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
11 #20310: configure uses hosts's support status for "sort -z" when
12 generating the updatedb script for use on the target. This is
13 inappropriate when cross-compiling, so avoid doing that.
15 #20263: Compilation fix for DEC Alpha OSF/1 cc, which forbids the
16 ordering comparison of function pointers.
18 #20139: find -[acm]time -N (wrongly) includes files from N days ago,
19 as well as (correctly) from less than N days ago.
21 #20273: When xargs is successful without consuming all of stdin (for
22 example, with the -E option), and stdin is seekable, xargs now
23 correctly restores the file position, even on platforms where exit()
24 does not follow the POSIX rules of doing likewise. Likewise for find
25 (for example, with the -ok action).
27 #20547: The version information printed by find, xargs, locate,
28 updatedb, frcode and code now complies with the GNU Project's coding
31 #20662: Avoid memory leak in find -name and other places affected by
32 gnulib dirname module. The leak had been present since 4.3.1.
34 #20751: Avoid memory corruption in find -ls that has been present
39 #20594: Allow fine-tuning of the default argument size used by xargs
40 and find at ./configure time.
42 #20688: The warning printed by -name or -iname when the pattern to
43 match contains a slash can now be silenced by -nowarn. This warning
44 was originally introduced unconditionally in 4.2.21.
46 Translation of locate --limit problems is improved.
48 ** Documentation Fixes
50 Point out more explicitly that the subsecond timestamp support
51 introduced by findutils-4.3.3 introduces a change in the format of
54 Also explain that when reporting a bug, you should check the most
55 recent findutils release first.
57 Introduced doc/find-maint.texi, a maintenance manual for findutils.
59 Added an extra worked example for find (copying a subset of files).
61 The locate command's manual page now has a HISTORY section.
63 #20552: Fixed typos, formatting and section ordering issues in the
66 #20529: removed spurious 'o' in description of "xargs -a" in
69 * Major changes in release 4.3.8, 2007-06-12
73 #20157: Avoid segfault in locate when run as root. This is caused by
74 a buffer overrun, but at this time no exploit mechanism is known.
76 * Major changes in release 4.3.7, 2007-06-09
80 Locate can now read old-format locate databases generated on machines
81 with a different byte order. It does this by guessing the byte order,
82 so the result is not completely reliable. If you need to share
83 databases between machines of different architectures, you should use
84 the LOCATE02 format (which has other advantages, as explained in the
89 #20014: Findutils-4.3.7 includes a patch for a potential security
90 problem in locate. When locate read an old-format database, it read
91 file names into a fixed-length buffer allocated on the heap without
92 checking for overflow. Although overflowing a heap buffer is often
93 somewhat safer than overflowing a buffer on the stack, this bug still
94 has potential security implications.
96 This bug also affected the following previous findutils releases:
98 - All releases prior to 4.2.31
99 - Findutils 4.3.0 to 4.3.6.
101 This bug has been assigned CVE number CVE-2007-2452.
105 #20128: Fix compilation error of find/tree.c on AIX with GCC.
107 #20005: Tests -mtime -n and -mtime +n incorrectly treated like -mtime n.
109 #19983: include_next causes compilation failure in findutils 4.3.6 on
112 #19981: Don't call setgroups if the function isn't available. This
113 fixes Savannah bug# 19981.
115 #19980: Don't use the functions putw() or getw() since these are not
116 in current POSIX. Use the gnulib version of wcwidth() where the
117 system does not provide it.
119 #19979: Compilation errors on BeOS
121 #19970: Cannot cast from pointer to bool using gnulib's <stdbool.h>
123 #19967: Use of __attribute((__noreturn__)) makes compilation fail with
124 some non-GCC compilers
126 #19966: find should link against -lm for modf() and fabs()
128 #19965: Compilation failure on OSF/1 4.0; non-declaration of uintmax_t
130 #19948: Assertion failure O_NOFOLLOW != 0 on IRIX 6.5
132 #19871: Typos in find.1
134 #19596: Fixed this bug again, this time in the Texinfo manual (the
135 discussion should compare %b with %s/512, not %s/1024).
137 #19416: _FORTIFY_SOURCE warn_unused_result warnings
139 * Major changes in release 4.3.6, 2007-05-21
143 #19948: Fixed an assertion failure on IRIX 6.5 (O_NOFOLLOW is defined
146 #19923: Fixed an array overrun in groups[] array of 'locate' when run by
147 or as root. This bug appears not to be exploitable. If locate is not
148 installed setuid, the bug is not exploitable. For setuid
149 installations, it is concievable that there could be an information
150 leak if the user uses the -d option or the -e option, though the
151 maintainer has been unable to provoke this on an x86 system.
153 #19871: Spurious .R directives in manpage produced error messages from
154 GNU troff. This is now fixed (they are corrected to .B).
156 #19416: The result of I/O operations in print-related actions is now
157 checked, and failures are reported. Any failure will cause find's
158 exit status to be nonzero. The predicate itself will continue to
163 A variety of changes were made to allow compilation to succeed on
166 #19983: Now compiles on DEC C V5.9-005 on Digital UNIX V4.0 (or at
169 #19970: Compile correctly on C89 systems where the "_Bool" type is not
170 provided, taking into account the limitations of the gnulib
171 replacement for stdbool.h.
173 #19967: Build successfully with C compilers that don't support the GCC
174 construct __attribute__((__noreturn__)).
176 #19966: Findutils should now build on systems which have the modf()
177 and fabs() functions in the maths library, -lm. This includes some
178 versions of HP-UX and Solaris.
180 #19965: Fixed a compilation failure on OSF/1 4.0 (no definition of the
184 * Major changes in release 4.3.5, 2007-05-05
186 ** Functional changes
188 Updatedb can now support he generation of file name databases which
189 are compatible with slocate. For some time, GNU locate has been able
192 The /proc filesystem is excluded from the locate database (by
193 default; change PRUNEPATHS to modify this behaviour).
197 #19806: The -samefile predicate might get fooled by inode reuse. We
198 now hold open a file descriptor on the reference file to prevent this.
200 #19768: Better detection of corrupted old-style locate databases
201 (e.g. if the database is too short to include a complete bigram
204 #19766: The frcode and code programs now detect write errors more
207 #19371: Fix compilation failure on systems which #define open to
208 open64 (and similarly with the close system call). This fixes
209 Savannah bug #19371, affecting AIX 5.3.
211 #19658: When cross-compiling, "make clean" no longer deletes the
212 generated file doc/regexprops.texi, because there is no way to
215 #19391: When xargs knows that the system's actual exec limit is larger
216 than the compiled-in ARG_MAX, use the system's limit without
217 generating an assertion failure.
219 #18203: A duplicate report of bug #17478.
221 #17478: Error messages from find can garble the console.
223 #16378: Assertion failure if stat() returns 00000 as the mode
224 of a file. This apparently can happen occasionally with broken NFS
227 #11668: FreeBSD extensions for time specification are now
228 implemented. In fact, these were included in findutils-4.3.3. The
229 change was listed as a functional change (whcih it is) and this bug
230 report was not mentioned.
232 ** Documentation Fixes
234 The locatedb.5 manpage now documents the (default) LOCATE02 format
235 more clearly, and also documents the slocate database format.
237 The maximum and default values applying to the -s option of xargs are
238 now documented more clearly in the manual page.
240 * Major changes in release 4.3.4, 2007-04-21
244 #19634: Test suite now passes (again) if "." is on your $PATH.
246 #19619: Findutils builds once again on Cygwin.
248 #19617: Nonexistent start points are (once again) diagnosed in
249 ftsfind. This bug affected only findutils-4.3.3.
251 #19616: Fix leaf optimisation and loop detection (which were
252 unreliable in findutils 4.3.3). This bug affected only
255 #19615: find --version no longer claims to be using FTS_CWDFD when it
256 isn't. This bug affected only findutils-4.3.3.
258 #19613: "find -L . -type f" no longer causes an assertion failure when
259 it encounters a symbolic link loop. This bug affected only
262 #19605: Issue an error message (and later return nonzero exit status)
263 if a symbolic link loop was encountered during directory traversal.
265 #19484: bigram.c and code.c fail if the first pathname recorded begins
268 #19483: Inconsistent option highlighting in updatedb manpage
270 #18414: Tests for "find -readable" are skipped for the superuser, as
271 on some systems (e.g. Cygwin with an Administrative user) users can
276 Findutils 4.3.4 includes a translation for the Ukranian language.
279 * Major changes in release 4.3.3, 2007-04-15
281 Fiundutils-4.3.3 was released on 2007-04-15.
285 #19596: Correct the comparison in the find manpage between %b and %s
286 (the divisor is 512 not 1024).
288 #18714: In the POSIX locale, vertical tabs and form feeds are not
291 #18713: Quoted but empty arguments which occur last on an xargs input
292 line are no longer ignored, but instead produce an empty argument.
294 #18554: Documented the construct -exec sh -c 'foo "$@" bar' {} +
296 #18466: we now avoid this bug by limiting "-execdir ...+"
297 to just one argument for the time being. There is a performance
298 penalty for doing this. We hope to make a better fix in a later
301 #18384: excess bracket in xargs --help
303 #18320: Zero bytes in input should give warning
305 #17437: Corrected the handling of X in symbolic permissions (such
306 as-u+w,a+X). This change actually occurred in findutils-4.3.2, but
307 the NEWS file for that release didn't mention it.
309 #17396: find -mtime -atime -ctime does not support fractional part
310 (see "Functional changes" below)
312 #14748: find -perm /zzz gives wrong result when zzz evaluates to an
315 #14535: correctly support case-folding in locate (that is, "locate
316 -i") for multibyte character environments such as UTF-8. Previously,
317 if your search string contained a character which was outside the
318 single-byte-encoding range for UTF-8 for example, then the
319 case-folding behaviour failed to work and only exact matches would be
324 ** Functional changes
326 The -printf action (and similar related actions) now support %S,
327 which is a measurement of the sparseness of a file.
329 The test "-perm /000" now matches all files instead of no files. For
330 over a year find has been issuing warning messages indicating that
331 this change will happen. We now issue a warning indicating that the
332 change has already happened (in 4.3.x only, there is no plan to make
333 this change in the 4.2.x series).
335 The tests -newer, -anewer, -cnewer, -mtime, -atime, -ctime, -amin,
336 -cmin, -mmin and -used now support sub-second timestamps, including
337 the ability to specify times with non-integer arguments.
339 The -printf format specifiers also support sub-second timestamps:
348 The new test -newerXY supports comparison between status times for
349 files. One of the status times for a file being considered (denoted
350 X) is checked against a reference time (denoted Y) for the file whose
351 name id the argument. X and Y can be:
354 B Birth time (st_birthtime, currently unsupported)
357 t Valid only for the reference time; instead of comparison
358 against a file status time, the argument is a time string.
361 For example, -newermm is equivalent to -newer, and -neweram is true if
362 the file being considered was accessed more recently than the
363 reference file was modified. The -newerXY test supports subsecond
364 timestamps where these are available. The X=B variant is not yet
367 If you configure the sourec code and then run the tests with "make
368 check", the test suite fails rather than defaulting to testing the
372 * Major changes in release 4.3.2, 2006-11-25
376 #18222: find -printf '%H %P' once again prints the right result if
377 more than one start point was given on the command line.
379 #17782: find -execdir now correctly puts the prefix "./" before the
380 expansion of "{}" rather than at the start of the argument it appears
381 in. Please note that if you use the -exec or -execdir actions with a
382 shell, then you may be vulnerable to shell code injection attacks, so
383 don't do that. It's not a security defect in find - you should not be
384 passing untrusted data (such as file names chosen by other people) to
387 #17490: find -regex generated a segfault in findutils-4.3.1, but this
388 is fixed in findutils-4.3.2.
390 #17477: find -printf '%' (that is, where the format has a trailing %)
391 now generates an error message.
393 #17372: The fts-based find executable (the default configuration uses
394 fts) is now much faster when -maxdepth is used on filesystems with
397 #15531: The -prune action now behaves correctly when applied to a file.
399 ** Functional changes
401 The slocate database format is now supported. Preliminary changes
402 intended to eventually allow setuid operation of locate have also been
403 made. For the moment, please don't install GNU locate as a
404 set-user-ID program (except for testing purposes; if you do so, please
405 make sure that untrusted users cannot execute the set-user-ID locate
408 Use of an slocate database which was built with a nonzero security
409 mode (at the moment, GNU updatedb will not do this) forces locate's
410 "-e" option to be turned on, which has an effect on the "-S" option
411 which is probably surprising for most users.
414 ** Documentation Fixes
416 The global effect of options (other than -daystart and -follow) is now
417 explained more clearly in the manual page. Savannah bug #15360.
420 * Major changes in release 4.3.1, 2006-08-06
424 Find now follows POSIX rules for determining where directories end and
425 expressions start. This means that "find \(1 \!2 \, \)" now searches
426 in the four named directories, rather than trying to parse an
427 expression. (Savannah bug #15235).
429 You now get a more helpful error message when you use command lines
430 which have missing expressions, such as
437 Savannah bug #15800: If find finds more subdirectories within a parent
438 directory than it previously expected to based on the link count of
439 the parent, the resulting error message now gives the correct
440 directory name (previously an error message was issued but it
441 specified the wrong directory).
443 Savannah bug #16738: "find .... -exec ... {} +" now works if you have
444 a large environment and many files must be passed to the -exec
445 action. The same problem affected the -execdir action, though since
446 the number of files in a given directory will normally be smaller, the
447 problem was worse for -exec.
449 Savannah bug #16579: Updatedb now works if it is running as a user
450 whose login shell is not actually a shell.
452 There have also been a number of documentation improvements (includng
453 Savannah bug #16269).
455 ** Functional changes
457 For find, debug output can now be enabled at runtime with the -D
458 option. This causes the printing of various sorts of information
459 about find's internal state and progress.
461 The find option -nowarn cannot itself produce a warning (this used to
462 happen with commands like "find . -name quux -nowarn -print").
464 ** Performance Enhancements
466 Find now has a rudimentary cost-based optimiser. It has an idea of
467 the basic cost of each test (i.e. that -name is very cheap while -size
468 is more expensive). It re-orders tests bearing in mind the cost of
469 each test and its likely success. Predicates with side effects (for
470 example -delete or -exec) are not reordered. The optimiser is not
471 yet enabled by default, but the new option -O controls the query
472 optimisation level. To see this in action, try
473 find -D opt -O3 . -type f -o -type c -o -size 555 -name Z
474 and compare the optimised query with:
475 find -D opt -O3 . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z
477 find -D opt . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z
479 Over time, as optimisations are proven to be robust and correct, they
480 will be moved to lower optimisation levels. Some optimisations have
481 always been performed by find (for example -name is always done early
486 Findutils 4.3.1 includes updated translations for the following
488 Vietnamese, Belarusian, Catalan, Danish, German, Greek, Esperanto,
489 Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Irish, Galician, Croatian, Hungarian,
490 Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Luganda, Malay, Dutch, Polish,
491 Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Kinyarwanda,
492 Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish, Chinese (simplified),
493 Chinese (traditional), Bulgarian
495 * Major changes in release 4.3.0, 2005-12-12
497 The 4.3.x release series are currently 'development' releases. Please
498 test it, but think carefully before installing it in a production
499 system. New features in findutils-4.3.x are under development; they
500 may change or go away.
502 All changes up to and including findutils-4.2.27 are included in this
503 release. In addition the following changes are new in this release:
505 ** Functional Changes
507 By default, find now uses the fts() function to search the file
508 system. The use of fts greatly increases find's ability to search
509 extremely deep directory hierarchites.
511 You can tell that the version of find you are using uses FTS, because
512 the output of "find --version" will include the word "FTS".
514 Currently two binaries for 'find' are built. The configure option
515 --without-fts can be used to select whether 'find' uses fts:
518 default configuration find oldfind
519 configure --with-fts find oldfind
520 configure --without-fts ftsfind find
522 New tests, -readable, -writable, -executable. These check that a file
523 can be read, written or executed respectively.
525 * Major changes in release 4.2.27, 2005-12-06
527 ** Warnings of Future Changes
529 The test -perm /000 currently matches no files, but for greater
530 consistency with -perm -000, this will be changed to match all files;
531 this change will probably be made in early 2006. Meanwhile, a warning
532 message is given if you do this.
536 If xargs is invoked with many short arguments on PPC systems running
537 the Linux kernel, we no longer get an "argument list too long" error
538 from the operating system.
540 Fixed a bug in the test suite which caused it to spuriously fail on
541 systems where ARG_MAX is different to the value used by the Linux
542 kernel on 32-bit x86-architecture systems.
544 On systems running the Linux kernel, "find -printf %F" no longer
545 produces the wrong answer for files on filesystems that have been
546 remounted elsewhere using "mount --bind". (Savannah bug #14921).
548 ** Documentation Changes
550 Following some extensive and detailed review comments from Aaron
551 Hawley, the material in the manual pages and the Texinfo manual are
554 The %M format specifier of "find -printf" is now documented, although
555 it has existed since release 4.2.5.
557 The 'find' manual page now correctly documents the fact that -regex
558 defaults to using Emacs-style regular expressions (though this can be
561 * Major changes in release 4.2.26, 2005-11-19
563 ** Public Service Announcements
565 I'd like to point out a second time that the interpretation of '-perm
566 +mode' has changed to be more POSIX-compliant. If you want the old
567 behaviour of the GNU extension you should use '-perm /mode'. See the
568 NEWS entry for findutils version 4.2.21 for details.
570 ** Functional Changes
572 The xargs command now supports a new option (--delimiter) which allows
573 input items to be separated by characters other than null and
574 whitespace. This resolves Savannah support request sr #102914.
576 Sometimes find needs to read the /etc/mtab file (or perform the
577 equivalent operation on systems not using /etc/mtab). If this
578 information is needed but not available, find now exits with an error
579 message non-zero status. If the information is not needed, find will
582 A new xargs option --delimiter allows the input delimiter to be
583 changed (previously \0 was the only choice unless you use the -L
584 option, which changes other semantics too).
588 If the environment size is too large to allow xargs to operate
589 normally, 'xargs --help' still works (now).
591 If the input to xargs is a large number of very short options (for
592 example, one character each), earlier versions of xargs would fail
593 with 'Argument list too long'. However, since this is precisely the
594 problem that xargs was invented to solve, this is a bug. Hence on
595 those systems we now correctly use a shorter command line. This
596 problem particularly affected 64-bit Linux systems because of the
597 larger size of pointers, although 32-bit Linux systems were also
598 affected (albeit for longer command lines). In theory the same
599 problem could affect 'find -exec {} +', but that's much less likely
600 (even so, the bug is fixed there too).
602 Bugfix for an unusual failure mode (Savannah bug #14842) where an
603 attempt to allocate more space for directory contents succeeds but is
604 incorrectly diagnosed as a failure. The likelihood of you
605 experiencing this depends on your architecture, operating system and
606 resource limits. This failure has been observed in a directory
607 containing 35396 entries.
609 ** Documentation Changes
611 The EXAMPLES section of the find manual page now correctly describes
612 the symbolic and octal modes for the -perm test.
614 The documentation and "--help" usage information for the -L, -l, -I
615 and -i options have been clarified (but the behaviour has not changed).
617 The documentation now explains more clearly what happens when you use
620 * Major changes in release 4.2.25, 2005-09-03
624 find -perm /440 (which should succeed if a file is readable by its
625 owner or group) now works. Previously there was a bug which caused
626 this to be treated as "find -perm 440".
628 Some files in the xargs test suite have been renamed to avoid problems
629 on operating systems whoch cannot distinguish filenames on the basis
630 of upper/lower case distinctions.
632 The software now builds on Cygwin, including the generated file
635 Findutils should now build once again on systems supporting AFS, but
636 this support has not recently been fully tested. Findutils should
637 also (once again) build on Cygwin.
641 The test suite for find is now much more extensive.
643 * Major changes in release 4.2.24, 2005-07-29
645 ** Documentation Changes
647 The manual now includes a "Worked Examples" section which talks about
648 the various ways in which findutils can be used to perform common
649 tasks, and why some of these alternatives are better than others.
651 The -I option of xargs (which is required by the POSIX standard) is
654 We now document the fact that find ensures that commands run by -ok
655 and -okdir don't steal find's input. Find does this by redirecting
656 the command's standard input from stdin.
658 Many documentation readability enhancements and proofreading fixes
659 were contributed by Aaron Hawley.
661 ** Functional Changes
663 *** Functional changes in locate
665 The "--regex" option of locate now assumes the regular expression to
666 be in the same syntax as is used in GNU Emacs, though this can be
667 changed with the new option --regextype. This is a change from the
668 existing behaviour (which was to use POSIX Basic Regular Expressions).
669 Since this feature is releatively new anyway, I though it was more
670 useful to have compatibility between regular expression handling in
671 find and locate than to maintain the short-lived previous behaviour of
674 The locate program now also supports a "--regextype" long option which
675 controls which regular expression syntax is understood by locate.
676 This is a long option and has no single-letter 'short option'
679 *** Functional changes in find
681 The regular expression syntax understood by "find" can be changed with
682 the -regextype option; this option is positional, meaning that you can
683 have several tests, each using a distinct syntax (this is not
684 recommended practice however).
686 The default regular expression syntax is substantially the same as
687 that recognised by GNU Emacs, except for the fact that "." will match
690 The leaf optimisation can be disabled with the configure option
691 "--disable-leaf-optimisation", which is equivalent to specifying
692 "-noleaf" on all find command lines. This is useful for systems
693 having filesystems which do not provide traditional Unix behaviour for
694 the link count on directories (for example Cygwin and the Solaris 9
695 HSFS implementation).
699 *** Bug Fixes for find
701 The -iregex test now works once again on systems that lack
702 re_search() (that is, systems on which findutils needs to use the
703 gnulib version of this function).
705 find -regex now once again uses GNU Emacs-compatible regular
708 If invoked with stderr closed, the -fprint and -fprintf actions now no
709 longer cause error messages to be sent into the output file.
711 If the link count of a directory is less that two, the leaf
712 optimisation is now disabled for that directory. This should allow
713 searching of non-Unix filesystems to be more reliable on systems that
714 don't take the trouble to make their filesystems look like traditional
715 Unix filesystems. Some filesystems don't even take the trouble to
716 have a link count of less than two and for these, -noleaf is still
717 required unless --disable-leaf-optimisation was used at configure time.
719 The "%Y" directive for the -printf action now no longer changes find's
720 idea of the mode of the file, so this means among other things that
721 "-printf %Y %y" now works properly. This is Savannah bug #13973.
723 * Major changes in release 4.2.23, 2005-06-19
725 ** Documentation Changes
727 The -L and -I options of xargs are currently incompatible (but should
730 Improved the documentation for -execdir and -okdir.
732 ** Functional Changes to updatedb
734 File names ending in "/" which are specified as an argument to
735 --prunepaths (or in $PRUNEPATHS) don't work, so we now issue an error
736 message if the user tries to do that. The obvious exception of course
737 is "/" which does work and is not rejected.
740 * Major changes in release 4.2.22, 2005-06-12
744 If a directory entry searched with "find -L" is a symbolic link to
745 ".", we no longer loop indefinitely. This problem affected find
746 versions 4.2.19, 4.2.20 and 4.2.21. This problem allows users to make
747 "find" loop indefinitely. This is in effect a denial of service and
748 could be used to prevent updates to the locate database or to defeat
749 file security checks based on find. However, it should be noted that
750 you should not use "find -L" in security-sensitive scenarios.
754 None in this release.
756 ** Functional Changes to locate
758 A locate database can now be supplied on stdin, using '-' as a element
759 of the database-path. If more than one database-path element is '-',
760 later instances are ignored.
762 A new option to locate, '--all' ('-A') causes matches to be limited to
763 entries which match all given patterns, not entries which match
764 one or more patterns.
766 ** Documentation Changes
768 Some typos in the manual pages have been fixed. Various parts of the
769 manual now point out that it is good practice to quote the argument of
770 "-name". The manpage now has a "NON-BUGS" section which explains some
771 symptoms that look like bugs but aren't. The explanations of the "%k"
772 and "%b" directives to "find -printf" have been imrpoved.
775 * Major changes in release 4.2.21, 2005-06-07
776 ** Functional Changes to find
778 The GNU extension "find ... -perm +MODE" has been withdrawn because it
779 is incompatible with POSIX in obscure cases like "find ... -perm ++r".
780 Use the new syntax "find ... -perm /MODE" instead. Old usages will
781 still continue to work, so long as they don't conflict with POSIX.
783 If the output is going to a terminal, the -print, -fprint, -printf and
784 -fprintf actions now quote "unusual" characters to prevent unwanted
785 effects on the terminal. See "Unusual Characters in File Names" for
786 further details. There is no change to the behaviour when the output
787 is not going to a terminal. The locate program does the same thing,
788 unless the -0 option is in effect (in which case the filenames are
791 ** Functional Changes to locate
793 The locate command will now read each locate database at most once.
794 This means that if you are using multiple databases and are searching
795 for more than one name, the results will now be printed in a different
796 order (and if you specified a small limit with --limit, you may get a
797 different set of results).
799 A new option '--print' for locate causes it to print the matching
800 results even if the '--count' or '--statistics' option is in effect.
803 find /blah/blah/blah -depth -empty now works once again.
805 The -regex and -iregex tests of find now correctly accept POSIX Basic
806 Regular Expressions. (Savannah bug #12999)
808 The updatedb program now works on systems where "su" does not support
809 the "-s" option, for example Solaris.
811 * Major changes in release 4.2.20, 2005-03-17
812 ** Internationalization and Localization
813 Updated Vietnamese and Dutch translations.
816 Minor bugfix affecting only those who compile from the CVS repository,
817 as opposed to those who compile from the source releases.
819 * Major changes in release 4.2.19, 2005-03-07
822 find should now no longer hang on systems which lack the O_NOFOLLOW
823 flag to open(2) and which are clients of an unresponsive NFS server
824 (Savannah bug #12044).
826 We now avoid inappropriately failing for "find -L foo" or "find -H
827 foo" if foo is a symbolic link (Savannah bug #12181). Previously we
828 used to fail with the error message "Too many levels of symbolic
831 "find . -false -exec foo {} +" no longer runs an extra instance of foo
832 when find exits (Savannah bug #12230).
834 If the chdir() safety check fails but we can no longer get back to
835 where we started, exit with an explanatory (fatal) error message.
836 This does not happen on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD because the safety check
837 is not needed (the security problem the safety check protects against
838 is prevented in a cleaner way on those systems).
840 "make distclean" no longer deletes regex.c (which "make all" needs).
842 ** Functionality Changes
843 "find -printf "%h\n" will now print "." for files in the current directory.
844 Previously it printed nothing (but there was a bug in the %h
845 implementation anyway). This fixes Savannah bug #12085.
847 Should now build (again) on non-C99-compliant systems.
849 ** Documentation enhancements
850 Fixed some typos and clarified wording in "Working with automounters".
852 ** Internationalization and Localization
853 New Vietnamese message translation.
855 * Major changes in release 4.2.18, 2005-02-16
857 *** "find -depth" was missing out non-leaf directories when they contain
858 non-directories. This affected findutils releases 4.2.15,
859 4.2.16 and 4.2.17, but the bug is now fixed.
860 *** Find no longer hangs on systems which are clients of unresponsive
862 ** Documentation improvements
863 *** Improvements and corrections to the find.1 manpage, including corrections to the descriptions of -H and -L.
865 * Major changes in release 4.2.17, 2005-02-08
867 *** bug #11861 undefined symbol "basename" on IRIX 5.3
868 *** bug #11865 xargs -i regression (as compared to findutils-4.2.12)
869 *** bug #11866 Typo in pred_okdir renders it useless (affecting 4.2.16 only)
870 *** patch #3723 fix recent process_top_path change (for -execdir on /)
871 *** Fixing bug #11866 and applying patch #3723 made -execdir work much better.
872 *** find bar/baz/ugh now works again if baz is a symbolic link (broken
875 * Major changes in release 4.2.16, 2005-02-05
876 ** Functionality Changes
877 *** Updated the message catalogues for the translated messages.
878 *** The subfs filesystem is now treated the same as the autofs
880 *** New translations: Belarusian, Catalan, Greek, Esperanto,
881 Finnish, Irish, Croatian, Hungarian, Japanese, Luganda,
882 Malay, Romanian, Slovenian, Serbian, Chinese (simplified).
885 *** The -execdir action now works correctly for files named on the
888 * Major changes in release 4.2.15, 2005-01-29
889 ** Functionality Changes
890 *** locate now supports matching regular expression (--regex).
891 *** --enable-d_type-optimization (introduced in findutils 4.2.13) is now turned on by default.
893 * Major changes in release 4.2.14, 2005-01-25
894 ** Functionality Changes
895 *** New options -L, -P, -H for locate. The work in the same was as the same options for find.
897 *** Don't include the "findutils/find/testsuite/find.gnu" subdirectory in the
898 distributed tar file more than once.
899 *** Should now build on Solaris once again.
900 *** -xtype and -printf %Y now work correctly for symbolic links once again
901 ** Documentation improvements
902 *** All options for "locate" are now documented
904 * Major changes in release 4.2.13, 2005-01-23
905 ** Performance Enhancements
906 *** On Linux and some other systems, a large performance improvement,
907 because we can eliminate many of the calls to lstat() (in extreme
908 cases, 99% of them). Limited testing shows a 2x speedup on NFS
909 filesystems. Other systems which can make use of this enhancement
910 include Mac OS X and *BSD.
912 * Major changes in release 4.2.12, 2005-01-22
913 ** Functionality Changes
914 *** find is now POSIX-compliant, as far as I know.
915 *** -exec ... {} + now works.
916 *** New actions -execdir and -okdir which are like -exec and -ok but more secure.
917 *** "locate -w" is now a synonym for "locate --wholepath".
918 *** An empty path entry in the locate database path (for example "::" in
919 $LOCATE_PATH or in the argument to "locate -d") is taken to mean
920 the default database, whose name is hard-coded in locate.
922 *** If find or xargs cannot write to stdout, for example because
923 output is redirected to a file and the disk is full, the
924 relevant program will return a non-zero exit status.
926 * Major changes in release 4.2.11, 2004-12-12
928 *** Compilation fix for systems without EOVERFLOW.
929 *** More helpful error message if you make a mistake with (, ), -o or -a.
930 ** Functionality Changes
931 *** If you have unclosed parentheses on the find command line,
932 or any of a number of similar problems, find will now produce
933 a more helpful error message.
934 *** locate -b is now a synonym for locate --basename
935 *** locate now supports a --statistics (or -S) option, which prints some
936 statistics about the locate databases.
937 *** Implemented the -samefile option.
938 ** Documentation improvements
939 *** New chapter in the manual, "Security Considerations".
940 *** Better documentation for -prune (Mainly thanks to Stepan Kasal)
942 *** locate's options -i and -w now work with the -e option (previously a bug
945 * Major changes in release 4.2.10, 2004-12-06
947 *** Portability fix for fstype.c: should now compile on UNICOS, and possibly
948 also produce useful results on BeOS and Dolphin, perhaps other
951 * Major changes in release 4.2.9, 2004-12-05
952 ** Functionality Changes
953 *** 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_".
954 *** xargs now supports the POSIX options -E, -I and -L. These are synonyms
955 for the existing options -e, -i and -l, but the latter three are
958 *** xargs -n NUM now invokes a command as soon as it has NUM arguments.
959 Previously, it waited until NUM+1 items had been read, and then
960 invoked the command with NUM arguments, saving the remaining one
962 *** If "find -L" discovers a symbolic link loop, an error message is issued.
963 *** If you specify a directory on the find command line, but -prune
964 is applied to it, find will no longer chdir() into it anyway.
965 ** Documentation improvements
966 *** The precise interpretation of the arguments to the -atime, -ctime
967 and similar tests in find has been documented more clearly.
969 * Major changes in release 4.2.8, 2004-11-24
970 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.7 automount handling on Solaris. This
971 worked to some extent in findutils-4.2.7, but is much improved in
974 * Major changes in release 4.2.7, 2004-11-21
975 ** Functionality Changes
976 *** xargs can now read a list of arguments from a named file, allowing
977 the invoked program to use the same stdin as xargs started with
978 (for example ``xargs --arg-file=todo emacs'').
979 ** Documentation improvements
980 *** The Texinfo manual now has an extra chapter, "Error Messages". Most
981 error messages are self-explanatory, but some of the ones which
982 are not are explained in this chapter.
984 *** Avoid trying to link against -lsun on UNICOS, which doesn't need it or
986 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.6 automount handling (which hadn't been enabled
988 *** Reenabled internationalisation support (which had been accidentally
989 disabled in findutils-4.2.5).
991 * Major changes in release 4.2.6, 2004-11-21
993 *** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as
994 it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount.
995 This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change
996 directory into them. This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998,
999 * Major changes in release 4.2.5, 2004-11-11
1000 ** Functionality Changes
1001 *** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported. These control whether or not
1002 find will follow symbolic links.
1003 *** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case
1005 ** Documentation improvements
1006 *** Better documentation for "xargs -i".
1008 *** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir.
1009 (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location
1010 other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure").
1011 *** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9.
1012 *** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate
1013 warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library
1014 "-lsun". Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem.
1016 * Major changes in release 4.2.4, 2004-11-08
1017 ** Functionality Changes
1018 *** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
1019 now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
1021 *** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system
1022 doesn't support that much).
1023 *** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message
1024 is now issued. Options should be specified immediately after the
1025 list of paths to search. These warnings are enabled if you
1026 specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty. They are diabled
1027 by the use of the -nowarn option.
1028 *** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
1029 which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
1030 *** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
1031 output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
1033 *** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the
1034 number of results. This is useful if you only want to find out if
1035 there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
1036 to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
1037 *** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to
1038 be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
1039 database, rather than the whole name. The default behaviour
1040 (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
1041 parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
1042 *** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to
1043 pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.
1045 *** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
1046 systems that have non-writable string constants.
1047 *** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range
1048 values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
1049 error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
1051 *** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references
1053 * Major changes in release 4.2.3, 2004-10-30
1054 ** Functionality Changes
1055 *** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches.
1056 *** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately.
1057 *** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number.
1058 *** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names.
1059 *** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility
1060 with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. This option is already
1061 deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth".
1062 *** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are
1063 %y and %Y. They indicate the type of the file as a single letter;
1064 these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test.
1065 *** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find,
1066 the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change
1067 (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the
1068 directory we've just returned out of).
1070 *** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings.
1072 * Major changes in release 4.2.2, 2004-10-24
1073 ** Documentation improvements
1074 *** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported.
1076 *** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX
1077 *** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64
1078 *** The built-in internationalisation support now works again.
1080 *** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used,
1081 which means among other things that we only have one config.h file
1083 *** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in
1084 gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a". This is in the lib
1085 directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory.
1086 *** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers.
1088 * Major changes in release 4.2.1, 2004-10-17
1090 *** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard
1091 requires it, as explained at
1092 http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html
1094 * Major changes in release 4.2.1, 2004-10-17
1096 *** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function
1097 that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD
1098 *** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers,
1099 as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html)
1100 *** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t
1102 **** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17).
1104 * Major changes in release 4.2.0, 2003-06-14
1105 ** Functionality Changes
1106 *** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive.
1107 The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment
1108 data contained more than 20480 bytes.
1109 *** New options -wholename and -iwholename
1110 As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over
1111 the -path and -ipath options. Using -ipath now generates a warning,
1112 though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path).
1113 *** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored.
1114 *** New option "-ignore_readdir_race"
1115 silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed
1116 after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before
1117 find stats the file. There is also an option
1118 -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect.
1119 ** Documentation improvements
1120 *** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail
1121 *** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions
1122 The find manual page also now includes a section
1123 which describes the relationship between the features of GNU
1124 find and the POSIX standard. Some other small improvements
1125 to the find and xargs manual pages have been made.
1126 *** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented.
1127 The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now
1128 documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers
1130 *** xargs -i is now more clearly documented.
1132 *** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course)
1133 *** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes
1134 If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input,
1135 it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the
1136 list of files that xargs is trying to read.
1137 *** Better support for 64-bit systems.
1138 *** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect,
1139 I think this is a strange thing to want to do.
1140 *** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed
1141 Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing.
1142 *** updatedb is now somewhat more robust
1143 The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty
1144 database if it fails.
1145 *** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb
1146 Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the
1148 *** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works
1149 This was broken in 4.1.20.
1151 * Major changes in release 4.1.20, 2003-06-14:
1152 ** New maintainer, James Youngman <jay@gnu.org>
1153 ** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left
1155 ** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including
1156 a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository. There are no
1157 differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are
1158 building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file
1160 ** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20.
1162 * Major changes in release 4.1.7, 2001-05-20:
1163 fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used.
1164 security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing.
1166 * Major changes in release 4.1.6, 2000-10-10:
1167 correct bug in prune.
1168 added --ignore-case option for locate
1170 * Major changes in release 4.1.5, 2000-04-12:
1171 Add support for large files
1173 * Major changes in release 4.1.4, 2000-02-26:
1174 bug fixes, more up-to-date languages.
1176 * Major changes in release 4.1.3, 2000-01-27:
1177 added internationalization and localization.
1179 * Major changes in release 4.1.2, 2000-01-18:
1182 * Major changes in release 4.1.1, 1999-08-8:
1183 attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect
1184 "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb
1186 * Major changes in release 4.1, 1994-11-3:
1188 ** Distribution renamed to findutils.
1189 ** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin
1190 instead of $exec_prefix/libexec.
1191 ** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected.
1193 * Major changes in release 4.0, 1994-11-2:
1197 *** Man page for updatedb.
1198 *** Man page for the locate database formats.
1201 *** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend
1202 trees, so it does fewer inode lookups.
1203 *** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given.
1204 *** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include
1205 and you configure using the --with-afs option.
1206 *** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE.
1209 *** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and
1210 allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to
1211 share the databases. The new locate can also detect and read the
1212 old database format automatically. The new databases are typically
1213 30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in
1214 file names). Search times are approximately the same, or faster on
1216 *** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old.
1219 *** Takes command-line options.
1222 *** Performance improved 10-20%.
1223 *** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given.
1224 *** Now has a test suite. Some minor bugs fixed as a result.
1226 * Major changes in release 3.8, 1993-03-29:
1228 ** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex:
1229 -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex
1230 ** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type
1232 * Major changes in release 3.7:
1234 ** locate can search multiple databases
1235 ** locate has an option to specify the database path
1236 ** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail
1238 * No NEWS was kept for earlier releases. Known release dates include:
1239 ** release 3.2, 1991-08-28
1240 ** release 3.1, 1991-08-21
1241 ** release 3.0, 1991-08-21
1242 ** release 2.2, 1991-04-05
1243 ** release 2.1, 1991-01-01
1244 ** release 2.0, 1990-11-20
1245 ** release 1.2, 1990-07-03
1246 ** release 1.1, 1990-06-24
1247 ** release 1.0, 1990-06-22
1248 ** beginning of findutils history, 1987-02-21
1251 This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el:
1253 LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy
1254 LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake
1255 LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec
1256 LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname
1257 LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf