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1 GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes. -*- outline -*- (allout)
2 * Major changes in release 4.2.11
3 ** Bug Fixes
4 *** Compilation fix for systems without EOVERFLOW.
5 *** More helpful error message if you make a mistake with (, ), -o or -a.
6 ** Functionality Changes
7 *** If you have unclosed parentheses on the find command line,
8 or any of a number of similar problems, find will now produce
9 a more helpful error message.
10 ** Documentation improvements
11 *** Better documentation for -prune (Mainly thanks to Stepan Kasal)
12 *** New chapter in the manual, "Security Considerations".
14 * Major changes in release 4.2.10
15 ** Bug Fixes
16 *** Portability fix for fstype.c: should now compile on UNICOS, and possibly
17 also produce useful results on BeOS and Dolphin, perhaps other
18 systems too.
20 * Major changes in release 4.2.9
21 ** Functionality Changes
22 *** 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_".
23 *** xargs now supports the POSIX options -E, -I and -L. These are synonyms
24 for the existing options -e, -i and -l, but the latter three are
25 now deprecated.
26 ** Bug Fixes
27 *** xargs -n NUM now invokes a command as soon as it has NUM arguments.
28 Previously, it waited until NUM+1 items had been read, and then
29 invoked the command with NUM arguments, saving the remaining one
30 for next time.
31 *** If "find -L" discovers a symbolic link loop, an error message is issued.
32 *** If you specify a directory on the find command line, but -prune
33 is applied to it, find will no longer chdir() into it anyway.
34 ** Documentation improvements
35 *** The precise interpretation of the arguments to the -atime, -ctime
36 and similar tests in find has been documented more clearly.
38 * Major changes in release 4.2.8
39 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.7 automount handling on Solaris. This
40 worked to some extent in findutils-4.2.7, but is much improved in
41 findutils-4.2.8.
43 * Major changes in release 4.2.7
44 ** Functionality Changes
45 *** xargs can now read a list of arguments from a named file, allowing
46 the invoked program to use the same stdin as xargs started with
47 (for example ``xargs --arg-file=todo emacs'').
48 ** Documentation improvements
49 *** The Texinfo manual now has an extra chapter, "Error Messages". Most
50 error messages are self-explanatory, but some of the ones which
51 are not are explained in this chapter.
52 ** Bug Fixes
53 *** Avoid trying to link against -lsun on UNICOS, which doesn't need it or
54 have it.
55 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.6 automount handling (which hadn't been enabled
56 on Solaris).
57 *** Reenabled internationalisation support (which had been accidentally
58 disabled in findutils-4.2.5).
60 * Major changes in release 4.2.6
61 ** Bug Fixes
62 *** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as
63 it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount.
64 This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change
65 directory into them. This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998,
66 #9043.
68 * Major changes in release 4.2.5
69 ** Functionality Changes
70 *** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported. These control whether or not
71 find will follow symbolic links.
72 *** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case
73 it is the default).
74 ** Documentation improvements
75 *** Better documentation for "xargs -i".
76 ** Bug Fixes
77 *** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir.
78 (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location
79 other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure").
80 *** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9.
81 *** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate
82 warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library
83 "-lsun". Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem.
85 * Major changes in release 4.2.4
86 ** Functionality Changes
87 *** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
88 now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
89 locate).
90 *** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system
91 doesn't support that much).
92 *** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message
93 is now issued. Options should be specified immediately after the
94 list of paths to search. These warnings are enabled if you
95 specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty. They are diabled
96 by the use of the -nowarn option.
97 *** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
98 which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
99 *** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
100 output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
101 grep -c).
102 *** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the
103 number of results. This is useful if you only want to find out if
104 there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
105 to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
106 *** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to
107 be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
108 database, rather than the whole name. The default behaviour
109 (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
110 parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
111 *** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to
112 pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.
113 ** Bug Fixes
114 *** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
115 systems that have non-writable string constants.
116 *** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range
117 values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
118 error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
119 value).
120 *** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references
122 * Major changes in release 4.2.3
123 ** Functionality Changes
124 *** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches.
125 *** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately.
126 *** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number.
127 *** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names.
128 *** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility
129 with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. This option is already
130 deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth".
131 *** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are
132 %y and %Y. They indicate the type of the file as a single letter;
133 these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test.
134 *** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find,
135 the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change
136 (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the
137 directory we've just returned out of).
138 ** Other Changes
139 *** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings.
141 * Major changes in release 4.2.2
142 ** Documentation improvements
143 *** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported.
144 ** Bug Fixes
145 *** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX
146 *** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64
147 *** The built-in internationalisation support now works again.
148 ** Other Changes
149 *** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used,
150 which means among other things that we only have one config.h file
151 now.
152 *** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in
153 gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a". This is in the lib
154 directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory.
155 *** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers.
157 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
158 ** Bug Fixes
159 *** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard
160 requires it, as explained at
161 http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html
163 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
164 ** Bug Fixes
165 *** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function
166 that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD
167 *** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers,
168 as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html)
169 *** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t
170 ** Other Changes
171 **** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17).
173 * Major changes in release 4.2.0
174 ** Functionality Changes
175 *** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive.
176 The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment
177 data contained more than 20480 bytes.
178 *** New options -wholename and -iwholename
179 As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over
180 the -path and -ipath options. Using -ipath now generates a warning,
181 though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path).
182 *** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored.
183 *** New option "-ignore_readdir_race"
184 silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed
185 after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before
186 find stats the file. There is also an option
187 -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect.
188 ** Documentation improvements
189 *** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail
190 *** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions
191 The find manual page also now includes a section
192 which describes the relationship between the features of GNU
193 find and the POSIX standard. Some other small improvements
194 to the find and xargs manual pages have been made.
195 *** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented.
196 The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now
197 documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers
198 has been improved.
199 *** xargs -i is now more clearly documented.
200 ** Bug Fixes
201 *** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course)
202 *** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes
203 If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input,
204 it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the
205 list of files that xargs is trying to read.
206 *** Better support for 64-bit systems.
207 *** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect,
208 I think this is a strange thing to want to do.
209 *** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed
210 Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing.
211 *** updatedb is now somewhat more robust
212 The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty
213 database if it fails.
214 *** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb
215 Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the
216 locate database.
217 *** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works
218 This was broken in 4.1.20.
220 * Major changes in release 4.1.20:
221 ** New maintainer, James Youngman <jay@gnu.org>
222 ** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left
223 a gap just in case.
224 ** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including
225 a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository. There are no
226 differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are
227 building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file
228 README-CVS).
229 ** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20.
231 * Major changes in release 4.1.7:
232 fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used.
233 security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing.
235 * Major changes in release 4.1.6:
236 correct bug in prune.
237 added --ignore-case option for locate
239 * Major changes in release 4.1.5:
240 Add support for large files
242 * Major changes in release 4.1.4:
243 bug fixes, more up-to-date languages.
245 * Major changes in release 4.1.3:
246 added internationalization and localization.
248 * Major changes in release 4.1.1:
249 attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect
250 "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb
252 * Major changes in release 4.1:
254 ** Distribution renamed to findutils.
255 ** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin
256 instead of $exec_prefix/libexec.
257 ** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected.
258 \f
259 * Major changes in release 4.0:
261 ** Documentation:
262 *** Texinfo manual.
263 *** Man page for updatedb.
264 *** Man page for the locate database formats.
266 ** find:
267 *** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend
268 trees, so it does fewer inode lookups.
269 *** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given.
270 *** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include
271 and you configure using the --with-afs option.
272 *** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE.
274 ** locate:
275 *** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and
276 allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to
277 share the databases. The new locate can also detect and read the
278 old database format automatically. The new databases are typically
279 30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in
280 file names). Search times are approximately the same, or faster on
281 some systems.
282 *** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old.
284 ** updatedb:
285 *** Takes command-line options.
287 ** xargs:
288 *** Performance improved 10-20%.
289 *** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given.
290 *** Now has a test suite. Some minor bugs fixed as a result.
291 \f
292 * Major changes in release 3.8:
294 ** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex:
295 -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex
296 ** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type
297 \f
298 * Major changes in release 3.7:
300 ** locate can search multiple databases
301 ** locate has an option to specify the database path
302 ** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail
304 --//--
305 This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el:
307 LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy
308 LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake
309 LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec
310 LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname
311 LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf