todo emacs'').
44 ** Documentation improvements
45 *** The Texinfo manual now has an extra chapter, "Error Messages". Most
46 error messages are self-explanatory, but some of the ones which
47 are not are explained in this chapter.
48 ** Bug Fixes
49 *** Avoid trying to link against -lsun on UNICOS, which doesn't need it or
50 have it.
51 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.6 automount handling (which hadn't been enabled
52 on Solaris).
53 *** Reenabled internationalisation support (which had been accidentally
54 disabled in findutils-4.2.5).
56 * Major changes in release 4.2.6
57 ** Bug Fixes
58 *** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as
59 it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount.
60 This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change
61 directory into them. This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998,
62 #9043.
64 * Major changes in release 4.2.5
65 ** Functionality Changes
66 *** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported. These control whether or not
67 find will follow symbolic links.
68 *** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case
69 it is the default).
70 ** Documentation improvements
71 *** Better documentation for "xargs -i".
72 ** Bug Fixes
73 *** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir.
74 (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location
75 other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure").
76 *** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9.
77 *** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate
78 warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library
79 "-lsun". Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem.
81 * Major changes in release 4.2.4
82 ** Functionality Changes
83 *** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
84 now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
85 locate).
86 *** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system
87 doesn't support that much).
88 *** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message
89 is now issued. Options should be specified immediately after the
90 list of paths to search. These warnings are enabled if you
91 specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty. They are diabled
92 by the use of the -nowarn option.
93 *** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
94 which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
95 *** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
96 output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
97 grep -c).
98 *** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the
99 number of results. This is useful if you only want to find out if
100 there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
101 to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
102 *** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to
103 be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
104 database, rather than the whole name. The default behaviour
105 (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
106 parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
107 *** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to
108 pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.
109 ** Bug Fixes
110 *** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
111 systems that have non-writable string constants.
112 *** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range
113 values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
114 error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
115 value).
116 *** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references
118 * Major changes in release 4.2.3
119 ** Functionality Changes
120 *** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches.
121 *** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately.
122 *** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number.
123 *** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names.
124 *** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility
125 with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. This option is already
126 deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth".
127 *** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are
128 %y and %Y. They indicate the type of the file as a single letter;
129 these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test.
130 *** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find,
131 the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change
132 (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the
133 directory we've just returned out of).
134 ** Other Changes
135 *** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings.
137 * Major changes in release 4.2.2
138 ** Documentation improvements
139 *** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported.
140 ** Bug Fixes
141 *** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX
142 *** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64
143 *** The built-in internationalisation support now works again.
144 ** Other Changes
145 *** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used,
146 which means among other things that we only have one config.h file
147 now.
148 *** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in
149 gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a". This is in the lib
150 directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory.
151 *** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers.
153 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
154 ** Bug Fixes
155 *** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard
156 requires it, as explained at
157 http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html
159 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
160 ** Bug Fixes
161 *** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function
162 that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD
163 *** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers,
164 as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html)
165 *** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t
166 ** Other Changes
167 **** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17).
169 * Major changes in release 4.2.0
170 ** Functionality Changes
171 *** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive.
172 The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment
173 data contained more than 20480 bytes.
174 *** New options -wholename and -iwholename
175 As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over
176 the -path and -ipath options. Using -ipath now generates a warning,
177 though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path).
178 *** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored.
179 *** New option "-ignore_readdir_race"
180 silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed
181 after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before
182 find stats the file. There is also an option
183 -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect.
184 ** Documentation improvements
185 *** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail
186 *** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions
187 The find manual page also now includes a section
188 which describes the relationship between the features of GNU
189 find and the POSIX standard. Some other small improvements
190 to the find and xargs manual pages have been made.
191 *** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented.
192 The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now
193 documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers
194 has been improved.
195 *** xargs -i is now more clearly documented.
196 ** Bug Fixes
197 *** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course)
198 *** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes
199 If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input,
200 it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the
201 list of files that xargs is trying to read.
202 *** Better support for 64-bit systems.
203 *** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect,
204 I think this is a strange thing to want to do.
205 *** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed
206 Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing.
207 *** updatedb is now somewhat more robust
208 The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty
209 database if it fails.
210 *** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb
211 Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the
212 locate database.
213 *** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works
214 This was broken in 4.1.20.
216 * Major changes in release 4.1.20:
217 ** New maintainer, James Youngman <jay@gnu.org>
218 ** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left
219 a gap just in case.
220 ** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including
221 a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository. There are no
222 differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are
223 building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file
224 README-CVS).
225 ** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20.
227 * Major changes in release 4.1.7:
228 fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used.
229 security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing.
231 * Major changes in release 4.1.6:
232 correct bug in prune.
233 added --ignore-case option for locate
235 * Major changes in release 4.1.5:
236 Add support for large files
238 * Major changes in release 4.1.4:
239 bug fixes, more up-to-date languages.
241 * Major changes in release 4.1.3:
242 added internationalization and localization.
244 * Major changes in release 4.1.1:
245 attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect
246 "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb
248 * Major changes in release 4.1:
250 ** Distribution renamed to findutils.
251 ** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin
252 instead of $exec_prefix/libexec.
253 ** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected.
254 \f
255 * Major changes in release 4.0:
257 ** Documentation:
258 *** Texinfo manual.
259 *** Man page for updatedb.
260 *** Man page for the locate database formats.
262 ** find:
263 *** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend
264 trees, so it does fewer inode lookups.
265 *** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given.
266 *** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include
267 and you configure using the --with-afs option.
268 *** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE.
270 ** locate:
271 *** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and
272 allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to
273 share the databases. The new locate can also detect and read the
274 old database format automatically. The new databases are typically
275 30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in
276 file names). Search times are approximately the same, or faster on
277 some systems.
278 *** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old.
280 ** updatedb:
281 *** Takes command-line options.
283 ** xargs:
284 *** Performance improved 10-20%.
285 *** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given.
286 *** Now has a test suite. Some minor bugs fixed as a result.
287 \f
288 * Major changes in release 3.8:
290 ** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex:
291 -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex
292 ** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type
293 \f
294 * Major changes in release 3.7:
296 ** locate can search multiple databases
297 ** locate has an option to specify the database path
298 ** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail
300 --//--
301 This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el:
303 LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy
304 LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake
305 LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec
306 LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname
307 LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf