1 GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes. -*- outline -*- (allout)
2 * Major changes in release 4.2.18
4 *** "find -depth" was missing out non-leaf directories when they contain
5 non-directories. This affected findutils releases 4.2.15,
6 4.2.16 and 4.2.17, but the bug is now fixed.
7 *** Find no longer hangs on systems which are clients of unresponsive
9 ** Documentation improvements
10 *** Improvements and corrections to the find.1 manpage, including corrections to the descriptions of -H and -L.
12 * Major changes in release 4.2.17
14 *** bug #11861 undefined symbol "basename" on IRIX 5.3
15 *** bug #11865 xargs -i regression (as compared to findutils-4.2.12)
16 *** bug #11866 Typo in pred_okdir reders it useless (affecting 4.2.16 only)
17 *** patch #3723 fix recent process_top_path change (for -execdir on /)
18 *** Fixing bug #11866 and applying patch #3723 made -execdir work much better.
19 *** find bar/baz/ugh now works again if baz is a symbolic link (broken
22 * Major changes in release 4.2.16
23 ** Functionality Changes
24 *** Updated the message catalogues for the translated messages.
25 *** The subfs filesystem is now treated the same as the autofs
27 *** New translations: Belarusian, Catalan, Greek, Esperanto,
28 Finnish, Irish, Croatian, Hungarian, Japanese, Luganda,
29 Malay, Romanian, Slovenian, Serbian, Chinese (simplified).
32 *** The -execdir action now works correctly for files named on the
35 * Major changes in release 4.2.15
36 ** Functionality Changes
37 *** locate now supports matching regular expression (--regex).
38 *** --enable-d_type-optimization (introduced in findutils 4.2.13) is now turned on by default.
40 ** Functionality Changes
41 * Major changes in release 4.2.14
42 ** Functionality Changes
43 *** New options -L, -P, -H for locate. The work in the same was as the same options for find.
45 *** Don't include the "findutils/find/testsuite/find.gnu" subdirectory in the
46 distributed tar file more than once.
47 *** Should now build on Solaris once again.
48 *** -xtype and -printf %Y now work correctly for symbolic links once again
49 ** Documentation improvements
50 *** All options for "locate" are now documented
52 * Major changes in release 4.2.13
53 ** Performance Enhancements
54 *** On Linux and some other systems, a large performance improvement,
55 because we can eliminate many of the calls to lstat() (in extreme
56 cases, 99% of them). Limited testing shows a 2x speedup on NFS
57 filesystems. Other systems which can make use of this enhancement
58 include Mac OS X and *BSD.
60 * Major changes in release 4.2.12
61 ** Functionality Changes
62 *** find is now POSIX-compliant, as far as I know.
63 *** -exec ... {} + now works.
64 *** New actions -execdir and -okdir which are like -exec and -ok but more secure.
65 *** "locate -w" is now a synonym for "locate --wholepath".
66 *** An empty path entry in the locate database path (for example "::" in
67 $LOCATE_PATH or in the argument to "locate -d") is taken to mean
68 the default database, whose name is hard-coded in locate.
70 *** If find or xargs cannot write to stdout, for example because
71 output is redirected to a file and the disk is full, the
72 relevant program will return a non-zero exit status.
74 * Major changes in release 4.2.11
76 *** Compilation fix for systems without EOVERFLOW.
77 *** More helpful error message if you make a mistake with (, ), -o or -a.
78 ** Functionality Changes
79 *** If you have unclosed parentheses on the find command line,
80 or any of a number of similar problems, find will now produce
81 a more helpful error message.
82 *** locate -b is now a synonym for locate --basename
83 *** locate now supports a --statistics (or -S) option, which prints some
84 statistics about the locate databases.
85 *** Implemented the -samefile option.
86 ** Documentation improvements
87 *** New chapter in the manual, "Security Considerations".
88 *** Better documentation for -prune (Mainly thanks to Stepan Kasal)
90 *** locate's options -i and -w now work with the -e option (previously a bug
93 * Major changes in release 4.2.10
95 *** Portability fix for fstype.c: should now compile on UNICOS, and possibly
96 also produce useful results on BeOS and Dolphin, perhaps other
99 * Major changes in release 4.2.9
100 ** Functionality Changes
101 *** 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_".
102 *** xargs now supports the POSIX options -E, -I and -L. These are synonyms
103 for the existing options -e, -i and -l, but the latter three are
106 *** xargs -n NUM now invokes a command as soon as it has NUM arguments.
107 Previously, it waited until NUM+1 items had been read, and then
108 invoked the command with NUM arguments, saving the remaining one
110 *** If "find -L" discovers a symbolic link loop, an error message is issued.
111 *** If you specify a directory on the find command line, but -prune
112 is applied to it, find will no longer chdir() into it anyway.
113 ** Documentation improvements
114 *** The precise interpretation of the arguments to the -atime, -ctime
115 and similar tests in find has been documented more clearly.
117 * Major changes in release 4.2.8
118 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.7 automount handling on Solaris. This
119 worked to some extent in findutils-4.2.7, but is much improved in
122 * Major changes in release 4.2.7
123 ** Functionality Changes
124 *** xargs can now read a list of arguments from a named file, allowing
125 the invoked program to use the same stdin as xargs started with
126 (for example ``xargs --arg-file=todo emacs'').
127 ** Documentation improvements
128 *** The Texinfo manual now has an extra chapter, "Error Messages". Most
129 error messages are self-explanatory, but some of the ones which
130 are not are explained in this chapter.
132 *** Avoid trying to link against -lsun on UNICOS, which doesn't need it or
134 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.6 automount handling (which hadn't been enabled
136 *** Reenabled internationalisation support (which had been accidentally
137 disabled in findutils-4.2.5).
139 * Major changes in release 4.2.6
141 *** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as
142 it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount.
143 This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change
144 directory into them. This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998,
147 * Major changes in release 4.2.5
148 ** Functionality Changes
149 *** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported. These control whether or not
150 find will follow symbolic links.
151 *** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case
153 ** Documentation improvements
154 *** Better documentation for "xargs -i".
156 *** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir.
157 (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location
158 other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure").
159 *** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9.
160 *** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate
161 warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library
162 "-lsun". Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem.
164 * Major changes in release 4.2.4
165 ** Functionality Changes
166 *** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
167 now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
169 *** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system
170 doesn't support that much).
171 *** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message
172 is now issued. Options should be specified immediately after the
173 list of paths to search. These warnings are enabled if you
174 specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty. They are diabled
175 by the use of the -nowarn option.
176 *** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
177 which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
178 *** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
179 output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
181 *** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the
182 number of results. This is useful if you only want to find out if
183 there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
184 to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
185 *** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to
186 be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
187 database, rather than the whole name. The default behaviour
188 (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
189 parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
190 *** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to
191 pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.
193 *** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
194 systems that have non-writable string constants.
195 *** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range
196 values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
197 error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
199 *** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references
201 * Major changes in release 4.2.3
202 ** Functionality Changes
203 *** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches.
204 *** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately.
205 *** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number.
206 *** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names.
207 *** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility
208 with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. This option is already
209 deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth".
210 *** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are
211 %y and %Y. They indicate the type of the file as a single letter;
212 these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test.
213 *** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find,
214 the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change
215 (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the
216 directory we've just returned out of).
218 *** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings.
220 * Major changes in release 4.2.2
221 ** Documentation improvements
222 *** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported.
224 *** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX
225 *** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64
226 *** The built-in internationalisation support now works again.
228 *** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used,
229 which means among other things that we only have one config.h file
231 *** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in
232 gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a". This is in the lib
233 directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory.
234 *** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers.
236 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
238 *** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard
239 requires it, as explained at
240 http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html
242 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
244 *** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function
245 that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD
246 *** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers,
247 as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html)
248 *** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t
250 **** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17).
252 * Major changes in release 4.2.0
253 ** Functionality Changes
254 *** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive.
255 The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment
256 data contained more than 20480 bytes.
257 *** New options -wholename and -iwholename
258 As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over
259 the -path and -ipath options. Using -ipath now generates a warning,
260 though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path).
261 *** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored.
262 *** New option "-ignore_readdir_race"
263 silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed
264 after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before
265 find stats the file. There is also an option
266 -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect.
267 ** Documentation improvements
268 *** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail
269 *** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions
270 The find manual page also now includes a section
271 which describes the relationship between the features of GNU
272 find and the POSIX standard. Some other small improvements
273 to the find and xargs manual pages have been made.
274 *** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented.
275 The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now
276 documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers
278 *** xargs -i is now more clearly documented.
280 *** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course)
281 *** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes
282 If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input,
283 it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the
284 list of files that xargs is trying to read.
285 *** Better support for 64-bit systems.
286 *** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect,
287 I think this is a strange thing to want to do.
288 *** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed
289 Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing.
290 *** updatedb is now somewhat more robust
291 The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty
292 database if it fails.
293 *** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb
294 Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the
296 *** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works
297 This was broken in 4.1.20.
299 * Major changes in release 4.1.20:
300 ** New maintainer, James Youngman <jay@gnu.org>
301 ** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left
303 ** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including
304 a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository. There are no
305 differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are
306 building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file
308 ** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20.
310 * Major changes in release 4.1.7:
311 fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used.
312 security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing.
314 * Major changes in release 4.1.6:
315 correct bug in prune.
316 added --ignore-case option for locate
318 * Major changes in release 4.1.5:
319 Add support for large files
321 * Major changes in release 4.1.4:
322 bug fixes, more up-to-date languages.
324 * Major changes in release 4.1.3:
325 added internationalization and localization.
327 * Major changes in release 4.1.1:
328 attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect
329 "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb
331 * Major changes in release 4.1:
333 ** Distribution renamed to findutils.
334 ** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin
335 instead of $exec_prefix/libexec.
336 ** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected.
338 * Major changes in release 4.0:
342 *** Man page for updatedb.
343 *** Man page for the locate database formats.
346 *** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend
347 trees, so it does fewer inode lookups.
348 *** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given.
349 *** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include
350 and you configure using the --with-afs option.
351 *** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE.
354 *** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and
355 allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to
356 share the databases. The new locate can also detect and read the
357 old database format automatically. The new databases are typically
358 30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in
359 file names). Search times are approximately the same, or faster on
361 *** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old.
364 *** Takes command-line options.
367 *** Performance improved 10-20%.
368 *** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given.
369 *** Now has a test suite. Some minor bugs fixed as a result.
371 * Major changes in release 3.8:
373 ** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex:
374 -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex
375 ** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type
377 * Major changes in release 3.7:
379 ** locate can search multiple databases
380 ** locate has an option to specify the database path
381 ** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail
384 This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el:
386 LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy
387 LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake
388 LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec
389 LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname
390 LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf