1 GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes. -*- outline -*- (allout)
2 * Major changes in release 4.3.11-CVS
6 When the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set, "find -perm
7 +a+w" is rejected as invalid. Some other similar mode strings
8 starting with '+' which are not valid in POSIX are also rejected.
11 #21039: Setting the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable now turns off
12 warnings by default, because POSIX requires that only diagnostic
13 messages (and -ok prompts) are printed on STDERR, and diagnostic
14 messages must also result in a nonzero exit status.
16 #20970: Trailing slash on directory arguments breaks -name. "find
17 foo/ -name foo" now correctly matches foo and printf foo/. See POSIX
18 interp http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/uploads/40/14959/AI-186.txt
20 ** Documentation Fixes
22 #21270: Formatting fixes to the xargs.1 manual page, including making
23 options bold instead of italic and making OPTIONS a section header
24 rather than a subsection.
26 #21628: find -perm /000 matches all files rather than none, since
27 findutils-4.3.3. The Texinfo documentation is now consistent with the
28 manual page on this point.
30 * Major changes in release 4.3.10, 2007-11-13
34 #21568: findutils gnulib code does not match the date in
35 import-gnulib.config. We now check out the gnulib code via
38 * Major changes in release 4.3.9, 2007-11-11
42 Findutils version 4.3.9 is released under version 3 of the GNU General
47 #20834: Avoid segmentation violation for -execdir when $PATH is
48 unset. Assume that the PATH is safe in this situation.
50 #20310: configure uses hosts's support status for "sort -z" when
51 generating the updatedb script for use on the target. This is
52 inappropriate when cross-compiling, so avoid doing that.
54 #20263: Compilation fix for DEC Alpha OSF/1 cc, which forbids the
55 ordering comparison of function pointers.
57 #20139: find -[acm]time -N (wrongly) includes files from N days ago,
58 as well as (correctly) from less than N days ago.
60 #20273: When xargs is successful without consuming all of stdin (for
61 example, with the -E option), and stdin is seekable, xargs now
62 correctly restores the file position, even on platforms where exit()
63 does not follow the POSIX rules of doing likewise. Likewise for find
64 (for example, with the -ok action).
66 #20547: The version information printed by find, xargs, locate,
67 updatedb, frcode and code now complies with the GNU Project's coding
70 #20662: Avoid memory leak in find -name and other places affected by
71 gnulib dirname module. The leak had been present since 4.3.1.
73 #20751: Avoid memory corruption in find -ls that has been present
76 #20871: Assertion failure introduced in 4.3.3, when oldfind is invoked
77 in a directory where the parent directory lacks search permission.
81 #20594: Allow fine-tuning of the default argument size used by xargs
82 and find at ./configure time.
84 #20688: The warning printed by -name or -iname when the pattern to
85 match contains a slash can now be silenced by -nowarn. This warning
86 was originally introduced unconditionally in 4.2.21.
88 Translation of locate --limit problems is improved.
90 POSIX will standardise -path, so the documentation no longer claims
91 that -wholename is the 'canonical' test, and -ipath no longer
94 ** Documentation Fixes
96 Point out more explicitly that the subsecond timestamp support
97 introduced by findutils-4.3.3 introduces a change in the format of
100 Also explain that when reporting a bug, you should check the most
101 recent findutils release first.
103 Introduced doc/find-maint.texi, a maintenance manual for findutils.
105 Added an extra worked example for find (copying a subset of files).
107 The locate command's manual page now has a HISTORY section.
109 #20951: Very bad/unclear/confusing documentation of security checks in
112 #20865: Better documentation on the fact that -delete implies -depth
113 and that -delete interacts badly with -prune.
115 #20552: Fixed typos, formatting and section ordering issues in the
118 #20529: removed spurious 'o' in description of "xargs -a" in
121 #20232: The --max-database-age option of locate was added in release
122 4.3.3, but this file (NEWS) did not previously mention this fact.
126 Updated Dutch translation.
129 * Major changes in release 4.3.8, 2007-06-12
133 #20157: Avoid segfault in locate when run as root. This is caused by
134 a buffer overrun, but at this time no exploit mechanism is known.
136 * Major changes in release 4.3.7, 2007-06-09
138 ** Functional changes
140 Locate can now read old-format locate databases generated on machines
141 with a different byte order. It does this by guessing the byte order,
142 so the result is not completely reliable. If you need to share
143 databases between machines of different architectures, you should use
144 the LOCATE02 format (which has other advantages, as explained in the
149 #20014: Findutils-4.3.7 includes a patch for a potential security
150 problem in locate. When locate read an old-format database, it read
151 file names into a fixed-length buffer allocated on the heap without
152 checking for overflow. Although overflowing a heap buffer is often
153 somewhat safer than overflowing a buffer on the stack, this bug still
154 has potential security implications.
156 This bug also affected the following previous findutils releases:
158 - All releases prior to 4.2.31
159 - Findutils 4.3.0 to 4.3.6.
161 This bug has been assigned CVE number CVE-2007-2452.
165 #20128: Fix compilation error of find/tree.c on AIX with GCC.
167 #20005: Tests -mtime -n and -mtime +n incorrectly treated like -mtime n.
169 #19983: include_next causes compilation failure in findutils 4.3.6 on
172 #19981: Don't call setgroups if the function isn't available. This
173 fixes Savannah bug# 19981.
175 #19980: Don't use the functions putw() or getw() since these are not
176 in current POSIX. Use the gnulib version of wcwidth() where the
177 system does not provide it.
179 #19979: Compilation errors on BeOS
181 #19970: Cannot cast from pointer to bool using gnulib's <stdbool.h>
183 #19967: Use of __attribute((__noreturn__)) makes compilation fail with
184 some non-GCC compilers
186 #19966: find should link against -lm for modf() and fabs()
188 #19965: Compilation failure on OSF/1 4.0; non-declaration of uintmax_t
190 #19948: Assertion failure O_NOFOLLOW != 0 on IRIX 6.5
192 #19871: Typos in find.1
194 #19596: Fixed this bug again, this time in the Texinfo manual (the
195 discussion should compare %b with %s/512, not %s/1024).
197 #19416: _FORTIFY_SOURCE warn_unused_result warnings
199 * Major changes in release 4.3.6, 2007-05-21
203 #19948: Fixed an assertion failure on IRIX 6.5 (O_NOFOLLOW is defined
206 #19923: Fixed an array overrun in groups[] array of 'locate' when run by
207 or as root. This bug appears not to be exploitable. If locate is not
208 installed setuid, the bug is not exploitable. For setuid
209 installations, it is concievable that there could be an information
210 leak if the user uses the -d option or the -e option, though the
211 maintainer has been unable to provoke this on an x86 system.
213 #19871: Spurious .R directives in manpage produced error messages from
214 GNU troff. This is now fixed (they are corrected to .B).
216 #19416: The result of I/O operations in print-related actions is now
217 checked, and failures are reported. Any failure will cause find's
218 exit status to be nonzero. The predicate itself will continue to
223 A variety of changes were made to allow compilation to succeed on
226 #19983: Now compiles on DEC C V5.9-005 on Digital UNIX V4.0 (or at
229 #19970: Compile correctly on C89 systems where the "_Bool" type is not
230 provided, taking into account the limitations of the gnulib
231 replacement for stdbool.h.
233 #19967: Build successfully with C compilers that don't support the GCC
234 construct __attribute__((__noreturn__)).
236 #19966: Findutils should now build on systems which have the modf()
237 and fabs() functions in the maths library, -lm. This includes some
238 versions of HP-UX and Solaris.
240 #19965: Fixed a compilation failure on OSF/1 4.0 (no definition of the
244 * Major changes in release 4.3.5, 2007-05-05
246 ** Functional changes
248 Updatedb can now support he generation of file name databases which
249 are compatible with slocate. For some time, GNU locate has been able
252 The /proc filesystem is excluded from the locate database (by
253 default; change PRUNEPATHS to modify this behaviour).
257 #19806: The -samefile predicate might get fooled by inode reuse. We
258 now hold open a file descriptor on the reference file to prevent this.
260 #19768: Better detection of corrupted old-style locate databases
261 (e.g. if the database is too short to include a complete bigram
264 #19766: The frcode and code programs now detect write errors more
267 #19371: Fix compilation failure on systems which #define open to
268 open64 (and similarly with the close system call). This fixes
269 Savannah bug #19371, affecting AIX 5.3.
271 #19658: When cross-compiling, "make clean" no longer deletes the
272 generated file doc/regexprops.texi, because there is no way to
275 #19391: When xargs knows that the system's actual exec limit is larger
276 than the compiled-in ARG_MAX, use the system's limit without
277 generating an assertion failure.
279 #18203: A duplicate report of bug #17478.
281 #17478: Error messages from find can garble the console.
283 #16378: Assertion failure if stat() returns 00000 as the mode
284 of a file. This apparently can happen occasionally with broken NFS
287 #11668: FreeBSD extensions for time specification are now
288 implemented. In fact, these were included in findutils-4.3.3. The
289 change was listed as a functional change (whcih it is) and this bug
290 report was not mentioned.
292 ** Documentation Fixes
294 The locatedb.5 manpage now documents the (default) LOCATE02 format
295 more clearly, and also documents the slocate database format.
297 The maximum and default values applying to the -s option of xargs are
298 now documented more clearly in the manual page.
300 * Major changes in release 4.3.4, 2007-04-21
304 #19634: Test suite now passes (again) if "." is on your $PATH.
306 #19619: Findutils builds once again on Cygwin.
308 #19617: Nonexistent start points are (once again) diagnosed in
309 ftsfind. This bug affected only findutils-4.3.3.
311 #19616: Fix leaf optimisation and loop detection (which were
312 unreliable in findutils 4.3.3). This bug affected only
315 #19615: find --version no longer claims to be using FTS_CWDFD when it
316 isn't. This bug affected only findutils-4.3.3.
318 #19613: "find -L . -type f" no longer causes an assertion failure when
319 it encounters a symbolic link loop. This bug affected only
322 #19605: Issue an error message (and later return nonzero exit status)
323 if a symbolic link loop was encountered during directory traversal.
325 #19484: bigram.c and code.c fail if the first pathname recorded begins
328 #19483: Inconsistent option highlighting in updatedb manpage
330 #18414: Tests for "find -readable" are skipped for the superuser, as
331 on some systems (e.g. Cygwin with an Administrative user) users can
336 Findutils 4.3.4 includes a translation for the Ukranian language.
339 * Major changes in release 4.3.3, 2007-04-15
341 Fiundutils-4.3.3 was released on 2007-04-15.
345 #19596: Correct the comparison in the find manpage between %b and %s
346 (the divisor is 512 not 1024).
348 #18714: In the POSIX locale, vertical tabs and form feeds are not
351 #18713: Quoted but empty arguments which occur last on an xargs input
352 line are no longer ignored, but instead produce an empty argument.
354 #18554: Documented the construct -exec sh -c 'foo "$@" bar' {} +
356 #18466: we now avoid this bug by limiting "-execdir ...+"
357 to just one argument for the time being. There is a performance
358 penalty for doing this. We hope to make a better fix in a later
361 #18384: excess bracket in xargs --help
363 #18320: Zero bytes in input should give warning
365 #17437: Corrected the handling of X in symbolic permissions (such
366 as-u+w,a+X). This change actually occurred in findutils-4.3.2, but
367 the NEWS file for that release didn't mention it.
369 #17396: find -mtime -atime -ctime does not support fractional part
370 (see "Functional changes" below)
372 #14748: find -perm /zzz gives wrong result when zzz evaluates to an
375 #14535: correctly support case-folding in locate (that is, "locate
376 -i") for multibyte character environments such as UTF-8. Previously,
377 if your search string contained a character which was outside the
378 single-byte-encoding range for UTF-8 for example, then the
379 case-folding behaviour failed to work and only exact matches would be
384 ** Functional changes
386 The -printf action (and similar related actions) now support %S,
387 which is a measurement of the sparseness of a file.
389 The test "-perm /000" now matches all files instead of no files. For
390 over a year find has been issuing warning messages indicating that
391 this change will happen. We now issue a warning indicating that the
392 change has already happened (in 4.3.x only, there is no plan to make
393 this change in the 4.2.x series).
395 The tests -newer, -anewer, -cnewer, -mtime, -atime, -ctime, -amin,
396 -cmin, -mmin and -used now support sub-second timestamps, including
397 the ability to specify times with non-integer arguments.
399 The -printf format specifiers also support sub-second timestamps:
408 The new test -newerXY supports comparison between status times for
409 files. One of the status times for a file being considered (denoted
410 X) is checked against a reference time (denoted Y) for the file whose
411 name id the argument. X and Y can be:
414 B Birth time (st_birthtime, currently unsupported)
417 t Valid only for the reference time; instead of comparison
418 against a file status time, the argument is a time string.
421 For example, -newermm is equivalent to -newer, and -neweram is true if
422 the file being considered was accessed more recently than the
423 reference file was modified. The -newerXY test supports subsecond
424 timestamps where these are available. The X=B variant is not yet
427 If you configure the source code and then run the tests with "make
428 check", the test suite fails rather than defaulting to testing the
431 A new option, --max-database-age, has been added to locate.
434 * Major changes in release 4.3.2, 2006-11-25
438 #18222: find -printf '%H %P' once again prints the right result if
439 more than one start point was given on the command line.
441 #17782: find -execdir now correctly puts the prefix "./" before the
442 expansion of "{}" rather than at the start of the argument it appears
443 in. Please note that if you use the -exec or -execdir actions with a
444 shell, then you may be vulnerable to shell code injection attacks, so
445 don't do that. It's not a security defect in find - you should not be
446 passing untrusted data (such as file names chosen by other people) to
449 #17490: find -regex generated a segfault in findutils-4.3.1, but this
450 is fixed in findutils-4.3.2.
452 #17477: find -printf '%' (that is, where the format has a trailing %)
453 now generates an error message.
455 #17372: The fts-based find executable (the default configuration uses
456 fts) is now much faster when -maxdepth is used on filesystems with
459 #15531: The -prune action now behaves correctly when applied to a file.
461 ** Functional changes
463 The slocate database format is now supported. Preliminary changes
464 intended to eventually allow setuid operation of locate have also been
465 made. For the moment, please don't install GNU locate as a
466 set-user-ID program (except for testing purposes; if you do so, please
467 make sure that untrusted users cannot execute the set-user-ID locate
470 Use of an slocate database which was built with a nonzero security
471 mode (at the moment, GNU updatedb will not do this) forces locate's
472 "-e" option to be turned on, which has an effect on the "-S" option
473 which is probably surprising for most users.
476 ** Documentation Fixes
478 The global effect of options (other than -daystart and -follow) is now
479 explained more clearly in the manual page. Savannah bug #15360.
482 * Major changes in release 4.3.1, 2006-08-06
486 Find now follows POSIX rules for determining where directories end and
487 expressions start. This means that "find \(1 \!2 \, \)" now searches
488 in the four named directories, rather than trying to parse an
489 expression. (Savannah bug #15235).
491 You now get a more helpful error message when you use command lines
492 which have missing expressions, such as
499 Savannah bug #15800: If find finds more subdirectories within a parent
500 directory than it previously expected to based on the link count of
501 the parent, the resulting error message now gives the correct
502 directory name (previously an error message was issued but it
503 specified the wrong directory).
505 Savannah bug #16738: "find .... -exec ... {} +" now works if you have
506 a large environment and many files must be passed to the -exec
507 action. The same problem affected the -execdir action, though since
508 the number of files in a given directory will normally be smaller, the
509 problem was worse for -exec.
511 Savannah bug #16579: Updatedb now works if it is running as a user
512 whose login shell is not actually a shell.
514 There have also been a number of documentation improvements (includng
515 Savannah bug #16269).
517 ** Functional changes
519 For find, debug output can now be enabled at runtime with the -D
520 option. This causes the printing of various sorts of information
521 about find's internal state and progress.
523 The find option -nowarn cannot itself produce a warning (this used to
524 happen with commands like "find . -name quux -nowarn -print").
526 ** Performance Enhancements
528 Find now has a rudimentary cost-based optimiser. It has an idea of
529 the basic cost of each test (i.e. that -name is very cheap while -size
530 is more expensive). It re-orders tests bearing in mind the cost of
531 each test and its likely success. Predicates with side effects (for
532 example -delete or -exec) are not reordered. The optimiser is not
533 yet enabled by default, but the new option -O controls the query
534 optimisation level. To see this in action, try
535 find -D opt -O3 . -type f -o -type c -o -size 555 -name Z
536 and compare the optimised query with:
537 find -D opt -O3 . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z
539 find -D opt . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z
541 Over time, as optimisations are proven to be robust and correct, they
542 will be moved to lower optimisation levels. Some optimisations have
543 always been performed by find (for example -name is always done early
548 Findutils 4.3.1 includes updated translations for the following
550 Vietnamese, Belarusian, Catalan, Danish, German, Greek, Esperanto,
551 Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Irish, Galician, Croatian, Hungarian,
552 Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Luganda, Malay, Dutch, Polish,
553 Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Kinyarwanda,
554 Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish, Chinese (simplified),
555 Chinese (traditional), Bulgarian
557 * Major changes in release 4.3.0, 2005-12-12
559 The 4.3.x release series are currently 'development' releases. Please
560 test it, but think carefully before installing it in a production
561 system. New features in findutils-4.3.x are under development; they
562 may change or go away.
564 All changes up to and including findutils-4.2.27 are included in this
565 release. In addition the following changes are new in this release:
567 ** Functional Changes
569 By default, find now uses the fts() function to search the file
570 system. The use of fts greatly increases find's ability to search
571 extremely deep directory hierarchites.
573 You can tell that the version of find you are using uses FTS, because
574 the output of "find --version" will include the word "FTS".
576 Currently two binaries for 'find' are built. The configure option
577 --without-fts can be used to select whether 'find' uses fts:
580 default configuration find oldfind
581 configure --with-fts find oldfind
582 configure --without-fts ftsfind find
584 New tests, -readable, -writable, -executable. These check that a file
585 can be read, written or executed respectively.
587 * Major changes in release 4.2.27, 2005-12-06
589 ** Warnings of Future Changes
591 The test -perm /000 currently matches no files, but for greater
592 consistency with -perm -000, this will be changed to match all files;
593 this change will probably be made in early 2006. Meanwhile, a warning
594 message is given if you do this.
598 If xargs is invoked with many short arguments on PPC systems running
599 the Linux kernel, we no longer get an "argument list too long" error
600 from the operating system.
602 Fixed a bug in the test suite which caused it to spuriously fail on
603 systems where ARG_MAX is different to the value used by the Linux
604 kernel on 32-bit x86-architecture systems.
606 On systems running the Linux kernel, "find -printf %F" no longer
607 produces the wrong answer for files on filesystems that have been
608 remounted elsewhere using "mount --bind". (Savannah bug #14921).
610 ** Documentation Changes
612 Following some extensive and detailed review comments from Aaron
613 Hawley, the material in the manual pages and the Texinfo manual are
616 The %M format specifier of "find -printf" is now documented, although
617 it has existed since release 4.2.5.
619 The 'find' manual page now correctly documents the fact that -regex
620 defaults to using Emacs-style regular expressions (though this can be
623 * Major changes in release 4.2.26, 2005-11-19
625 ** Public Service Announcements
627 I'd like to point out a second time that the interpretation of '-perm
628 +mode' has changed to be more POSIX-compliant. If you want the old
629 behaviour of the GNU extension you should use '-perm /mode'. See the
630 NEWS entry for findutils version 4.2.21 for details.
632 ** Functional Changes
634 The xargs command now supports a new option (--delimiter) which allows
635 input items to be separated by characters other than null and
636 whitespace. This resolves Savannah support request sr #102914.
638 Sometimes find needs to read the /etc/mtab file (or perform the
639 equivalent operation on systems not using /etc/mtab). If this
640 information is needed but not available, find now exits with an error
641 message non-zero status. If the information is not needed, find will
644 A new xargs option --delimiter allows the input delimiter to be
645 changed (previously \0 was the only choice unless you use the -L
646 option, which changes other semantics too).
650 If the environment size is too large to allow xargs to operate
651 normally, 'xargs --help' still works (now).
653 If the input to xargs is a large number of very short options (for
654 example, one character each), earlier versions of xargs would fail
655 with 'Argument list too long'. However, since this is precisely the
656 problem that xargs was invented to solve, this is a bug. Hence on
657 those systems we now correctly use a shorter command line. This
658 problem particularly affected 64-bit Linux systems because of the
659 larger size of pointers, although 32-bit Linux systems were also
660 affected (albeit for longer command lines). In theory the same
661 problem could affect 'find -exec {} +', but that's much less likely
662 (even so, the bug is fixed there too).
664 Bugfix for an unusual failure mode (Savannah bug #14842) where an
665 attempt to allocate more space for directory contents succeeds but is
666 incorrectly diagnosed as a failure. The likelihood of you
667 experiencing this depends on your architecture, operating system and
668 resource limits. This failure has been observed in a directory
669 containing 35396 entries.
671 ** Documentation Changes
673 The EXAMPLES section of the find manual page now correctly describes
674 the symbolic and octal modes for the -perm test.
676 The documentation and "--help" usage information for the -L, -l, -I
677 and -i options have been clarified (but the behaviour has not changed).
679 The documentation now explains more clearly what happens when you use
682 * Major changes in release 4.2.25, 2005-09-03
686 find -perm /440 (which should succeed if a file is readable by its
687 owner or group) now works. Previously there was a bug which caused
688 this to be treated as "find -perm 440".
690 Some files in the xargs test suite have been renamed to avoid problems
691 on operating systems whoch cannot distinguish filenames on the basis
692 of upper/lower case distinctions.
694 The software now builds on Cygwin, including the generated file
697 Findutils should now build once again on systems supporting AFS, but
698 this support has not recently been fully tested. Findutils should
699 also (once again) build on Cygwin.
703 The test suite for find is now much more extensive.
705 * Major changes in release 4.2.24, 2005-07-29
707 ** Documentation Changes
709 The manual now includes a "Worked Examples" section which talks about
710 the various ways in which findutils can be used to perform common
711 tasks, and why some of these alternatives are better than others.
713 The -I option of xargs (which is required by the POSIX standard) is
716 We now document the fact that find ensures that commands run by -ok
717 and -okdir don't steal find's input. Find does this by redirecting
718 the command's standard input from stdin.
720 Many documentation readability enhancements and proofreading fixes
721 were contributed by Aaron Hawley.
723 ** Functional Changes
725 *** Functional changes in locate
727 The "--regex" option of locate now assumes the regular expression to
728 be in the same syntax as is used in GNU Emacs, though this can be
729 changed with the new option --regextype. This is a change from the
730 existing behaviour (which was to use POSIX Basic Regular Expressions).
731 Since this feature is releatively new anyway, I though it was more
732 useful to have compatibility between regular expression handling in
733 find and locate than to maintain the short-lived previous behaviour of
736 The locate program now also supports a "--regextype" long option which
737 controls which regular expression syntax is understood by locate.
738 This is a long option and has no single-letter 'short option'
741 *** Functional changes in find
743 The regular expression syntax understood by "find" can be changed with
744 the -regextype option; this option is positional, meaning that you can
745 have several tests, each using a distinct syntax (this is not
746 recommended practice however).
748 The default regular expression syntax is substantially the same as
749 that recognised by GNU Emacs, except for the fact that "." will match
752 The leaf optimisation can be disabled with the configure option
753 "--disable-leaf-optimisation", which is equivalent to specifying
754 "-noleaf" on all find command lines. This is useful for systems
755 having filesystems which do not provide traditional Unix behaviour for
756 the link count on directories (for example Cygwin and the Solaris 9
757 HSFS implementation).
761 *** Bug Fixes for find
763 The -iregex test now works once again on systems that lack
764 re_search() (that is, systems on which findutils needs to use the
765 gnulib version of this function).
767 find -regex now once again uses GNU Emacs-compatible regular
770 If invoked with stderr closed, the -fprint and -fprintf actions now no
771 longer cause error messages to be sent into the output file.
773 If the link count of a directory is less that two, the leaf
774 optimisation is now disabled for that directory. This should allow
775 searching of non-Unix filesystems to be more reliable on systems that
776 don't take the trouble to make their filesystems look like traditional
777 Unix filesystems. Some filesystems don't even take the trouble to
778 have a link count of less than two and for these, -noleaf is still
779 required unless --disable-leaf-optimisation was used at configure time.
781 The "%Y" directive for the -printf action now no longer changes find's
782 idea of the mode of the file, so this means among other things that
783 "-printf %Y %y" now works properly. This is Savannah bug #13973.
785 * Major changes in release 4.2.23, 2005-06-19
787 ** Documentation Changes
789 The -L and -I options of xargs are currently incompatible (but should
792 Improved the documentation for -execdir and -okdir.
794 ** Functional Changes to updatedb
796 File names ending in "/" which are specified as an argument to
797 --prunepaths (or in $PRUNEPATHS) don't work, so we now issue an error
798 message if the user tries to do that. The obvious exception of course
799 is "/" which does work and is not rejected.
802 * Major changes in release 4.2.22, 2005-06-12
806 If a directory entry searched with "find -L" is a symbolic link to
807 ".", we no longer loop indefinitely. This problem affected find
808 versions 4.2.19, 4.2.20 and 4.2.21. This problem allows users to make
809 "find" loop indefinitely. This is in effect a denial of service and
810 could be used to prevent updates to the locate database or to defeat
811 file security checks based on find. However, it should be noted that
812 you should not use "find -L" in security-sensitive scenarios.
816 None in this release.
818 ** Functional Changes to locate
820 A locate database can now be supplied on stdin, using '-' as a element
821 of the database-path. If more than one database-path element is '-',
822 later instances are ignored.
824 A new option to locate, '--all' ('-A') causes matches to be limited to
825 entries which match all given patterns, not entries which match
826 one or more patterns.
828 ** Documentation Changes
830 Some typos in the manual pages have been fixed. Various parts of the
831 manual now point out that it is good practice to quote the argument of
832 "-name". The manpage now has a "NON-BUGS" section which explains some
833 symptoms that look like bugs but aren't. The explanations of the "%k"
834 and "%b" directives to "find -printf" have been imrpoved.
837 * Major changes in release 4.2.21, 2005-06-07
838 ** Functional Changes to find
840 The GNU extension "find ... -perm +MODE" has been withdrawn because it
841 is incompatible with POSIX in obscure cases like "find ... -perm ++r".
842 Use the new syntax "find ... -perm /MODE" instead. Old usages will
843 still continue to work, so long as they don't conflict with POSIX.
845 If the output is going to a terminal, the -print, -fprint, -printf and
846 -fprintf actions now quote "unusual" characters to prevent unwanted
847 effects on the terminal. See "Unusual Characters in File Names" for
848 further details. There is no change to the behaviour when the output
849 is not going to a terminal. The locate program does the same thing,
850 unless the -0 option is in effect (in which case the filenames are
853 ** Functional Changes to locate
855 The locate command will now read each locate database at most once.
856 This means that if you are using multiple databases and are searching
857 for more than one name, the results will now be printed in a different
858 order (and if you specified a small limit with --limit, you may get a
859 different set of results).
861 A new option '--print' for locate causes it to print the matching
862 results even if the '--count' or '--statistics' option is in effect.
865 find /blah/blah/blah -depth -empty now works once again.
867 The -regex and -iregex tests of find now correctly accept POSIX Basic
868 Regular Expressions. (Savannah bug #12999)
870 The updatedb program now works on systems where "su" does not support
871 the "-s" option, for example Solaris.
873 * Major changes in release 4.2.20, 2005-03-17
874 ** Internationalization and Localization
875 Updated Vietnamese and Dutch translations.
878 Minor bugfix affecting only those who compile from the CVS repository,
879 as opposed to those who compile from the source releases.
881 * Major changes in release 4.2.19, 2005-03-07
884 find should now no longer hang on systems which lack the O_NOFOLLOW
885 flag to open(2) and which are clients of an unresponsive NFS server
886 (Savannah bug #12044).
888 We now avoid inappropriately failing for "find -L foo" or "find -H
889 foo" if foo is a symbolic link (Savannah bug #12181). Previously we
890 used to fail with the error message "Too many levels of symbolic
893 "find . -false -exec foo {} +" no longer runs an extra instance of foo
894 when find exits (Savannah bug #12230).
896 If the chdir() safety check fails but we can no longer get back to
897 where we started, exit with an explanatory (fatal) error message.
898 This does not happen on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD because the safety check
899 is not needed (the security problem the safety check protects against
900 is prevented in a cleaner way on those systems).
902 "make distclean" no longer deletes regex.c (which "make all" needs).
904 ** Functionality Changes
905 "find -printf "%h\n" will now print "." for files in the current directory.
906 Previously it printed nothing (but there was a bug in the %h
907 implementation anyway). This fixes Savannah bug #12085.
909 Should now build (again) on non-C99-compliant systems.
911 ** Documentation enhancements
912 Fixed some typos and clarified wording in "Working with automounters".
914 ** Internationalization and Localization
915 New Vietnamese message translation.
917 * Major changes in release 4.2.18, 2005-02-16
919 *** "find -depth" was missing out non-leaf directories when they contain
920 non-directories. This affected findutils releases 4.2.15,
921 4.2.16 and 4.2.17, but the bug is now fixed.
922 *** Find no longer hangs on systems which are clients of unresponsive
924 ** Documentation improvements
925 *** Improvements and corrections to the find.1 manpage, including corrections to the descriptions of -H and -L.
927 * Major changes in release 4.2.17, 2005-02-08
929 *** bug #11861 undefined symbol "basename" on IRIX 5.3
930 *** bug #11865 xargs -i regression (as compared to findutils-4.2.12)
931 *** bug #11866 Typo in pred_okdir renders it useless (affecting 4.2.16 only)
932 *** patch #3723 fix recent process_top_path change (for -execdir on /)
933 *** Fixing bug #11866 and applying patch #3723 made -execdir work much better.
934 *** find bar/baz/ugh now works again if baz is a symbolic link (broken
937 * Major changes in release 4.2.16, 2005-02-05
938 ** Functionality Changes
939 *** Updated the message catalogues for the translated messages.
940 *** The subfs filesystem is now treated the same as the autofs
942 *** New translations: Belarusian, Catalan, Greek, Esperanto,
943 Finnish, Irish, Croatian, Hungarian, Japanese, Luganda,
944 Malay, Romanian, Slovenian, Serbian, Chinese (simplified).
947 *** The -execdir action now works correctly for files named on the
950 * Major changes in release 4.2.15, 2005-01-29
951 ** Functionality Changes
952 *** locate now supports matching regular expression (--regex).
953 *** --enable-d_type-optimization (introduced in findutils 4.2.13) is now turned on by default.
955 * Major changes in release 4.2.14, 2005-01-25
956 ** Functionality Changes
957 *** New options -L, -P, -H for locate. The work in the same was as the same options for find.
959 *** Don't include the "findutils/find/testsuite/find.gnu" subdirectory in the
960 distributed tar file more than once.
961 *** Should now build on Solaris once again.
962 *** -xtype and -printf %Y now work correctly for symbolic links once again
963 ** Documentation improvements
964 *** All options for "locate" are now documented
966 * Major changes in release 4.2.13, 2005-01-23
967 ** Performance Enhancements
968 *** On Linux and some other systems, a large performance improvement,
969 because we can eliminate many of the calls to lstat() (in extreme
970 cases, 99% of them). Limited testing shows a 2x speedup on NFS
971 filesystems. Other systems which can make use of this enhancement
972 include Mac OS X and *BSD.
974 * Major changes in release 4.2.12, 2005-01-22
975 ** Functionality Changes
976 *** find is now POSIX-compliant, as far as I know.
977 *** -exec ... {} + now works.
978 *** New actions -execdir and -okdir which are like -exec and -ok but more secure.
979 *** "locate -w" is now a synonym for "locate --wholepath".
980 *** An empty path entry in the locate database path (for example "::" in
981 $LOCATE_PATH or in the argument to "locate -d") is taken to mean
982 the default database, whose name is hard-coded in locate.
984 *** If find or xargs cannot write to stdout, for example because
985 output is redirected to a file and the disk is full, the
986 relevant program will return a non-zero exit status.
988 * Major changes in release 4.2.11, 2004-12-12
990 *** Compilation fix for systems without EOVERFLOW.
991 *** More helpful error message if you make a mistake with (, ), -o or -a.
992 ** Functionality Changes
993 *** If you have unclosed parentheses on the find command line,
994 or any of a number of similar problems, find will now produce
995 a more helpful error message.
996 *** locate -b is now a synonym for locate --basename
997 *** locate now supports a --statistics (or -S) option, which prints some
998 statistics about the locate databases.
999 *** Implemented the -samefile option.
1000 ** Documentation improvements
1001 *** New chapter in the manual, "Security Considerations".
1002 *** Better documentation for -prune (Mainly thanks to Stepan Kasal)
1004 *** locate's options -i and -w now work with the -e option (previously a bug
1007 * Major changes in release 4.2.10, 2004-12-06
1009 *** Portability fix for fstype.c: should now compile on UNICOS, and possibly
1010 also produce useful results on BeOS and Dolphin, perhaps other
1013 * Major changes in release 4.2.9, 2004-12-05
1014 ** Functionality Changes
1015 *** 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_".
1016 *** xargs now supports the POSIX options -E, -I and -L. These are synonyms
1017 for the existing options -e, -i and -l, but the latter three are
1020 *** xargs -n NUM now invokes a command as soon as it has NUM arguments.
1021 Previously, it waited until NUM+1 items had been read, and then
1022 invoked the command with NUM arguments, saving the remaining one
1024 *** If "find -L" discovers a symbolic link loop, an error message is issued.
1025 *** If you specify a directory on the find command line, but -prune
1026 is applied to it, find will no longer chdir() into it anyway.
1027 ** Documentation improvements
1028 *** The precise interpretation of the arguments to the -atime, -ctime
1029 and similar tests in find has been documented more clearly.
1031 * Major changes in release 4.2.8, 2004-11-24
1032 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.7 automount handling on Solaris. This
1033 worked to some extent in findutils-4.2.7, but is much improved in
1036 * Major changes in release 4.2.7, 2004-11-21
1037 ** Functionality Changes
1038 *** xargs can now read a list of arguments from a named file, allowing
1039 the invoked program to use the same stdin as xargs started with
1040 (for example ``xargs --arg-file=todo emacs'').
1041 ** Documentation improvements
1042 *** The Texinfo manual now has an extra chapter, "Error Messages". Most
1043 error messages are self-explanatory, but some of the ones which
1044 are not are explained in this chapter.
1046 *** Avoid trying to link against -lsun on UNICOS, which doesn't need it or
1048 *** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.6 automount handling (which hadn't been enabled
1050 *** Reenabled internationalisation support (which had been accidentally
1051 disabled in findutils-4.2.5).
1053 * Major changes in release 4.2.6, 2004-11-21
1055 *** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as
1056 it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount.
1057 This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change
1058 directory into them. This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998,
1061 * Major changes in release 4.2.5, 2004-11-11
1062 ** Functionality Changes
1063 *** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported. These control whether or not
1064 find will follow symbolic links.
1065 *** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case
1067 ** Documentation improvements
1068 *** Better documentation for "xargs -i".
1070 *** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir.
1071 (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location
1072 other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure").
1073 *** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9.
1074 *** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate
1075 warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library
1076 "-lsun". Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem.
1078 * Major changes in release 4.2.4, 2004-11-08
1079 ** Functionality Changes
1080 *** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
1081 now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
1083 *** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system
1084 doesn't support that much).
1085 *** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message
1086 is now issued. Options should be specified immediately after the
1087 list of paths to search. These warnings are enabled if you
1088 specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty. They are diabled
1089 by the use of the -nowarn option.
1090 *** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
1091 which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
1092 *** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
1093 output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
1095 *** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the
1096 number of results. This is useful if you only want to find out if
1097 there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
1098 to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
1099 *** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to
1100 be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
1101 database, rather than the whole name. The default behaviour
1102 (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
1103 parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
1104 *** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to
1105 pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.
1107 *** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
1108 systems that have non-writable string constants.
1109 *** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range
1110 values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
1111 error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
1113 *** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references
1115 * Major changes in release 4.2.3, 2004-10-30
1116 ** Functionality Changes
1117 *** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches.
1118 *** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately.
1119 *** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number.
1120 *** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names.
1121 *** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility
1122 with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. This option is already
1123 deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth".
1124 *** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are
1125 %y and %Y. They indicate the type of the file as a single letter;
1126 these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test.
1127 *** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find,
1128 the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change
1129 (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the
1130 directory we've just returned out of).
1132 *** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings.
1134 * Major changes in release 4.2.2, 2004-10-24
1135 ** Documentation improvements
1136 *** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported.
1138 *** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX
1139 *** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64
1140 *** The built-in internationalisation support now works again.
1142 *** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used,
1143 which means among other things that we only have one config.h file
1145 *** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in
1146 gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a". This is in the lib
1147 directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory.
1148 *** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers.
1150 * Major changes in release 4.2.1, 2004-10-17
1152 *** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard
1153 requires it, as explained at
1154 http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html
1156 * Major changes in release 4.2.1, 2004-10-17
1158 *** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function
1159 that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD
1160 *** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers,
1161 as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html)
1162 *** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t
1164 **** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17).
1166 * Major changes in release 4.2.0, 2003-06-14
1167 ** Functionality Changes
1168 *** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive.
1169 The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment
1170 data contained more than 20480 bytes.
1171 *** New options -wholename and -iwholename
1172 As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over
1173 the -path and -ipath options. Using -ipath now generates a warning,
1174 though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path).
1175 *** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored.
1176 *** New option "-ignore_readdir_race"
1177 silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed
1178 after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before
1179 find stats the file. There is also an option
1180 -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect.
1181 ** Documentation improvements
1182 *** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail
1183 *** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions
1184 The find manual page also now includes a section
1185 which describes the relationship between the features of GNU
1186 find and the POSIX standard. Some other small improvements
1187 to the find and xargs manual pages have been made.
1188 *** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented.
1189 The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now
1190 documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers
1192 *** xargs -i is now more clearly documented.
1194 *** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course)
1195 *** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes
1196 If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input,
1197 it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the
1198 list of files that xargs is trying to read.
1199 *** Better support for 64-bit systems.
1200 *** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect,
1201 I think this is a strange thing to want to do.
1202 *** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed
1203 Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing.
1204 *** updatedb is now somewhat more robust
1205 The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty
1206 database if it fails.
1207 *** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb
1208 Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the
1210 *** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works
1211 This was broken in 4.1.20.
1213 * Major changes in release 4.1.20, 2003-06-14:
1214 ** New maintainer, James Youngman <jay@gnu.org>
1215 ** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left
1217 ** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including
1218 a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository. There are no
1219 differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are
1220 building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file
1222 ** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20.
1224 * Major changes in release 4.1.7, 2001-05-20:
1225 fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used.
1226 security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing.
1228 * Major changes in release 4.1.6, 2000-10-10:
1229 correct bug in prune.
1230 added --ignore-case option for locate
1232 * Major changes in release 4.1.5, 2000-04-12:
1233 Add support for large files
1235 * Major changes in release 4.1.4, 2000-02-26:
1236 bug fixes, more up-to-date languages.
1238 * Major changes in release 4.1.3, 2000-01-27:
1239 added internationalization and localization.
1241 * Major changes in release 4.1.2, 2000-01-18:
1244 * Major changes in release 4.1.1, 1999-08-8:
1245 attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect
1246 "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb
1248 * Major changes in release 4.1, 1994-11-3:
1250 ** Distribution renamed to findutils.
1251 ** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin
1252 instead of $exec_prefix/libexec.
1253 ** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected.
1255 * Major changes in release 4.0, 1994-11-2:
1259 *** Man page for updatedb.
1260 *** Man page for the locate database formats.
1263 *** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend
1264 trees, so it does fewer inode lookups.
1265 *** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given.
1266 *** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include
1267 and you configure using the --with-afs option.
1268 *** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE.
1271 *** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and
1272 allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to
1273 share the databases. The new locate can also detect and read the
1274 old database format automatically. The new databases are typically
1275 30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in
1276 file names). Search times are approximately the same, or faster on
1278 *** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old.
1281 *** Takes command-line options.
1284 *** Performance improved 10-20%.
1285 *** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given.
1286 *** Now has a test suite. Some minor bugs fixed as a result.
1288 * Major changes in release 3.8, 1993-03-29:
1290 ** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex:
1291 -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex
1292 ** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type
1294 * Major changes in release 3.7:
1296 ** locate can search multiple databases
1297 ** locate has an option to specify the database path
1298 ** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail
1300 * No NEWS was kept for earlier releases. Known release dates include:
1301 ** release 3.2, 1991-08-28
1302 ** release 3.1, 1991-08-21
1303 ** release 3.0, 1991-08-21
1304 ** release 2.2, 1991-04-05
1305 ** release 2.1, 1991-01-01
1306 ** release 2.0, 1990-11-20
1307 ** release 1.2, 1990-07-03
1308 ** release 1.1, 1990-06-24
1309 ** release 1.0, 1990-06-22
1310 ** beginning of findutils history, 1987-02-21
1313 This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el:
1315 LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy
1316 LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake
1317 LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec
1318 LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname
1319 LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf