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1 GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes. -*- outline -*- (allout)
2 * Major changes in release 4.3.1-CVS
4 ** Bug Fixes
6 Find now follows POSIX rules for determining where directories end and
7 expressions start. This means that "find \(1 \!2 \, \)" now searches
8 in the four named directories, rather than trying to parse an
9 expression. (Savannah bug #15235).
11 You now get a more helpful error message when you use command lines
12 which have missing expressions, such as
13 find . ( )
14 find . !
15 find . -a
16 find . \( -not \)
17 find . \( -true -a
19 Savannah bug #15800: If find finds more subdirectories within a parent
20 directory than it previously expected to based on the link count of
21 the parent, the resulting error message now gives the correct
22 directory name (previously an error message was issued but it
23 specified the wrong directory).
25 There have also been a number of documentation improvements (includng
26 Savannah bug #16269).
28 ** Functional changes
30 For find, debug output can now be enabled at runtime with the -D
31 option. This causes the printing of various sorts of information
32 about find's internal state and progress.
34 The find option -nowarn cannot itself produce a warning (this used to
35 happen with commands like "find . -name quux -nowarn -print".
37 ** Performance Enhancements
39 Find now has a rudimentary cost-based optimiser. It has an idea of
40 the basic cost of each test (i.e. that -name is very cheap while -size
41 is more expensive). It re-orders tests bearing in mind the cost of
42 each test and its likely success. Predicates with side effects (for
43 example -delete or -exec) are not reordered. The optimiser is not
44 yet enabled by default, but the new option -O controls the query
45 optimisation level. To see this in action, try
46 find -D opt -O3 . -type f -o -type c -o -size 555 -name Z
47 and compare the optimised query with:
48 find -D opt -O3 . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z
49 and
50 find -D opt . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z
52 Over time, as optimisations are proven to be robust and correct, they
53 will be moved to lower optimisation levels. Some optimisations have
54 always been performed by find (for example -name is always done early
55 if possible).
57 ** Translations
59 Findutils 4.3.1 includes updated translations for the following
60 languages:
61 Vietnamese, Belarusian, Catalan, Danish, German, Greek, Esperanto,
62 Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Irish, Galician, Croatian, Hungarian,
63 Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Luganda, Malay, Dutch, Polish,
64 Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Kinyarwanda,
65 Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish, Chinese (simplified),
66 Chinese (traditional), Bulgarian
68 * Major changes in release 4.3.0
70 The 4.3.x release series are currently 'development' releases. Please
71 test it, but think carefully before installing it in a production
72 system. New features in findutils-4.3.x are under development; they
73 may change or go away.
75 All changes up to and including findutils-4.2.27 are included in this
76 release. In addition the following changes are new in this release:
78 ** Functional Changes
80 By default, find now uses the fts() function to search the file
81 system. The use of fts greatly increases find's ability to search
82 extremely deep directory hierarchites.
84 You can tell that the version of find you are using uses FTS, because
85 the output of "find --version" will include the word "FTS".
87 Currently two binaries for 'find' are built. The configure option
88 --without-fts can be used to select whether 'find' uses fts:
90 With fts Without fts
91 default configuration find oldfind
92 configure --with-fts find oldfind
93 configure --without-fts ftsfind find
95 New tests, -readable, -writable, -executable. These check that a file
96 can be read, written or executed respectively.
98 * Major changes in release 4.2.27
100 ** Warnings of Future Changes
102 The test -perm /000 currently matches no files, but for greater
103 consistency with -perm -000, this will be changed to match all files;
104 this change will probably be made in early 2006. Meanwhile, a warning
105 message is given if you do this.
107 ** Bug Fixes
109 If xargs is invoked with many short arguments on PPC systems running
110 the Linux kernel, we no longer get an "argument list too long" error
111 from the operating system.
113 Fixed a bug in the test suite which caused it to spuriously fail on
114 systems where ARG_MAX is different to the value used by the Linux
115 kernel on 32-bit x86-architecture systems.
117 On systems running the Linux kernel, "find -printf %F" no longer
118 produces the wrong answer for files on filesystems that have been
119 remounted elsewhere using "mount --bind". (Savannah bug #14921).
121 ** Documentation Changes
123 Following some extensive and detailed review comments from Aaron
124 Hawley, the material in the manual pages and the Texinfo manual are
125 now synchronised.
127 The %M format specifier of "find -printf" is now documented, although
128 it has existed since release 4.2.5.
130 The 'find' manual page now correctly documents the fact that -regex
131 defaults to using Emacs-style regular expressions (though this can be
132 changed).
134 * Major changes in release 4.2.26
136 ** Public Service Announcements
138 I'd like to point out a second time that the interpretation of '-perm
139 +mode' has changed to be more POSIX-compliant. If you want the old
140 behaviour of the GNU extension you should use '-perm /mode'. See the
141 NEWS entry for findutils version 4.2.21 for details.
143 ** Functional Changes
145 The xargs command now supports a new option (--delimiter) which allows
146 input items to be separated by characters other than null and
147 whitespace. This resolves Savannah support request sr #102914.
149 Sometimes find needs to read the /etc/mtab file (or perform the
150 equivalent operation on systems not using /etc/mtab). If this
151 information is needed butnot available, find now exits with an error
152 message non-zero status. If the information is not needed, find will
153 not spuriously fail.
155 A new xargs option --delimiter allows the input delimiter to be
156 changed (previously \0 was the only choice unless you use the -L
157 option, which changes other semantics too).
159 ** Bug Fixes
161 If the environment size is too large to allow xargs to operate
162 normally, 'xargs --help' still works (now).
164 If the input to xargs is a large number of very short options (for
165 example, one character each), earlier versions of xargs would fail
166 with 'Argument list too long'. However, since this is precisely the
167 problem that xargs was invented to solve, this is a bug. Hence on
168 those systems we now correctly use a shorter command line. This
169 problem particularly affected 64-bit Linux systems because of the
170 larger size of pointers, although 32-bit Linux systems were also
171 affected (albeit for longer command lines). In theory the same
172 problem could affect 'find -exec {} +', but that's much less likely
173 (even so, the bug is fixed there too).
175 Bugfix for an unusual failure mode (Savannah bug #14842) where an
176 attempt to allocate more space for directory contents succeeds but is
177 incorrectly diagnosed as a failure. The likelihood of you
178 experiencing this depends on your architecture, operating system and
179 resource limits. This failure has been observed in a directory
180 containing 35396 entries.
182 ** Documentation Changes
184 The EXAMPLES section of the find manual page now correctly describes
185 the symbolic and octal modes for the -perm test.
187 The documentation and "--help" usage information for the -L, -l, -I
188 and -i options have been clarified (but the behaviour has not changed).
190 The documentation now explains more clearly what happens when you use
191 "-L -type l".
193 * Major changes in release 4.2.25
195 ** Bug Fixes
197 find -perm /440 (which should succeed if a file is readable by its
198 owner or group) now works. Previously there was a bug which caused
199 this to be treated as "find -perm 440".
201 Some files in the xargs test suite have been renamed to avoid problems
202 on operating systems whoch cannot distinguish filenames on the basis
203 of upper/lower case distinctions.
205 The software now builds on Cygwin, including the generated file
206 regexprops.texi.
208 Findutils should now build once again on systems supporting AFS, but
209 this support has not recently been fully tested. Findutils should
210 also (once again) build on Cygwin.
212 ** Other Changes
214 The test suite for find is now much more extensive.
216 * Major changes in release 4.2.24
218 ** Documentation Changes
220 The manual now includes a "Worked Examples" section which talks about
221 the various ways in which findutils can be used to perform common
222 tasks, and why some of these alternatives are better than others.
224 The -I option of xargs (which is required by the POSIX standard) is
225 now documented.
227 We now document the fact that find ensures that commands run by -ok
228 and -okdir don't steal find's input. Find does this by redirecting
229 the command's standard input from stdin.
231 Many documentation readability enhancements and proofreading fixes
232 were contributed by Aaron Hawley.
234 ** Functional Changes
236 *** Functional changes in locate
238 The "--regex" option of locate now assumes the regular expression to
239 be in the same syntax as is used in GNU Emacs, though this can be
240 changed with the new option --regextype. This is a change from the
241 existing behaviour (which was to use POSIX Basic Regular Expressions).
242 Since this feature is releatively new anyway, I though it was more
243 useful to have compatibility between regular expression handling in
244 find and locate than to maintain the short-lived previous behaviour of
245 locate.
247 The locate program now also supports a "--regextype" long option which
248 controls which regular expression syntax is understood by locate.
249 This is a long option and has no single-letter 'short option'
250 equivalent.
252 *** Functional changes in find
254 The regular expression syntax understood by "find" can be changed with
255 the -regextype option; this option is positional, meaning that you can
256 have several tests, each using a distinct syntax (this is not
257 recommended practice however).
259 The default regular expression syntax is substantially the same as
260 that recognised by GNU Emacs, except for the fact that "." will match
261 a newline.
263 The leaf optimisation can be disabled with the configure option
264 "--disable-leaf-optimisation", which is equivalent to specifying
265 "-noleaf" on all find command lines. This is useful for systems
266 having filesystems which do not provide traditional Unix behaviour for
267 the link count on directories (for example Cygwin and the Solaris 9
268 HSFS implementation).
270 ** Bug Fixes
272 *** Bug Fixes for find
274 The -iregex test now works once again on systems that lack
275 re_search() (that is, systems on which findutils needs to use the
276 gnulib version of this function).
278 find -regex now once again uses GNU Emacs-compatible regular
279 expressions.
281 If invoked with stderr closed, the -fprint and -fprintf actions now no
282 longer cause error messages to be sent into the output file.
284 If the link count of a directory is less that two, the leaf
285 optimisation is now disabled for that directory. This should allow
286 searching of non-Unix filesystems to be more reliable on systems that
287 don't take the trouble to make their filesystems look like traditional
288 Unix filesystems. Some filesystems don't even take the trouble to
289 have a link count of less than two and for these, -noleaf is still
290 required unless --disable-leaf-optimisation was used at configure time.
292 The "%Y" directive for the -printf action now no longer changes find's
293 idea of the mode of the file, so this means among other things that
294 "-printf %Y %y" now works properly. This is Savannah bug #13973.
296 * Major changes in release 4.2.23
298 ** Documentation Changes
300 The -L and -I options of xargs are currently incompatible (but should
301 not be).
303 Improved the documentation for -execdir and -okdir.
305 ** Functional Changes to updatedb
307 File names ending in "/" which are specified as an argument to
308 --prunepaths (or in $PRUNEPATHS) don't work, so we now issue an error
309 message if the user tries to do that. The obvious exception of course
310 is "/" which does work and is not rejected.
313 * Major changes in release 4.2.22
315 ** Security Fixes
317 If a directory entry searched with "find -L" is a symbolic link to
318 ".", we no longer loop indefinitely. This problem affected find
319 versions 4.2.19, 4.2.20 and 4.2.21. This problem allows users to make
320 "find" loop indefinitely. This is in effect a denial of service and
321 could be used to prevent updates to the locate database or to defeat
322 file security checks based on find. However, it should be noted that
323 you should not use "find -L" in security-sensitive scenarios.
325 ** Other Bug Fixes
327 None in this release.
329 ** Functional Changes to locate
331 A locate database can now be supplied on stdin, using '-' as a element
332 of the database-path. If more than one database-path element is '-',
333 later instances are ignored.
335 A new option to locate, '--all' ('-A') causes matches to be limited to
336 entries which match all given patterns, not entries which match
337 one or more patterns.
339 ** Documentation Changes
341 Some typos in the manual pages have been fixed. Various parts of the
342 manual now point out that it is good practice to quote the argument of
343 "-name". The manpage now has a "NON-BUGS" section which explains some
344 symptoms that look like bugs but aren't. The explanations of the "%k"
345 and "%b" directives to "find -printf" have been imrpoved.
348 * Major changes in release 4.2.21
349 ** Functional Changes to find
351 The GNU extension "find ... -perm +MODE" has been withdrawn because it
352 is incompatible with POSIX in obscure cases like "find ... -perm ++r".
353 Use the new syntax "find ... -perm /MODE" instead. Old usages will
354 still continue to work, so long as they don't conflict with POSIX.
356 If the output is going to a terminal, the -print, -fprint, -printf and
357 -fprintf actions now quote "unusual" characters to prevent unwanted
358 effects on the terminal. See "Unusual Characters in File Names" for
359 further details. There is no change to the behaviour when the output
360 is not going to a terminal. The locate program does the same thing,
361 unless the -0 option is in effect (in which case the filenames are
362 printed as-is).
364 ** Functional Changes to locate
366 The locate command will now read each locate database at most once.
367 This means that if you are using multiple databases and are searching
368 for more than one name, the results will now be printed in a different
369 order (and if you specified a small limit with --limit, you may get a
370 different set of results).
372 A new option '--print' for locate causes it to print the matching
373 results even if the '--count' or '--statistics' option is in effect.
375 ** Bug Fixes
376 find /blah/blah/blah -depth -empty now works once again.
378 The -regex and -iregex tests of find now correctly accept POSIX Basic
379 Regular Expressions. (Savannah bug #12999)
381 The updatedb program now works on systems where "su" does not support
382 the "-s" option, for example Solaris.
384 * Major changes in release 4.2.20
385 ** Internationalization and Localization
386 Updated Vietnamese and Dutch translations.
388 ** Bug Fixes
389 Minor bugfix affecting only those who compile from the CVS repository,
390 as opposed to those who compile from the source releases.
392 * Major changes in release 4.2.19
393 ** Bug Fixes
395 find should now no longer hang on systems which lack the O_NOFOLLOW
396 flag to open(2) and which are clients of an unresponsive NFS server
397 (Savannah bug #12044).
399 We now avoid inappropriately failing for "find -L foo" or "find -H
400 foo" if foo is a symbolic link (Savannah bug #12181). Previously we
401 used to fail with the error message "Too many levels of symbolic
402 links".
404 "find . -false -exec foo {} +" no longer runs an extra instance of foo
405 when find exits (Savannah bug #12230).
407 If the chdir() safety check fails but we can no longer get back to
408 where we started, exit with an explanatory (fatal) error message.
409 This does not happen on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD because the safety check
410 is not needed (the security problem the safety check protects against
411 is prevented in a cleaner way on those systems).
413 "make distclean" no longer deletes regex.c (which "make all" needs).
415 ** Functionality Changes
416 "find -printf "%h\n" will now print "." for files in the current directory.
417 Previously it printed nothing (but there was a bug in the %h
418 implementation anyway). This fixes Savannah bug #12085.
420 Should now build (again) on non-C99-compliant systems.
422 ** Documentation enhancements
423 Fixed some typos and clarified wording in "Working with automounters".
425 ** Internationalization and Localization
426 New Vietnamese message translation.
427 \f
428 * Major changes in release 4.2.18
429 ** Bug Fixes
430 *** "find -depth" was missing out non-leaf directories when they contain
431 non-directories. This affected findutils releases 4.2.15,
432 4.2.16 and 4.2.17, but the bug is now fixed.
433 *** Find no longer hangs on systems which are clients of unresponsive
434 NFS servers.
435 ** Documentation improvements
436 *** Improvements and corrections to the find.1 manpage, including corrections to the descriptions of -H and -L.
437 \f
438 * Major changes in release 4.2.17
439 ** Bug Fixes
440 *** bug #11861 undefined symbol "basename" on IRIX 5.3
441 *** bug #11865 xargs -i regression (as compared to findutils-4.2.12)
442 *** bug #11866 Typo in pred_okdir renders it useless (affecting 4.2.16 only)
443 *** patch #3723 fix recent process_top_path change (for -execdir on /)
444 *** Fixing bug #11866 and applying patch #3723 made -execdir work much better.
445 *** find bar/baz/ugh now works again if baz is a symbolic link (broken
446 in 4.2.15).
447 \f
448 * Major changes in release 4.2.16
449 ** Functionality Changes
450 *** Updated the message catalogues for the translated messages.
451 *** The subfs filesystem is now treated the same as the autofs
452 filesystem is.
453 *** New translations: Belarusian, Catalan, Greek, Esperanto,
454 Finnish, Irish, Croatian, Hungarian, Japanese, Luganda,
455 Malay, Romanian, Slovenian, Serbian, Chinese (simplified).
457 ** Bug Fixes
458 *** The -execdir action now works correctly for files named on the
459 command line.
460 \f
461 * Major changes in release 4.2.15
462 ** Functionality Changes
463 *** locate now supports matching regular expression (--regex).
464 *** --enable-d_type-optimization (introduced in findutils 4.2.13) is now turned on by default.
465 \f
466 * Major changes in release 4.2.14
467 ** Functionality Changes
468 *** New options -L, -P, -H for locate. The work in the same was as the same options for find.
469 ** Bug Fixes
470 *** Don't include the "findutils/find/testsuite/find.gnu" subdirectory in the
471 distributed tar file more than once.
472 *** Should now build on Solaris once again.
473 *** -xtype and -printf %Y now work correctly for symbolic links once again
474 ** Documentation improvements
475 *** All options for "locate" are now documented
476 \f
477 * Major changes in release 4.2.13
478 ** Performance Enhancements
479 *** On Linux and some other systems, a large performance improvement,
480 because we can eliminate many of the calls to lstat() (in extreme
481 cases, 99% of them). Limited testing shows a 2x speedup on NFS
482 filesystems. Other systems which can make use of this enhancement
483 include Mac OS X and *BSD.
484 \f
485 * Major changes in release 4.2.12
486 ** Functionality Changes
487 *** find is now POSIX-compliant, as far as I know.
488 *** -exec ... {} + now works.
489 *** New actions -execdir and -okdir which are like -exec and -ok but more secure.
490 *** "locate -w" is now a synonym for "locate --wholepath".
491 *** An empty path entry in the locate database path (for example "::" in
492 $LOCATE_PATH or in the argument to "locate -d") is taken to mean
493 the default database, whose name is hard-coded in locate.
494 ** Bug Fixes
495 *** If find or xargs cannot write to stdout, for example because
496 output is redirected to a file and the disk is full, the
497 relevant program will return a non-zero exit status.
498 \f
499 * Major changes in release 4.2.11
500 ** Bug Fixes
501 *** Compilation fix for systems without EOVERFLOW.
502 *** More helpful error message if you make a mistake with (, ), -o or -a.
503 ** Functionality Changes
504 *** If you have unclosed parentheses on the find command line,
505 or any of a number of similar problems, find will now produce
506 a more helpful error message.
507 *** locate -b is now a synonym for locate --basename
508 *** locate now supports a --statistics (or -S) option, which prints some
509 statistics about the locate databases.
510 *** Implemented the -samefile option.
511 ** Documentation improvements
512 *** New chapter in the manual, "Security Considerations".
513 *** Better documentation for -prune (Mainly thanks to Stepan Kasal)
514 ** Bug Fixes
515 *** locate's options -i and -w now work with the -e option (previously a bug
516 prevented this).
517 \f
518 * Major changes in release 4.2.10
519 ** Bug Fixes
520 *** Portability fix for fstype.c: should now compile on UNICOS, and possibly
521 also produce useful results on BeOS and Dolphin, perhaps other
522 systems too.
523 \f
524 * Major changes in release 4.2.9
525 ** Functionality Changes
526 *** 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_".
527 *** xargs now supports the POSIX options -E, -I and -L. These are synonyms
528 for the existing options -e, -i and -l, but the latter three are
529 now deprecated.
530 ** Bug Fixes
531 *** xargs -n NUM now invokes a command as soon as it has NUM arguments.
532 Previously, it waited until NUM+1 items had been read, and then
533 invoked the command with NUM arguments, saving the remaining one
534 for next time.
535 *** If "find -L" discovers a symbolic link loop, an error message is issued.
536 *** If you specify a directory on the find command line, but -prune
537 is applied to it, find will no longer chdir() into it anyway.
538 ** Documentation improvements
539 *** The precise interpretation of the arguments to the -atime, -ctime
540 and similar tests in find has been documented more clearly.
541 \f
542 * Major changes in release 4.2.8
543 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.7 automount handling on Solaris. This
544 worked to some extent in findutils-4.2.7, but is much improved in
545 findutils-4.2.8.
546 \f
547 * Major changes in release 4.2.7
548 ** Functionality Changes
549 *** xargs can now read a list of arguments from a named file, allowing
550 the invoked program to use the same stdin as xargs started with
551 (for example ``xargs --arg-file=todo emacs'').
552 ** Documentation improvements
553 *** The Texinfo manual now has an extra chapter, "Error Messages". Most
554 error messages are self-explanatory, but some of the ones which
555 are not are explained in this chapter.
556 ** Bug Fixes
557 *** Avoid trying to link against -lsun on UNICOS, which doesn't need it or
558 have it.
559 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.6 automount handling (which hadn't been enabled
560 on Solaris).
561 *** Reenabled internationalisation support (which had been accidentally
562 disabled in findutils-4.2.5).
563 \f
564 * Major changes in release 4.2.6
565 ** Bug Fixes
566 *** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as
567 it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount.
568 This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change
569 directory into them. This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998,
570 #9043.
571 \f
572 * Major changes in release 4.2.5
573 ** Functionality Changes
574 *** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported. These control whether or not
575 find will follow symbolic links.
576 *** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case
577 it is the default).
578 ** Documentation improvements
579 *** Better documentation for "xargs -i".
580 ** Bug Fixes
581 *** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir.
582 (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location
583 other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure").
584 *** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9.
585 *** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate
586 warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library
587 "-lsun". Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem.
588 \f
589 * Major changes in release 4.2.4
590 ** Functionality Changes
591 *** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
592 now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
593 locate).
594 *** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system
595 doesn't support that much).
596 *** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message
597 is now issued. Options should be specified immediately after the
598 list of paths to search. These warnings are enabled if you
599 specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty. They are diabled
600 by the use of the -nowarn option.
601 *** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
602 which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
603 *** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
604 output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
605 grep -c).
606 *** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the
607 number of results. This is useful if you only want to find out if
608 there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
609 to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
610 *** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to
611 be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
612 database, rather than the whole name. The default behaviour
613 (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
614 parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
615 *** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to
616 pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.
617 ** Bug Fixes
618 *** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
619 systems that have non-writable string constants.
620 *** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range
621 values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
622 error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
623 value).
624 *** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references
625 \f
626 * Major changes in release 4.2.3
627 ** Functionality Changes
628 *** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches.
629 *** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately.
630 *** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number.
631 *** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names.
632 *** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility
633 with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. This option is already
634 deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth".
635 *** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are
636 %y and %Y. They indicate the type of the file as a single letter;
637 these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test.
638 *** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find,
639 the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change
640 (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the
641 directory we've just returned out of).
642 ** Other Changes
643 *** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings.
644 \f
645 * Major changes in release 4.2.2
646 ** Documentation improvements
647 *** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported.
648 ** Bug Fixes
649 *** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX
650 *** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64
651 *** The built-in internationalisation support now works again.
652 ** Other Changes
653 *** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used,
654 which means among other things that we only have one config.h file
655 now.
656 *** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in
657 gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a". This is in the lib
658 directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory.
659 *** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers.
660 \f
661 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
662 ** Bug Fixes
663 *** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard
664 requires it, as explained at
665 http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html
666 \f
667 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
668 ** Bug Fixes
669 *** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function
670 that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD
671 *** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers,
672 as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html)
673 *** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t
674 ** Other Changes
675 **** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17).
676 \f
677 * Major changes in release 4.2.0
678 ** Functionality Changes
679 *** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive.
680 The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment
681 data contained more than 20480 bytes.
682 *** New options -wholename and -iwholename
683 As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over
684 the -path and -ipath options. Using -ipath now generates a warning,
685 though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path).
686 *** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored.
687 *** New option "-ignore_readdir_race"
688 silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed
689 after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before
690 find stats the file. There is also an option
691 -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect.
692 ** Documentation improvements
693 *** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail
694 *** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions
695 The find manual page also now includes a section
696 which describes the relationship between the features of GNU
697 find and the POSIX standard. Some other small improvements
698 to the find and xargs manual pages have been made.
699 *** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented.
700 The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now
701 documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers
702 has been improved.
703 *** xargs -i is now more clearly documented.
704 ** Bug Fixes
705 *** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course)
706 *** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes
707 If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input,
708 it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the
709 list of files that xargs is trying to read.
710 *** Better support for 64-bit systems.
711 *** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect,
712 I think this is a strange thing to want to do.
713 *** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed
714 Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing.
715 *** updatedb is now somewhat more robust
716 The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty
717 database if it fails.
718 *** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb
719 Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the
720 locate database.
721 *** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works
722 This was broken in 4.1.20.
723 \f
724 * Major changes in release 4.1.20:
725 ** New maintainer, James Youngman <jay@gnu.org>
726 ** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left
727 a gap just in case.
728 ** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including
729 a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository. There are no
730 differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are
731 building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file
732 README-CVS).
733 ** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20.
734 \f
735 * Major changes in release 4.1.7:
736 fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used.
737 security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing.
738 \f
739 * Major changes in release 4.1.6:
740 correct bug in prune.
741 added --ignore-case option for locate
743 * Major changes in release 4.1.5:
744 Add support for large files
746 * Major changes in release 4.1.4:
747 bug fixes, more up-to-date languages.
749 * Major changes in release 4.1.3:
750 added internationalization and localization.
752 * Major changes in release 4.1.1:
753 attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect
754 "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb
756 * Major changes in release 4.1:
758 ** Distribution renamed to findutils.
759 ** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin
760 instead of $exec_prefix/libexec.
761 ** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected.
762 \f
763 * Major changes in release 4.0:
765 ** Documentation:
766 *** Texinfo manual.
767 *** Man page for updatedb.
768 *** Man page for the locate database formats.
770 ** find:
771 *** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend
772 trees, so it does fewer inode lookups.
773 *** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given.
774 *** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include
775 and you configure using the --with-afs option.
776 *** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE.
778 ** locate:
779 *** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and
780 allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to
781 share the databases. The new locate can also detect and read the
782 old database format automatically. The new databases are typically
783 30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in
784 file names). Search times are approximately the same, or faster on
785 some systems.
786 *** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old.
788 ** updatedb:
789 *** Takes command-line options.
791 ** xargs:
792 *** Performance improved 10-20%.
793 *** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given.
794 *** Now has a test suite. Some minor bugs fixed as a result.
795 \f
796 * Major changes in release 3.8:
798 ** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex:
799 -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex
800 ** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type
801 \f
802 * Major changes in release 3.7:
804 ** locate can search multiple databases
805 ** locate has an option to specify the database path
806 ** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail
808 --//--
809 This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el:
811 LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy
812 LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake
813 LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec
814 LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname
815 LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf