1 GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes. -*- outline -*- (allout)
2 * Major changes in release 4.3.9-CVS
6 Findutils version 4.3.9 is released under version 3 of the GNU General
10 #20263: Compilation fix for DEC Alpha OSF/1 cc, which forbids the
11 ordering comparison of function pointers.
13 #20139: find -[acm]time -N (wrongly) includes files from N days ago,
14 as well as (correctly) from less than N days ago.
16 #20273: When xargs is successful without consuming all of stdin (for
17 example, with the -E option), and stdin is seekable, xargs now
18 correctly restores the file position, even on platforms where exit()
19 does not follow the POSIX rules of doing likewise.
21 ** Documentation Fixes
23 Point out more explicitly that the subsecond timestamp support
24 introduced by findutils-4.3.3 introduces a change in the format of
27 Also explain that when reporting a bug, you should check the most
28 recent findutils release first.
30 Introduced doc/find-maint.texi, a maintenance manual for findutils.
33 * Major changes in release 4.3.8
37 #20157: Avoid segfault in locate when run as root. This is caused by
38 a buffer overrun, but at this time no explot mechanism is known.
40 * Major changes in release 4.3.7
44 Locate can now read old-format locate databases generated on machines
45 with a different byte order. It does this by guessing the byte order,
46 so the result is not completely reliable. If you need to share
47 databases between machines of different architectures, you should use
48 the LOCATE02 format (which has other advantages, as explained in the
53 #20014: Findutils-4.3.7 includes a patch for a potential security
54 problem in locate. When locate read an old-format database, it read
55 file names into a fixed-length buffer allocated on the heap without
56 checking for overflow. Although overflowing a heap buffer is often
57 somewhat safer than overflowing a buffer on the stack, this bug still
58 has potential security implications.
60 This bug also affected the following previous findutils releases:
62 - All releases prior to 4.2.31
63 - Findutils 4.3.0 to 4.3.6.
65 This bug has been assigned CVE number CVE-2007-2452.
69 #20128: Fix compilation error of find/tree.c on AIX with GCC.
71 #20005: Tests -mtime -n and -mtime +n incorrectly treated like -mtime n.
73 #19983: include_next causes compilation failure in findutils 4.3.6 on
76 #19981: Don't call setgroups if the function isn't available. This
77 fixes Savannah bug# 19981.
79 #19980: Don't use the functions putw() or getw() since these are not
80 in current POSIX. Use the gnulib version of wcwidth() where the
81 system does not provide it.
83 #19979: Compilation errors on BeOS
85 #19970: Cannot cast from pointer to bool using gnulib's <stdbool.h>
87 #19967: Use of __attribute((__noreturn__)) makes compilation fail with
88 some non-GCC compilers
90 #19966: find should link against -lm for modf() and fabs()
92 #19965: Compilation failure on OSF/1 4.0; non-declaration of uintmax_t
94 #19948: Assertion failure O_NOFOLLOW != 0 on IRIX 6.5
96 #19871: Typos in find.1
98 #19596: Fixed this bug again, this time in the Texinfo manual (the
99 discussion should compare %b with %s/512, not %s/1024).
101 #19416: _FORTIFY_SOURCE warn_unused_result warnings
103 * Major changes in release 4.3.6
107 #19948: Fixed an assertion failure on IRIX 6.5 (O_NOFOLLOW is defined
110 #19923: Fixed an array overrun in groups[] array of 'locate' when run by
111 or as root. This bug appears not to be exploitable. If locate is not
112 installed setuid, the bug is not exploitable. For setuid
113 installations, it is concievable that there could be an information
114 leak if the user uses the -d option or the -e option, though the
115 maintainer has been unable to provoke this on an x86 system.
117 #19871: Spurious .R directives in manpage produced error messages from
118 GNU troff. This is now fixed (they are corrected to .B).
120 #19416: The result of I/O operations in print-related actions is now
121 checked, and failures are reported. Any failure will cause find's
122 exit status to be nonzero. The predicate itself will continue to
127 A variety of changes were made to allow compilation to succeed on
130 #19983: Now compiles on DEC C V5.9-005 on Digital UNIX V4.0 (or at
133 #19970: Compile correctly on C89 systems where the "_Bool" type is not
134 provided, taking into account the limitations of the gnulib
135 replacement for stdbool.h.
137 #19967: Build successfully with C compilers that don't support the GCC
138 construct __attribute__((__noreturn__)).
140 #19966: Findutils should now build on systems which have the modf()
141 and fabs() functions in the maths library, -lm. This includes some
142 versions of HP-UX and Solaris.
144 #19965: Fixed a compilation failure on OSF/1 4.0 (no definition of the
148 * Major changes in release 4.3.5
150 ** Functional changes
152 Updatedb can now support he generation of file name databases which
153 are compatible with slocate. For some time, GNU locate has been able
156 The /proc filesystem is excluded from the locate database (by
157 default; change PRUNEPATHS to modify this behaviour).
161 #19806: The -samefile predicate might get fooled by inode reuse. We
162 now hold open a file descriptor on the reference file to prevent this.
164 #19768: Better detection of corrupted old-style locate databases
165 (e.g. if the database is too short to include a complete bigram
168 #19766: The frcode and code programs now detect write errors more
171 #19371: Fix compilation failure on systems which #define open to
172 open64 (and similarly with the close system call). This fixes
173 Savannah bug #19371, affecting AIX 5.3.
175 #19658: When cross-compiling, "make clean" no longer deletes the
176 generated file doc/regexprops.texi, because there is no way to
179 #19391: When xargs knows that the system's actual exec limit is larger
180 than the compiled-in ARG_MAX, use the system's limit without
181 generating an assertion failure.
183 #18203: A duplicate report of bug #17478.
185 #17478: Error messages from find can garble the console.
187 #16378: Assertion failure if stat() returns 00000 as the mode
188 of a file. This apparently can happen occasionally with broken NFS
191 #11668: FreeBSD extensions for time specification are now
192 implemented. In fact, these were included in findutils-4.3.3. The
193 change was listed as a functional change (whcih it is) and this bug
194 report was not mentioned.
196 ** Documentation Fixes
198 The locatedb.5 manpage now documents the (default) LOCATE02 format
199 more clearly, and also documents the slocate database format.
201 The maximum and default values applying to the -s option of xargs are
202 now documented more clearly in the manual page.
204 * Major changes in release 4.3.4
208 #19634: Test suite now passes (again) if "." is on your $PATH.
210 #19619: Findutils builds once again on Cygwin.
212 #19617: Nonexistent start points are (once again) diagnosed in
213 ftsfind. This bug affected only findutils-4.3.3.
215 #19616: Fix leaf optimisation and loop detection (which were
216 unreliable in findutils 4.3.3). This bug affected only
219 #19615: find --version no longer claims to be using FTS_CWDFD when it
220 isn't. This bug affected only findutils-4.3.3.
222 #19613: "find -L . -type f" no longer causes an assertion failure when
223 it encounters a symbolic link loop. This bug affected only
226 #19605: Issue an error message (and later return nonzero exit status)
227 if a symbolic link loop was encountered during directory traversal.
229 #19484: bigram.c and code.c fail if the first pathname recorded begins
232 #19483: Inconsistent option highlighting in updatedb manpage
234 #18414: Tests for "find -readable" are skipped for the superuser, as
235 on some systems (e.g. Cygwin with an Administrative user) users can
240 Findutils 4.3.4 includes a translation for the Ukranian language.
243 * Major changes in release 4.3.3
245 Fiundutils-4.3.3 was released on 2007-04-15.
249 #19596: Correct the comparison in the find manpage between %b and %s
250 (the divisor is 512 not 1024).
252 #18714: In the POSIX locale, vertical tabs and form feeds are not
255 #18713: Quoted but empty arguments which occur last on an xargs input
256 line are no longer ignored, but instead produce an empty argument.
258 #18554: Documented the construct -exec sh -c 'foo "$@" bar' {} +
260 #18466: we now avoid this bug by limiting "-execdir ...+"
261 to just one argument for the time being. There is a performance
262 penalty for doing this. We hope to make a better fix in a later
265 #18384: excess bracket in xargs --help
267 #18320: Zero bytes in input should give warning
269 #17437: Corrected the handling of X in symbolic permissions (such
270 as-u+w,a+X). This change actually occurred in findutils-4.3.2, but
271 the NEWS file for that release didn't mention it.
273 #17396: find -mtime -atime -ctime does not support fractional part
274 (see "Functional changes" below)
276 #14748: find -perm /zzz gives wrong result when zzz evaluates to an
279 #14535: correctly support case-folding in locate (that is, "locate
280 -i") for multibyte character environments such as UTF-8. Previously,
281 if your search string contained a character which was outside the
282 single-byte-encoding range for UTF-8 for example, then the
283 case-folding behaviour failed to work and only exact matches would be
288 ** Functional changes
290 The -printf action (and similar related actions) now support %S,
291 which is a measurement of the sparseness of a file.
293 The test "-perm /000" now matches all files instead of no files. For
294 over a year find has been issuing warning messages indicating that
295 this change will happen. We now issue a warning indicating that the
296 change has already happened (in 4.3.x only, there is no plan to make
297 this change in the 4.2.x series).
299 The tests -newer, -anewer, -cnewer, -mtime, -atime, -ctime, -amin,
300 -cmin, -mmin and -used now support sub-second timestamps, including
301 the ability to specify times with non-integer arguments.
303 The -printf format specifiers also support sub-second timestamps:
312 The new test -newerXY supports comparison between status times for
313 files. One of the status times for a file being considered (denoted
314 X) is checked against a reference time (denoted Y) for the file whose
315 name id the argument. X and Y can be:
318 B Birth time (st_birthtime, currently unsupported)
321 t Valid only for the reference time; instead of comparison
322 against a file status time, the argument is a time string.
325 For example, -newermm is equivalent to -newer, and -neweram is true if
326 the file being considered was accessed more recently than the
327 reference file was modified. The -newerXY test supports subsecond
328 timestamps where these are available. The X=B variant is not yet
331 If you configure the sourec code and then run the tests with "make
332 check", the test suite fails rather than defaulting to testing the
336 * Major changes in release 4.3.2
340 #18222: find -printf '%H %P' once again prints the right result if
341 more than one start point was given on the command line.
343 #17782: find -execdir now correctly puts the prefix "./" before the
344 expansion of "{}" rather than at the start of the argument it appears
345 in. Please note that if you use the -exec or -execdir actions with a
346 shell, then you may be vulnerable to shell code injection attacks, so
347 don't do that. It's not a security defect in find - you should not be
348 passing untrusted data (such as file names chosen by other people) to
351 #17490: find -regex generated a segfault in findutils-4.3.1, but this
352 is fixed in findutils-4.3.2.
354 #17477: find -printf '%' (that is, where the format has a trailing %)
355 now generates an error message.
357 #17372: The fts-based find executable (the default configuration uses
358 fts) is now much faster when -maxdepth is used on filesystems with
361 #15531: The -prune action now behaves correctly when applied to a file.
363 ** Functional changes
365 The slocate database format is now supported. Preliminary changes
366 intended to eventually allow setuid operation of locate have also been
367 made. For the moment, please don't install GNU locate as a
368 set-user-ID program (except for testing purposes; if you do so, please
369 make sure that untrusted users cannot execute the set-user-ID locate
372 Use of an slocate database which was built with a nonzero security
373 mode (at the moment, GNU updatedb will not do this) forces locate's
374 "-e" option to be turned on, which has an effect on the "-S" option
375 which is probably surprising for most users.
378 ** Documentation Fixes
380 The global effect of options (other than -daystart and -follow) is now
381 explained more clearly in the manual page. Savannah bug #15360.
384 * Major changes in release 4.3.1
388 Find now follows POSIX rules for determining where directories end and
389 expressions start. This means that "find \(1 \!2 \, \)" now searches
390 in the four named directories, rather than trying to parse an
391 expression. (Savannah bug #15235).
393 You now get a more helpful error message when you use command lines
394 which have missing expressions, such as
401 Savannah bug #15800: If find finds more subdirectories within a parent
402 directory than it previously expected to based on the link count of
403 the parent, the resulting error message now gives the correct
404 directory name (previously an error message was issued but it
405 specified the wrong directory).
407 Savannah bug #16738: "find .... -exec ... {} +" now works if you have
408 a large environment and many files must be passed to the -exec
409 action. The same problem affected the -execdir action, though since
410 the number of files in a given directory will normally be smaller, the
411 problem was worse for -exec.
413 Savannah bug #16579: Updatedb now works if it is running as a user
414 whose login shell is not actually a shell.
416 There have also been a number of documentation improvements (includng
417 Savannah bug #16269).
419 ** Functional changes
421 For find, debug output can now be enabled at runtime with the -D
422 option. This causes the printing of various sorts of information
423 about find's internal state and progress.
425 The find option -nowarn cannot itself produce a warning (this used to
426 happen with commands like "find . -name quux -nowarn -print").
428 ** Performance Enhancements
430 Find now has a rudimentary cost-based optimiser. It has an idea of
431 the basic cost of each test (i.e. that -name is very cheap while -size
432 is more expensive). It re-orders tests bearing in mind the cost of
433 each test and its likely success. Predicates with side effects (for
434 example -delete or -exec) are not reordered. The optimiser is not
435 yet enabled by default, but the new option -O controls the query
436 optimisation level. To see this in action, try
437 find -D opt -O3 . -type f -o -type c -o -size 555 -name Z
438 and compare the optimised query with:
439 find -D opt -O3 . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z
441 find -D opt . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z
443 Over time, as optimisations are proven to be robust and correct, they
444 will be moved to lower optimisation levels. Some optimisations have
445 always been performed by find (for example -name is always done early
450 Findutils 4.3.1 includes updated translations for the following
452 Vietnamese, Belarusian, Catalan, Danish, German, Greek, Esperanto,
453 Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Irish, Galician, Croatian, Hungarian,
454 Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Luganda, Malay, Dutch, Polish,
455 Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Kinyarwanda,
456 Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish, Chinese (simplified),
457 Chinese (traditional), Bulgarian
459 * Major changes in release 4.3.0
461 The 4.3.x release series are currently 'development' releases. Please
462 test it, but think carefully before installing it in a production
463 system. New features in findutils-4.3.x are under development; they
464 may change or go away.
466 All changes up to and including findutils-4.2.27 are included in this
467 release. In addition the following changes are new in this release:
469 ** Functional Changes
471 By default, find now uses the fts() function to search the file
472 system. The use of fts greatly increases find's ability to search
473 extremely deep directory hierarchites.
475 You can tell that the version of find you are using uses FTS, because
476 the output of "find --version" will include the word "FTS".
478 Currently two binaries for 'find' are built. The configure option
479 --without-fts can be used to select whether 'find' uses fts:
482 default configuration find oldfind
483 configure --with-fts find oldfind
484 configure --without-fts ftsfind find
486 New tests, -readable, -writable, -executable. These check that a file
487 can be read, written or executed respectively.
489 * Major changes in release 4.2.27
491 ** Warnings of Future Changes
493 The test -perm /000 currently matches no files, but for greater
494 consistency with -perm -000, this will be changed to match all files;
495 this change will probably be made in early 2006. Meanwhile, a warning
496 message is given if you do this.
500 If xargs is invoked with many short arguments on PPC systems running
501 the Linux kernel, we no longer get an "argument list too long" error
502 from the operating system.
504 Fixed a bug in the test suite which caused it to spuriously fail on
505 systems where ARG_MAX is different to the value used by the Linux
506 kernel on 32-bit x86-architecture systems.
508 On systems running the Linux kernel, "find -printf %F" no longer
509 produces the wrong answer for files on filesystems that have been
510 remounted elsewhere using "mount --bind". (Savannah bug #14921).
512 ** Documentation Changes
514 Following some extensive and detailed review comments from Aaron
515 Hawley, the material in the manual pages and the Texinfo manual are
518 The %M format specifier of "find -printf" is now documented, although
519 it has existed since release 4.2.5.
521 The 'find' manual page now correctly documents the fact that -regex
522 defaults to using Emacs-style regular expressions (though this can be
525 * Major changes in release 4.2.26
527 ** Public Service Announcements
529 I'd like to point out a second time that the interpretation of '-perm
530 +mode' has changed to be more POSIX-compliant. If you want the old
531 behaviour of the GNU extension you should use '-perm /mode'. See the
532 NEWS entry for findutils version 4.2.21 for details.
534 ** Functional Changes
536 The xargs command now supports a new option (--delimiter) which allows
537 input items to be separated by characters other than null and
538 whitespace. This resolves Savannah support request sr #102914.
540 Sometimes find needs to read the /etc/mtab file (or perform the
541 equivalent operation on systems not using /etc/mtab). If this
542 information is needed but not available, find now exits with an error
543 message non-zero status. If the information is not needed, find will
546 A new xargs option --delimiter allows the input delimiter to be
547 changed (previously \0 was the only choice unless you use the -L
548 option, which changes other semantics too).
552 If the environment size is too large to allow xargs to operate
553 normally, 'xargs --help' still works (now).
555 If the input to xargs is a large number of very short options (for
556 example, one character each), earlier versions of xargs would fail
557 with 'Argument list too long'. However, since this is precisely the
558 problem that xargs was invented to solve, this is a bug. Hence on
559 those systems we now correctly use a shorter command line. This
560 problem particularly affected 64-bit Linux systems because of the
561 larger size of pointers, although 32-bit Linux systems were also
562 affected (albeit for longer command lines). In theory the same
563 problem could affect 'find -exec {} +', but that's much less likely
564 (even so, the bug is fixed there too).
566 Bugfix for an unusual failure mode (Savannah bug #14842) where an
567 attempt to allocate more space for directory contents succeeds but is
568 incorrectly diagnosed as a failure. The likelihood of you
569 experiencing this depends on your architecture, operating system and
570 resource limits. This failure has been observed in a directory
571 containing 35396 entries.
573 ** Documentation Changes
575 The EXAMPLES section of the find manual page now correctly describes
576 the symbolic and octal modes for the -perm test.
578 The documentation and "--help" usage information for the -L, -l, -I
579 and -i options have been clarified (but the behaviour has not changed).
581 The documentation now explains more clearly what happens when you use
584 * Major changes in release 4.2.25
588 find -perm /440 (which should succeed if a file is readable by its
589 owner or group) now works. Previously there was a bug which caused
590 this to be treated as "find -perm 440".
592 Some files in the xargs test suite have been renamed to avoid problems
593 on operating systems whoch cannot distinguish filenames on the basis
594 of upper/lower case distinctions.
596 The software now builds on Cygwin, including the generated file
599 Findutils should now build once again on systems supporting AFS, but
600 this support has not recently been fully tested. Findutils should
601 also (once again) build on Cygwin.
605 The test suite for find is now much more extensive.
607 * Major changes in release 4.2.24
609 ** Documentation Changes
611 The manual now includes a "Worked Examples" section which talks about
612 the various ways in which findutils can be used to perform common
613 tasks, and why some of these alternatives are better than others.
615 The -I option of xargs (which is required by the POSIX standard) is
618 We now document the fact that find ensures that commands run by -ok
619 and -okdir don't steal find's input. Find does this by redirecting
620 the command's standard input from stdin.
622 Many documentation readability enhancements and proofreading fixes
623 were contributed by Aaron Hawley.
625 ** Functional Changes
627 *** Functional changes in locate
629 The "--regex" option of locate now assumes the regular expression to
630 be in the same syntax as is used in GNU Emacs, though this can be
631 changed with the new option --regextype. This is a change from the
632 existing behaviour (which was to use POSIX Basic Regular Expressions).
633 Since this feature is releatively new anyway, I though it was more
634 useful to have compatibility between regular expression handling in
635 find and locate than to maintain the short-lived previous behaviour of
638 The locate program now also supports a "--regextype" long option which
639 controls which regular expression syntax is understood by locate.
640 This is a long option and has no single-letter 'short option'
643 *** Functional changes in find
645 The regular expression syntax understood by "find" can be changed with
646 the -regextype option; this option is positional, meaning that you can
647 have several tests, each using a distinct syntax (this is not
648 recommended practice however).
650 The default regular expression syntax is substantially the same as
651 that recognised by GNU Emacs, except for the fact that "." will match
654 The leaf optimisation can be disabled with the configure option
655 "--disable-leaf-optimisation", which is equivalent to specifying
656 "-noleaf" on all find command lines. This is useful for systems
657 having filesystems which do not provide traditional Unix behaviour for
658 the link count on directories (for example Cygwin and the Solaris 9
659 HSFS implementation).
663 *** Bug Fixes for find
665 The -iregex test now works once again on systems that lack
666 re_search() (that is, systems on which findutils needs to use the
667 gnulib version of this function).
669 find -regex now once again uses GNU Emacs-compatible regular
672 If invoked with stderr closed, the -fprint and -fprintf actions now no
673 longer cause error messages to be sent into the output file.
675 If the link count of a directory is less that two, the leaf
676 optimisation is now disabled for that directory. This should allow
677 searching of non-Unix filesystems to be more reliable on systems that
678 don't take the trouble to make their filesystems look like traditional
679 Unix filesystems. Some filesystems don't even take the trouble to
680 have a link count of less than two and for these, -noleaf is still
681 required unless --disable-leaf-optimisation was used at configure time.
683 The "%Y" directive for the -printf action now no longer changes find's
684 idea of the mode of the file, so this means among other things that
685 "-printf %Y %y" now works properly. This is Savannah bug #13973.
687 * Major changes in release 4.2.23
689 ** Documentation Changes
691 The -L and -I options of xargs are currently incompatible (but should
694 Improved the documentation for -execdir and -okdir.
696 ** Functional Changes to updatedb
698 File names ending in "/" which are specified as an argument to
699 --prunepaths (or in $PRUNEPATHS) don't work, so we now issue an error
700 message if the user tries to do that. The obvious exception of course
701 is "/" which does work and is not rejected.
704 * Major changes in release 4.2.22
708 If a directory entry searched with "find -L" is a symbolic link to
709 ".", we no longer loop indefinitely. This problem affected find
710 versions 4.2.19, 4.2.20 and 4.2.21. This problem allows users to make
711 "find" loop indefinitely. This is in effect a denial of service and
712 could be used to prevent updates to the locate database or to defeat
713 file security checks based on find. However, it should be noted that
714 you should not use "find -L" in security-sensitive scenarios.
718 None in this release.
720 ** Functional Changes to locate
722 A locate database can now be supplied on stdin, using '-' as a element
723 of the database-path. If more than one database-path element is '-',
724 later instances are ignored.
726 A new option to locate, '--all' ('-A') causes matches to be limited to
727 entries which match all given patterns, not entries which match
728 one or more patterns.
730 ** Documentation Changes
732 Some typos in the manual pages have been fixed. Various parts of the
733 manual now point out that it is good practice to quote the argument of
734 "-name". The manpage now has a "NON-BUGS" section which explains some
735 symptoms that look like bugs but aren't. The explanations of the "%k"
736 and "%b" directives to "find -printf" have been imrpoved.
739 * Major changes in release 4.2.21
740 ** Functional Changes to find
742 The GNU extension "find ... -perm +MODE" has been withdrawn because it
743 is incompatible with POSIX in obscure cases like "find ... -perm ++r".
744 Use the new syntax "find ... -perm /MODE" instead. Old usages will
745 still continue to work, so long as they don't conflict with POSIX.
747 If the output is going to a terminal, the -print, -fprint, -printf and
748 -fprintf actions now quote "unusual" characters to prevent unwanted
749 effects on the terminal. See "Unusual Characters in File Names" for
750 further details. There is no change to the behaviour when the output
751 is not going to a terminal. The locate program does the same thing,
752 unless the -0 option is in effect (in which case the filenames are
755 ** Functional Changes to locate
757 The locate command will now read each locate database at most once.
758 This means that if you are using multiple databases and are searching
759 for more than one name, the results will now be printed in a different
760 order (and if you specified a small limit with --limit, you may get a
761 different set of results).
763 A new option '--print' for locate causes it to print the matching
764 results even if the '--count' or '--statistics' option is in effect.
767 find /blah/blah/blah -depth -empty now works once again.
769 The -regex and -iregex tests of find now correctly accept POSIX Basic
770 Regular Expressions. (Savannah bug #12999)
772 The updatedb program now works on systems where "su" does not support
773 the "-s" option, for example Solaris.
775 * Major changes in release 4.2.20
776 ** Internationalization and Localization
777 Updated Vietnamese and Dutch translations.
780 Minor bugfix affecting only those who compile from the CVS repository,
781 as opposed to those who compile from the source releases.
783 * Major changes in release 4.2.19
786 find should now no longer hang on systems which lack the O_NOFOLLOW
787 flag to open(2) and which are clients of an unresponsive NFS server
788 (Savannah bug #12044).
790 We now avoid inappropriately failing for "find -L foo" or "find -H
791 foo" if foo is a symbolic link (Savannah bug #12181). Previously we
792 used to fail with the error message "Too many levels of symbolic
795 "find . -false -exec foo {} +" no longer runs an extra instance of foo
796 when find exits (Savannah bug #12230).
798 If the chdir() safety check fails but we can no longer get back to
799 where we started, exit with an explanatory (fatal) error message.
800 This does not happen on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD because the safety check
801 is not needed (the security problem the safety check protects against
802 is prevented in a cleaner way on those systems).
804 "make distclean" no longer deletes regex.c (which "make all" needs).
806 ** Functionality Changes
807 "find -printf "%h\n" will now print "." for files in the current directory.
808 Previously it printed nothing (but there was a bug in the %h
809 implementation anyway). This fixes Savannah bug #12085.
811 Should now build (again) on non-C99-compliant systems.
813 ** Documentation enhancements
814 Fixed some typos and clarified wording in "Working with automounters".
816 ** Internationalization and Localization
817 New Vietnamese message translation.
819 * Major changes in release 4.2.18
821 *** "find -depth" was missing out non-leaf directories when they contain
822 non-directories. This affected findutils releases 4.2.15,
823 4.2.16 and 4.2.17, but the bug is now fixed.
824 *** Find no longer hangs on systems which are clients of unresponsive
826 ** Documentation improvements
827 *** Improvements and corrections to the find.1 manpage, including corrections to the descriptions of -H and -L.
829 * Major changes in release 4.2.17
831 *** bug #11861 undefined symbol "basename" on IRIX 5.3
832 *** bug #11865 xargs -i regression (as compared to findutils-4.2.12)
833 *** bug #11866 Typo in pred_okdir renders it useless (affecting 4.2.16 only)
834 *** patch #3723 fix recent process_top_path change (for -execdir on /)
835 *** Fixing bug #11866 and applying patch #3723 made -execdir work much better.
836 *** find bar/baz/ugh now works again if baz is a symbolic link (broken
839 * Major changes in release 4.2.16
840 ** Functionality Changes
841 *** Updated the message catalogues for the translated messages.
842 *** The subfs filesystem is now treated the same as the autofs
844 *** New translations: Belarusian, Catalan, Greek, Esperanto,
845 Finnish, Irish, Croatian, Hungarian, Japanese, Luganda,
846 Malay, Romanian, Slovenian, Serbian, Chinese (simplified).
849 *** The -execdir action now works correctly for files named on the
852 * Major changes in release 4.2.15
853 ** Functionality Changes
854 *** locate now supports matching regular expression (--regex).
855 *** --enable-d_type-optimization (introduced in findutils 4.2.13) is now turned on by default.
857 * Major changes in release 4.2.14
858 ** Functionality Changes
859 *** New options -L, -P, -H for locate. The work in the same was as the same options for find.
861 *** Don't include the "findutils/find/testsuite/find.gnu" subdirectory in the
862 distributed tar file more than once.
863 *** Should now build on Solaris once again.
864 *** -xtype and -printf %Y now work correctly for symbolic links once again
865 ** Documentation improvements
866 *** All options for "locate" are now documented
868 * Major changes in release 4.2.13
869 ** Performance Enhancements
870 *** On Linux and some other systems, a large performance improvement,
871 because we can eliminate many of the calls to lstat() (in extreme
872 cases, 99% of them). Limited testing shows a 2x speedup on NFS
873 filesystems. Other systems which can make use of this enhancement
874 include Mac OS X and *BSD.
876 * Major changes in release 4.2.12
877 ** Functionality Changes
878 *** find is now POSIX-compliant, as far as I know.
879 *** -exec ... {} + now works.
880 *** New actions -execdir and -okdir which are like -exec and -ok but more secure.
881 *** "locate -w" is now a synonym for "locate --wholepath".
882 *** An empty path entry in the locate database path (for example "::" in
883 $LOCATE_PATH or in the argument to "locate -d") is taken to mean
884 the default database, whose name is hard-coded in locate.
886 *** If find or xargs cannot write to stdout, for example because
887 output is redirected to a file and the disk is full, the
888 relevant program will return a non-zero exit status.
890 * Major changes in release 4.2.11
892 *** Compilation fix for systems without EOVERFLOW.
893 *** More helpful error message if you make a mistake with (, ), -o or -a.
894 ** Functionality Changes
895 *** If you have unclosed parentheses on the find command line,
896 or any of a number of similar problems, find will now produce
897 a more helpful error message.
898 *** locate -b is now a synonym for locate --basename
899 *** locate now supports a --statistics (or -S) option, which prints some
900 statistics about the locate databases.
901 *** Implemented the -samefile option.
902 ** Documentation improvements
903 *** New chapter in the manual, "Security Considerations".
904 *** Better documentation for -prune (Mainly thanks to Stepan Kasal)
906 *** locate's options -i and -w now work with the -e option (previously a bug
909 * Major changes in release 4.2.10
911 *** Portability fix for fstype.c: should now compile on UNICOS, and possibly
912 also produce useful results on BeOS and Dolphin, perhaps other
915 * Major changes in release 4.2.9
916 ** Functionality Changes
917 *** 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_".
918 *** xargs now supports the POSIX options -E, -I and -L. These are synonyms
919 for the existing options -e, -i and -l, but the latter three are
922 *** xargs -n NUM now invokes a command as soon as it has NUM arguments.
923 Previously, it waited until NUM+1 items had been read, and then
924 invoked the command with NUM arguments, saving the remaining one
926 *** If "find -L" discovers a symbolic link loop, an error message is issued.
927 *** If you specify a directory on the find command line, but -prune
928 is applied to it, find will no longer chdir() into it anyway.
929 ** Documentation improvements
930 *** The precise interpretation of the arguments to the -atime, -ctime
931 and similar tests in find has been documented more clearly.
933 * Major changes in release 4.2.8
934 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.7 automount handling on Solaris. This
935 worked to some extent in findutils-4.2.7, but is much improved in
938 * Major changes in release 4.2.7
939 ** Functionality Changes
940 *** xargs can now read a list of arguments from a named file, allowing
941 the invoked program to use the same stdin as xargs started with
942 (for example ``xargs --arg-file=todo emacs'').
943 ** Documentation improvements
944 *** The Texinfo manual now has an extra chapter, "Error Messages". Most
945 error messages are self-explanatory, but some of the ones which
946 are not are explained in this chapter.
948 *** Avoid trying to link against -lsun on UNICOS, which doesn't need it or
950 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.6 automount handling (which hadn't been enabled
952 *** Reenabled internationalisation support (which had been accidentally
953 disabled in findutils-4.2.5).
955 * Major changes in release 4.2.6
957 *** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as
958 it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount.
959 This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change
960 directory into them. This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998,
963 * Major changes in release 4.2.5
964 ** Functionality Changes
965 *** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported. These control whether or not
966 find will follow symbolic links.
967 *** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case
969 ** Documentation improvements
970 *** Better documentation for "xargs -i".
972 *** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir.
973 (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location
974 other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure").
975 *** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9.
976 *** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate
977 warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library
978 "-lsun". Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem.
980 * Major changes in release 4.2.4
981 ** Functionality Changes
982 *** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
983 now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
985 *** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system
986 doesn't support that much).
987 *** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message
988 is now issued. Options should be specified immediately after the
989 list of paths to search. These warnings are enabled if you
990 specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty. They are diabled
991 by the use of the -nowarn option.
992 *** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
993 which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
994 *** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
995 output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
997 *** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the
998 number of results. This is useful if you only want to find out if
999 there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
1000 to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
1001 *** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to
1002 be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
1003 database, rather than the whole name. The default behaviour
1004 (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
1005 parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
1006 *** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to
1007 pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.
1009 *** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
1010 systems that have non-writable string constants.
1011 *** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range
1012 values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
1013 error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
1015 *** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references
1017 * Major changes in release 4.2.3
1018 ** Functionality Changes
1019 *** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches.
1020 *** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately.
1021 *** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number.
1022 *** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names.
1023 *** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility
1024 with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. This option is already
1025 deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth".
1026 *** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are
1027 %y and %Y. They indicate the type of the file as a single letter;
1028 these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test.
1029 *** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find,
1030 the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change
1031 (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the
1032 directory we've just returned out of).
1034 *** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings.
1036 * Major changes in release 4.2.2
1037 ** Documentation improvements
1038 *** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported.
1040 *** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX
1041 *** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64
1042 *** The built-in internationalisation support now works again.
1044 *** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used,
1045 which means among other things that we only have one config.h file
1047 *** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in
1048 gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a". This is in the lib
1049 directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory.
1050 *** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers.
1052 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
1054 *** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard
1055 requires it, as explained at
1056 http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html
1058 * Major changes in release 4.2.1
1060 *** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function
1061 that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD
1062 *** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers,
1063 as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html)
1064 *** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t
1066 **** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17).
1068 * Major changes in release 4.2.0
1069 ** Functionality Changes
1070 *** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive.
1071 The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment
1072 data contained more than 20480 bytes.
1073 *** New options -wholename and -iwholename
1074 As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over
1075 the -path and -ipath options. Using -ipath now generates a warning,
1076 though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path).
1077 *** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored.
1078 *** New option "-ignore_readdir_race"
1079 silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed
1080 after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before
1081 find stats the file. There is also an option
1082 -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect.
1083 ** Documentation improvements
1084 *** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail
1085 *** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions
1086 The find manual page also now includes a section
1087 which describes the relationship between the features of GNU
1088 find and the POSIX standard. Some other small improvements
1089 to the find and xargs manual pages have been made.
1090 *** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented.
1091 The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now
1092 documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers
1094 *** xargs -i is now more clearly documented.
1096 *** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course)
1097 *** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes
1098 If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input,
1099 it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the
1100 list of files that xargs is trying to read.
1101 *** Better support for 64-bit systems.
1102 *** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect,
1103 I think this is a strange thing to want to do.
1104 *** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed
1105 Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing.
1106 *** updatedb is now somewhat more robust
1107 The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty
1108 database if it fails.
1109 *** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb
1110 Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the
1112 *** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works
1113 This was broken in 4.1.20.
1115 * Major changes in release 4.1.20:
1116 ** New maintainer, James Youngman <jay@gnu.org>
1117 ** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left
1119 ** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including
1120 a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository. There are no
1121 differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are
1122 building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file
1124 ** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20.
1126 * Major changes in release 4.1.7:
1127 fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used.
1128 security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing.
1130 * Major changes in release 4.1.6:
1131 correct bug in prune.
1132 added --ignore-case option for locate
1134 * Major changes in release 4.1.5:
1135 Add support for large files
1137 * Major changes in release 4.1.4:
1138 bug fixes, more up-to-date languages.
1140 * Major changes in release 4.1.3:
1141 added internationalization and localization.
1143 * Major changes in release 4.1.1:
1144 attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect
1145 "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb
1147 * Major changes in release 4.1:
1149 ** Distribution renamed to findutils.
1150 ** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin
1151 instead of $exec_prefix/libexec.
1152 ** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected.
1154 * Major changes in release 4.0:
1158 *** Man page for updatedb.
1159 *** Man page for the locate database formats.
1162 *** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend
1163 trees, so it does fewer inode lookups.
1164 *** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given.
1165 *** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include
1166 and you configure using the --with-afs option.
1167 *** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE.
1170 *** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and
1171 allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to
1172 share the databases. The new locate can also detect and read the
1173 old database format automatically. The new databases are typically
1174 30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in
1175 file names). Search times are approximately the same, or faster on
1177 *** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old.
1180 *** Takes command-line options.
1183 *** Performance improved 10-20%.
1184 *** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given.
1185 *** Now has a test suite. Some minor bugs fixed as a result.
1187 * Major changes in release 3.8:
1189 ** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex:
1190 -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex
1191 ** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type
1193 * Major changes in release 3.7:
1195 ** locate can search multiple databases
1196 ** locate has an option to specify the database path
1197 ** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail
1200 This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el:
1202 LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy
1203 LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake
1204 LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec
1205 LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname
1206 LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf