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