Rename the old locate database to the new name atomically. This fixes Savannah bug...

[findutils.git] / NEWS

GNU findutils NEWS - User visible changes.      -*- outline -*- (allout)

* Major changes in release 4.3.13-CVS

** Bug Fixes

#22057: Actually rename the old locate database to the new one
atomically, instead of just claiming the rename is atomic in a
comment.

#21960: xargs should collect the exit status of child processes even if
the total count of unreaped children has not yet reached the maximum
allowed. 

* Major changes in release 4.3.12, 2007-12-19

** Bug Fixes

#15384: Find misbehaves when parent directory is not readable. 

** Documentation Fixes

More examples in the xargs manual page, including a portable analogue
for BSD's "xargs -o".

** Translations

Updated translations: Polish, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish, Vietnamese.


* Major changes in release 4.3.11, 2007-12-02

** Functional changes

When the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set, "find -perm
+a+w" is rejected as invalid.  Some other similar mode strings
starting with '+' which are not valid in POSIX are also rejected.

The -prune action now always evaluates as true (this is also a
bugfix).


** Bug Fixes

#21568: Switch to checking the gnulib code out with native git, not
CVS.  This affects mainly those who check findutils code out of CVS.
This is not the first time this bug has been fixed (the previous fix
used "cvs update -D", which git-cvspserver silently does not
support). 

#21039: Setting the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable now turns off
warnings by default, because POSIX requires that only diagnostic
messages (and -ok prompts) are printed on STDERR, and diagnostic
messages must also result in a nonzero exit status.  

#20970: Trailing slash on directory arguments breaks -name.  "find
foo/ -name foo" now correctly matches foo and printf foo/.  See POSIX
interp http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/uploads/40/14959/AI-186.txt

#20865: Using both -delete and -prune without explicitly using -depth
is now an error.  Traditionally, -delete has always turned -depth on
anyway, so this is not a functional change.   However, using -depth
(implicitly or explicitly) makes -prune a no-op.  This change is
intended to avoid nasty surprises for people who test with
"-print" and then change it to "-delete" when they are happy.

#20803: POSIX requires that -prune always returns true.  Previously it
returned false when -depth was in effect and true otherwise.

#20802: If -delete fails, find's exit status will now be non-zero.
However, find still skips trying to delete ".".

** Documentation Fixes
#21635: Some of the documentation files had missing copying
conditions.   The missing files now have copying headers, and these
are compatible with each other (GNU FDL 1.2).

#21634: No copy of FDL 1.2 included with the source code

#21633: Missing copyright/license header in some documentation.

#21628: find -perm /000 matches all files rather than none, since
findutils-4.3.3.  The Texinfo documentation is now consistent with the
manual page on this point.

#21270: Formatting fixes to the xargs.1 manual page, including making
options bold instead of italic and making OPTIONS a section header
rather than a subsection.

* Major changes in release 4.3.10, 2007-11-13

** Bug Fixes

#21568: findutils gnulib code does not match the date in
import-gnulib.config.  We now check out the gnulib code via
git-cvs-pserver.  

* Major changes in release 4.3.9, 2007-11-11

** Licensing

Findutils version 4.3.9 is released under version 3 of the GNU General
Public License.

** Bug Fixes

#20834: Avoid segmentation violation for -execdir when $PATH is
unset.  Assume that the PATH is safe in this situation.

#20310: configure uses hosts's support status for "sort -z" when
generating the updatedb script for use on the target.  This is
inappropriate when cross-compiling, so avoid doing that.

#20263: Compilation fix for DEC Alpha OSF/1 cc, which forbids the
ordering comparison of function pointers.

#20139: find -[acm]time -N (wrongly) includes files from N days ago,
as well as (correctly) from less than N days ago.

#20273: When xargs is successful without consuming all of stdin (for
example, with the -E option), and stdin is seekable, xargs now
correctly restores the file position, even on platforms where exit()
does not follow the POSIX rules of doing likewise.  Likewise for find
(for example, with the -ok action).

#20547: The version information printed by find, xargs, locate,
updatedb, frcode and code now complies with the GNU Project's coding
standards.

#20662: Avoid memory leak in find -name and other places affected by
gnulib dirname module.  The leak had been present since 4.3.1.

#20751: Avoid memory corruption in find -ls that has been present
since 4.3.1.

#20871: Assertion failure introduced in 4.3.3, when oldfind is invoked
in a directory where the parent directory lacks search permission.

** Enhancements

#20594: Allow fine-tuning of the default argument size used by xargs
and find at ./configure time.

#20688: The warning printed by -name or -iname when the pattern to
match contains a slash can now be silenced by -nowarn.  This warning
was originally introduced unconditionally in 4.2.21.

Translation of locate --limit problems is improved.

POSIX will standardise -path, so the documentation no longer claims
that -wholename is the 'canonical' test, and -ipath no longer
generates a warning.

** Documentation Fixes

Point out more explicitly that the subsecond timestamp support
introduced by findutils-4.3.3 introduces a change in the format of
several fields.

Also explain that when reporting a bug, you should check the most
recent findutils release first.

Introduced doc/find-maint.texi, a maintenance manual for findutils.

Added an extra worked example for find (copying a subset of files).

The locate command's manual page now has a HISTORY section.

#20951: Very bad/unclear/confusing documentation of security checks in
find -execdir

#20865: Better documentation on the fact that -delete implies -depth 
and that -delete interacts badly with -prune.

#20552: Fixed typos, formatting and section ordering issues in the
find manual page.

#20529: removed spurious 'o' in description of "xargs -a" in
doc/find.texi. 

#20232: The --max-database-age option of locate was added in release
4.3.3, but this file (NEWS) did not previously mention this fact.

** Translations

Updated Dutch translation.


* Major changes in release 4.3.8, 2007-06-12

** Bug Fixes

#20157: Avoid segfault in locate when run as root.  This is caused by
a buffer overrun, but at this time no exploit mechanism is known.

* Major changes in release 4.3.7, 2007-06-09

** Functional changes

Locate can now read old-format locate databases generated on machines
with a different byte order.  It does this by guessing the byte order,
so the result is not completely reliable.  If you need to share
databases between machines of different architectures, you should use
the LOCATE02 format (which has other advantages, as explained in the
documentation).

** Security Fixes

#20014: Findutils-4.3.7 includes a patch for a potential security
problem in locate.  When locate read an old-format database, it read
file names into a fixed-length buffer allocated on the heap without
checking for overflow.  Although overflowing a heap buffer is often
somewhat safer than overflowing a buffer on the stack, this bug still
has potential security implications.

This bug also affected the following previous findutils releases:

 - All releases prior to 4.2.31
 - Findutils 4.3.0 to 4.3.6.

This bug has been assigned CVE number CVE-2007-2452.

** Bug Fixes

#20128: Fix compilation error of find/tree.c on AIX with GCC.

#20005: Tests -mtime -n and -mtime +n incorrectly treated like -mtime n.

#19983: include_next causes compilation failure in findutils 4.3.6 on
non-GCC compilers 

#19981: Don't call setgroups if the function isn't available.  This
fixes Savannah bug# 19981.

#19980: Don't use the functions putw() or getw() since these are not
in current POSIX.  Use the gnulib version of wcwidth() where the
system does not provide it.

#19979: Compilation errors on BeOS

#19970: Cannot cast from pointer to bool using gnulib's <stdbool.h> 

#19967: Use of __attribute((__noreturn__)) makes compilation fail with
some non-GCC compilers  

#19966: find should link against -lm for modf() and fabs()

#19965: Compilation failure on OSF/1 4.0; non-declaration of uintmax_t 

#19948: Assertion failure O_NOFOLLOW != 0 on IRIX 6.5

#19871: Typos in find.1 

#19596: Fixed this bug again, this time in the Texinfo manual (the
discussion should compare %b with %s/512, not %s/1024).

#19416: _FORTIFY_SOURCE warn_unused_result warnings

* Major changes in release 4.3.6, 2007-05-21

** Bug Fixes

#19948: Fixed an assertion failure on IRIX 6.5 (O_NOFOLLOW is defined
to 0 there).

#19923: Fixed an array overrun in groups[] array of 'locate' when run by
or as root.  This bug appears not to be exploitable.  If locate is not
installed setuid, the bug is not exploitable.  For setuid
installations, it is concievable that there could be an information
leak if the user uses the -d option or the -e option, though the
maintainer has been unable to provoke this on an x86 system.

#19871: Spurious .R directives in manpage produced error messages from
GNU troff.  This is now fixed (they are corrected to .B).

#19416: The result of I/O operations in print-related actions is now
checked, and failures are reported.  Any failure will cause find's
exit status to be nonzero.   The predicate itself will continue to
return true.

** Compilation Fixes

A variety of changes were made to allow compilation to succeed on
non-GNU systems.

#19983: Now compiles on DEC C V5.9-005 on Digital UNIX V4.0 (or at
least, should).

#19970: Compile correctly on C89 systems where the "_Bool" type is not
provided, taking into account the limitations of the gnulib
replacement for stdbool.h.

#19967: Build successfully with C compilers that don't support the GCC
 construct __attribute__((__noreturn__)).

#19966: Findutils should now build on systems which have the modf()
and fabs() functions in the maths library, -lm.  This includes some
versions of HP-UX and Solaris.  

#19965: Fixed a compilation failure on OSF/1 4.0 (no definition of the
type uintmax_t).


* Major changes in release 4.3.5, 2007-05-05

** Functional changes

Updatedb can now support he generation of file name databases which
are compatible with slocate.  For some time, GNU locate has been able
to read these.

The /proc filesystem is excluded from the locate database (by
default; change PRUNEPATHS to modify this behaviour).

** Bug Fixes

#19806: The -samefile predicate might get fooled by inode reuse.  We
now hold open a file descriptor on the reference file to prevent this.

#19768: Better detection of corrupted old-style locate databases
(e.g. if the database is too short to include a complete bigram
table).

#19766: The frcode and code programs now detect write errors more
reliably.

#19371: Fix compilation failure on systems which #define open to
open64 (and similarly with the close system call).  This fixes
Savannah bug #19371, affecting AIX 5.3.

#19658: When cross-compiling, "make clean" no longer deletes the
generated file doc/regexprops.texi, because there is no way to
regenerate it.

#19391: When xargs knows that the system's actual exec limit is larger
than the compiled-in ARG_MAX, use the system's limit without
generating an assertion failure.  

#18203: A duplicate report of bug #17478.

#17478: Error messages from find can garble the console.

#16378: Assertion failure if stat() returns 00000 as the mode
of a file.  This apparently can happen occasionally with broken NFS
servers.

#11668: FreeBSD extensions for time specification are now
implemented.  In fact, these were included in findutils-4.3.3.  The
change was listed as a functional change (whcih it is) and this bug
report was not mentioned.

** Documentation Fixes

The locatedb.5 manpage now documents the (default) LOCATE02 format
more clearly, and also documents the slocate database format.

The maximum and default values applying to the -s option of xargs are
now documented more clearly in the manual page.

* Major changes in release 4.3.4, 2007-04-21

** Bug Fixes

#19634: Test suite now passes (again) if "." is on your $PATH.

#19619: Findutils builds once again on Cygwin.

#19617: Nonexistent start points are (once again) diagnosed in
ftsfind.  This bug affected only findutils-4.3.3.

#19616: Fix leaf optimisation and loop detection (which were
unreliable in findutils 4.3.3).  This bug affected only
findutils-4.3.3.

#19615: find --version no longer claims to be using FTS_CWDFD when it
isn't.  This bug affected only findutils-4.3.3.

#19613: "find -L . -type f" no longer causes an assertion failure when
it encounters a symbolic link loop.  This bug affected only
findutils-4.3.3.

#19605: Issue an error message (and later return nonzero exit status)
 if a symbolic link loop was encountered during directory traversal.

#19484: bigram.c and code.c fail if the first pathname recorded begins
with a space

#19483: Inconsistent option highlighting in updatedb manpage

#18414: Tests for "find -readable" are skipped for the superuser, as
 on some systems (e.g. Cygwin with an Administrative user) users can
 read mode-000 files.

** Translations

Findutils 4.3.4 includes a translation for the Ukranian language.


* Major changes in release 4.3.3, 2007-04-15

Fiundutils-4.3.3 was released on 2007-04-15.

** Bug Fixes

#19596: Correct the comparison in the find manpage between %b and %s
(the divisor is 512 not 1024).

#18714: In the POSIX locale, vertical tabs and form feeds are not
field separators.

#18713: Quoted but empty arguments which occur last on an xargs input
line are no longer ignored, but instead produce an empty argument.

#18554: Documented the construct  -exec sh -c 'foo "$@" bar' {} +

#18466: we now avoid this bug by limiting "-execdir ...+"
to just one argument for the time being.  There is a performance
penalty for doing this.  We hope to make a better fix in a later
release.

#18384: excess bracket in xargs --help

#18320: Zero bytes in input should give warning

#17437: Corrected the handling of X in symbolic permissions (such
as-u+w,a+X).  This change actually occurred in findutils-4.3.2, but
the NEWS file for that release didn't mention it.

#17396: find -mtime -atime -ctime does not support fractional part
(see "Functional changes" below)

#14748: find -perm /zzz gives wrong result when zzz evaluates to an
 all-zero mask

#14535: correctly support case-folding in locate (that is, "locate
-i") for multibyte character environments such as UTF-8.  Previously,
if your search string contained a character which was outside the
single-byte-encoding range for UTF-8 for example, then the
case-folding behaviour failed to work and only exact matches would be
returned.



** Functional changes

The -printf action (and similar related actions) now support %S,
which is a measurement of the sparseness of a file.

The test "-perm /000" now matches all files instead of no files.  For
over a year find has been issuing warning messages indicating that
this change will happen.  We now issue a warning indicating that the
change has already happened (in 4.3.x only, there is no plan to make
this change in the 4.2.x series).

The tests -newer, -anewer, -cnewer, -mtime, -atime, -ctime, -amin,
-cmin, -mmin and -used now support sub-second timestamps, including
the ability to specify times with non-integer arguments.

The -printf format specifiers also support sub-second timestamps:
  atime   ctime  mtime
  %a      %c     %t
  %AS     %CS    %TS 
  %AT     %CT    %TT 
  %A+     %C+    %T+ 
  %AX     %CX    %TX 


The new test -newerXY supports comparison between status times for
files.  One of the status times for a file being considered (denoted
X) is checked against a reference time (denoted Y) for the file whose
name id the argument.  X and Y can be:

   a    Access time
   B    Birth time (st_birthtime, currently unsupported)
   c    Change time
   m    Modification time
   t    Valid only for the reference time; instead of comparison
        against a file status time, the argument is a time string.
        Not yet supported.

For example, -newermm is equivalent to -newer, and -neweram is true if
the file being considered was accessed more recently than the
reference file was modified.  The -newerXY test supports subsecond
timestamps where these are available.  The X=B variant is not yet
implemented.

If you configure the source code and then run the tests with "make
check", the test suite fails rather than defaulting to testing the
system binaries.

A new option, --max-database-age, has been added to locate.   


* Major changes in release 4.3.2, 2006-11-25

** Bug Fixes

#18222: find -printf '%H %P' once again prints the right result if
more than one start point was given on the command line.

#17782: find -execdir now correctly puts the prefix "./" before the
expansion of "{}" rather than at the start of the argument it appears
in.  Please note that if you use the -exec or -execdir actions with a
shell, then you may be vulnerable to shell code injection attacks, so
don't do that.  It's not a security defect in find - you should not be
passing untrusted data (such as file names chosen by other people) to
the shell.

#17490: find  -regex generated a segfault in findutils-4.3.1, but this
 is fixed in findutils-4.3.2.

#17477: find -printf '%' (that is, where the format has a trailing %)
now generates an error message.

#17372: The fts-based find executable (the default configuration uses
fts) is now much faster when -maxdepth is used on filesystems with
high fanouts.

#15531: The -prune action now behaves correctly when applied to a file.

** Functional changes

The slocate database format is now supported.  Preliminary changes
intended to eventually allow setuid operation of locate have also been
made.  For the moment, please don't install GNU locate as a
set-user-ID program (except for testing purposes; if you do so, please
make sure that untrusted users cannot execute the set-user-ID locate
program).

Use of an slocate database which was built with a nonzero security
mode (at the moment, GNU updatedb will not do this) forces locate's
"-e" option to be turned on, which has an effect on the "-S" option
which is probably surprising for most users.


** Documentation Fixes

The global effect of options (other than -daystart and -follow) is now
explained more clearly in the manual page.   Savannah bug #15360.


* Major changes in release 4.3.1, 2006-08-06

** Bug Fixes

Find now follows POSIX rules for determining where directories end and
expressions start.  This means that "find \(1 \!2 \, \)" now searches
in the four named directories, rather than trying to parse an
expression. (Savannah bug #15235).

You now get a more helpful error message when you use command lines
which have missing expressions, such as 
      find . ( )
      find . !
      find . -a
      find . \( -not \)
      find . \( -true -a

Savannah bug #15800: If find finds more subdirectories within a parent
directory than it previously expected to based on the link count of
the parent, the resulting error message now gives the correct
directory name (previously an error message was issued but it
specified the wrong directory).

Savannah bug #16738: "find .... -exec ... {} +" now works if you have
a large environment and many files must be passed to the -exec
action.  The same problem affected the -execdir action, though since
the number of files in a given directory will normally be smaller, the
problem was worse for -exec.

Savannah bug #16579: Updatedb now works if it is running as a user
whose login shell is not actually a shell.

There have also been a number of documentation improvements (includng
Savannah bug #16269).

** Functional changes

For find, debug output can now be enabled at runtime with the -D
option.  This causes the printing of various sorts of information
about find's internal state and progress.

The find option -nowarn cannot itself produce a warning (this used to
happen with commands like "find . -name quux -nowarn -print").

** Performance Enhancements

Find now has a rudimentary cost-based optimiser.  It has an idea of
the basic cost of each test (i.e. that -name is very cheap while -size
is more expensive).  It re-orders tests bearing in mind the cost of
each test and its likely success.  Predicates with side effects (for
example -delete or -exec) are not reordered.  The optimiser is not
yet enabled by default, but the new option -O controls the query 
optimisation level.  To see this in action, try
  find -D opt -O3 . -type f -o -type c -o -size 555 -name Z
and compare the optimised query with:
  find -D opt -O3 . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z
and
  find -D opt     . -size 555 -o -type c -o -type f -name Z

Over time, as optimisations are proven to be robust and correct, they
will be moved to lower optimisation levels.  Some optimisations have
always been performed by find (for example -name is always done early
if possible).

** Translations

Findutils 4.3.1 includes updated translations for the following
languages:
 Vietnamese, Belarusian, Catalan, Danish, German, Greek, Esperanto,
 Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Irish, Galician, Croatian, Hungarian,
 Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Luganda, Malay, Dutch, Polish,
 Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Kinyarwanda,
 Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish, Turkish, Chinese (simplified),
 Chinese (traditional), Bulgarian

* Major changes in release 4.3.0, 2005-12-12

The 4.3.x release series are currently 'development' releases.  Please
test it, but think carefully before installing it in a production
system.  New features in findutils-4.3.x are under development; they
may change or go away. 

All changes up to and including findutils-4.2.27 are included in this
release.  In addition the following changes are new in this release:

** Functional Changes

By default, find now uses the fts() function to search the file
system.  The use of fts greatly increases find's ability to search
extremely deep directory hierarchites.

You can tell that the version of find you are using uses FTS, because
the output of "find --version" will include the word "FTS".

Currently two binaries for 'find' are built.  The configure option
--without-fts can be used to select whether 'find' uses fts:

                                  With fts      Without fts
default configuration             find          oldfind
configure --with-fts              find          oldfind
configure --without-fts           ftsfind       find

New tests, -readable, -writable, -executable.  These check that a file
can be read, written or executed respectively.

* Major changes in release 4.2.27, 2005-12-06

** Warnings of Future Changes

The test -perm /000 currently matches no files, but for greater
consistency with -perm -000, this will be changed to match all files;
this change will probably be made in early 2006.  Meanwhile, a warning
message is given if you do this.

** Bug Fixes

If xargs is invoked with many short arguments on PPC systems running
the Linux kernel, we no longer get an "argument list too long" error
from the operating system.

Fixed a bug in the test suite which caused it to spuriously fail on
systems where ARG_MAX is different to the value used by the Linux
kernel on 32-bit x86-architecture systems.

On systems running the Linux kernel, "find -printf %F" no longer
produces the wrong answer for files on filesystems that have been
remounted elsewhere using "mount --bind". (Savannah bug #14921).

** Documentation Changes

Following some extensive and detailed review comments from Aaron
Hawley, the material in the manual pages and the Texinfo manual are
now synchronised.

The %M format specifier of "find -printf" is now documented, although
it has existed since release 4.2.5.

The 'find' manual page now correctly documents the fact that -regex
defaults to using Emacs-style regular expressions (though this can be
changed).

* Major changes in release 4.2.26, 2005-11-19

** Public Service Announcements

I'd like to point out a second time that the interpretation of '-perm
+mode' has changed to be more POSIX-compliant.  If you want the old
behaviour of the GNU extension you should use '-perm /mode'.  See the
NEWS entry for findutils version 4.2.21 for details.

** Functional Changes

The xargs command now supports a new option (--delimiter) which allows
input items to be separated by characters other than null and
whitespace.  This resolves Savannah support request sr #102914.

Sometimes find needs to read the /etc/mtab file (or perform the
equivalent operation on systems not using /etc/mtab).  If this
information is needed but not available, find now exits with an error
message non-zero status.  If the information is not needed, find will
not spuriously fail.

A new xargs option --delimiter allows the input delimiter to be
changed (previously \0 was the only choice unless you use the -L
option, which changes other semantics too).

** Bug Fixes

If the environment size is too large to allow xargs to operate
normally, 'xargs --help' still works (now).

If the input to xargs is a large number of very short options (for
example, one character each), earlier versions of xargs would fail
with 'Argument list too long'.  However, since this is precisely the
problem that xargs was invented to solve, this is a bug.  Hence on
those systems we now correctly use a shorter command line.  This
problem particularly affected 64-bit Linux systems because of the
larger size of pointers, although 32-bit Linux systems were also
affected (albeit for longer command lines).  In theory the same
problem could affect 'find -exec {} +', but that's much less likely
(even so, the bug is fixed there too).

Bugfix for an unusual failure mode (Savannah bug #14842) where an
attempt to allocate more space for directory contents succeeds but is
incorrectly diagnosed as a failure.  The likelihood of you
experiencing this depends on your architecture, operating system and
resource limits.  This failure has been observed in a directory
containing 35396 entries.

** Documentation Changes

The EXAMPLES section of the find manual page now correctly describes
the symbolic and octal modes for the -perm test.

The documentation and "--help" usage information for the -L, -l, -I
and -i options have been clarified (but the behaviour has not changed).

The documentation now explains more clearly what happens when you use
"-L -type l".

* Major changes in release 4.2.25, 2005-09-03

** Bug Fixes

find -perm /440 (which should succeed if a file is readable by its
owner or group) now works.  Previously there was a bug which caused
this to be treated as "find -perm 440".

Some files in the xargs test suite have been renamed to avoid problems
on operating systems whoch cannot distinguish filenames on the basis
of upper/lower case distinctions.

The software now builds on Cygwin, including the generated file
regexprops.texi.

Findutils should now build once again on systems supporting AFS, but
this support has not recently been fully tested.  Findutils should
also (once again) build on Cygwin.

** Other Changes

The test suite for find is now much more extensive.

* Major changes in release 4.2.24, 2005-07-29

** Documentation Changes

The manual now includes a "Worked Examples" section which talks about
the various ways in which findutils can be used to perform common
tasks, and why some of these alternatives are better than others.

The -I option of xargs (which is required by the POSIX standard) is
now documented.

We now document the fact that find ensures that commands run by -ok
and -okdir don't steal find's input.  Find does this by redirecting
the command's standard input from stdin.

Many documentation readability enhancements and proofreading fixes
were contributed by Aaron Hawley.

** Functional Changes

*** Functional changes in locate

The "--regex" option of locate now assumes the regular expression to
be in the same syntax as is used in GNU Emacs, though this can be
changed with the new option --regextype.  This is a change from the
existing behaviour (which was to use POSIX Basic Regular Expressions).
Since this feature is releatively new anyway, I though it was more
useful to have compatibility between regular expression handling in
find and locate than to maintain the short-lived previous behaviour of
locate.

The locate program now also supports a "--regextype" long option which
controls which regular expression syntax is understood by locate.
This is a long option and has no single-letter 'short option'
equivalent.

*** Functional changes in find

The regular expression syntax understood by "find" can be changed with
the -regextype option; this option is positional, meaning that you can
have several tests, each using a distinct syntax (this is not
recommended practice however).

The default regular expression syntax is substantially the same as
that recognised by GNU Emacs, except for the fact that "." will match
a newline.

The leaf optimisation can be disabled with the configure option
"--disable-leaf-optimisation", which is equivalent to specifying
"-noleaf" on all find command lines.  This is useful for systems
having filesystems which do not provide traditional Unix behaviour for
the link count on directories (for example Cygwin and the Solaris 9
HSFS implementation).

** Bug Fixes

*** Bug Fixes for find

The -iregex test now works once again on systems that lack
re_search() (that is, systems on which findutils needs to use the
gnulib version of this function).

find -regex now once again uses GNU Emacs-compatible regular
expressions.

If invoked with stderr closed, the -fprint and -fprintf actions now no
longer cause error messages to be sent into the output file.

If the link count of a directory is less that two, the leaf
optimisation is now disabled for that directory.  This should allow
searching of non-Unix filesystems to be more reliable on systems that
don't take the trouble to make their filesystems look like traditional
Unix filesystems.   Some filesystems don't even take the trouble to
have a link count of less than two and for these, -noleaf is still
required unless --disable-leaf-optimisation was used at configure time.

The "%Y" directive for the -printf action now no longer changes find's
idea of the mode of the file, so this means among other things that
"-printf %Y %y" now works properly.  This is Savannah bug #13973.

* Major changes in release 4.2.23, 2005-06-19

** Documentation Changes

The -L and -I options of xargs are currently incompatible (but should
not be).

Improved the documentation for -execdir and -okdir.

** Functional Changes to updatedb

File names ending in "/" which are specified as an argument to
--prunepaths (or in $PRUNEPATHS) don't work, so we now issue an error
message if the user tries to do that.  The obvious exception of course
is "/" which does work and is not rejected.


* Major changes in release 4.2.22, 2005-06-12

** Security Fixes

If a directory entry searched with "find -L" is a symbolic link to
".", we no longer loop indefinitely.  This problem affected find
versions 4.2.19, 4.2.20 and 4.2.21.  This problem allows users to make
"find" loop indefinitely.  This is in effect a denial of service and
could be used to prevent updates to the locate database or to defeat
file security checks based on find.   However, it should be noted that
you should not use "find -L" in security-sensitive scenarios.

** Other Bug Fixes

None in this release.

** Functional Changes to locate

A locate database can now be supplied on stdin, using '-' as a element
of the database-path. If more than one database-path element is '-',
later instances are ignored.

A new option to locate, '--all' ('-A') causes matches to be limited to
entries which match all given patterns, not entries which match
one or more patterns.

** Documentation Changes

Some typos in the manual pages have been fixed.  Various parts of the
manual now point out that it is good practice to quote the argument of
"-name".  The manpage now has a "NON-BUGS" section which explains some
symptoms that look like bugs but aren't.  The explanations of the "%k"
and "%b" directives to "find -printf" have been imrpoved.


* Major changes in release 4.2.21, 2005-06-07
** Functional Changes to find

The GNU extension "find ... -perm +MODE" has been withdrawn because it
is incompatible with POSIX in obscure cases like "find ... -perm ++r".
Use the new syntax "find ... -perm /MODE" instead.  Old usages will
still continue to work, so long as they don't conflict with POSIX.

If the output is going to a terminal, the -print, -fprint, -printf and
-fprintf actions now quote "unusual" characters to prevent unwanted
effects on the terminal.  See "Unusual Characters in File Names" for
further details.  There is no change to the behaviour when the output
is not going to a terminal.   The locate program does the same thing,
unless the -0 option is in effect (in which case the filenames are 
printed as-is).

** Functional Changes to locate

The locate command will now read each locate database at most once.
This means that if you are using multiple databases and are searching
for more than one name, the results will now be printed in a different
order (and if you specified a small limit with --limit, you may get a
different set of results).

A new option '--print' for locate causes it to print the matching
results even if the '--count' or '--statistics' option is in effect.

** Bug Fixes
find /blah/blah/blah -depth -empty now works once again.

The -regex and -iregex tests of find now correctly accept POSIX Basic
Regular Expressions.  (Savannah bug #12999)

The updatedb program now works on systems where "su" does not support
the "-s" option, for example Solaris.

* Major changes in release 4.2.20, 2005-03-17
** Internationalization and Localization
Updated Vietnamese and Dutch translations.   

** Bug Fixes
Minor bugfix affecting only those who compile from the CVS repository, 
as opposed to those who compile from the source releases.

* Major changes in release 4.2.19, 2005-03-07
** Bug Fixes

find should now no longer hang on systems which lack the O_NOFOLLOW
flag to open(2) and which are clients of an unresponsive NFS server
(Savannah bug #12044).

We now avoid inappropriately failing for "find -L foo" or "find -H
foo" if foo is a symbolic link (Savannah bug #12181).  Previously we
used to fail with the error message "Too many levels of symbolic
links".

"find . -false -exec foo {} +" no longer runs an extra instance of foo
when find exits (Savannah bug #12230).

If the chdir() safety check fails but we can no longer get back to 
where we started, exit with an explanatory (fatal) error message.
This does not happen on GNU/Linux and FreeBSD because the safety check
is not needed (the security problem the safety check protects against
is prevented in a cleaner way on those systems).

"make distclean" no longer deletes regex.c (which "make all" needs).

**  Functionality Changes
"find -printf "%h\n" will now print "." for files in the current directory.
Previously it printed nothing (but there was a bug in the %h
implementation anyway).  This fixes Savannah bug #12085.

Should now build (again) on non-C99-compliant systems.

** Documentation enhancements
Fixed some typos and clarified wording in "Working with automounters".

** Internationalization and Localization
New Vietnamese message translation.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.18, 2005-02-16
** Bug Fixes
*** "find -depth" was missing out non-leaf directories when they contain 
    non-directories.  This affected findutils releases 4.2.15,
    4.2.16 and 4.2.17, but the bug is now fixed.
*** Find no longer hangs on systems which are clients of unresponsive 
    NFS servers.
**  Documentation improvements
*** Improvements and corrections to the find.1 manpage, including corrections to the descriptions of -H and -L.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.17, 2005-02-08
** Bug Fixes
*** bug #11861  undefined symbol "basename" on IRIX 5.3 
*** bug #11865  xargs -i regression  (as compared to findutils-4.2.12)
*** bug #11866  Typo in pred_okdir renders it useless (affecting 4.2.16 only)
*** patch #3723 fix recent process_top_path change (for -execdir on /)
*** Fixing bug #11866 and applying patch #3723 made -execdir work much better.
*** find bar/baz/ugh now works again if baz is a symbolic link (broken 
    in 4.2.15).
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.16, 2005-02-05
**  Functionality Changes
*** Updated the message catalogues for the translated messages.
*** The subfs filesystem is now treated the same as the autofs
    filesystem is.
*** New translations:  Belarusian, Catalan, Greek, Esperanto,
    Finnish, Irish, Croatian, Hungarian, Japanese, Luganda,
    Malay, Romanian, Slovenian, Serbian, Chinese (simplified).

**  Bug Fixes
*** The -execdir action now works correctly for files named on the 
    command line.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.15, 2005-01-29
**  Functionality Changes
*** locate now supports matching regular expression (--regex).
*** --enable-d_type-optimization (introduced in findutils 4.2.13) is now turned on by default.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.14, 2005-01-25
**  Functionality Changes
*** New options -L, -P, -H for locate.  The work in the same was as the same options for find.
**  Bug Fixes
*** Don't include the "findutils/find/testsuite/find.gnu" subdirectory in the 
    distributed tar file more than once.
*** Should now build on Solaris once again.
*** -xtype and -printf %Y now work correctly for symbolic links once again
**  Documentation improvements
*** All options for "locate" are now documented
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.13, 2005-01-23
**  Performance Enhancements
*** On Linux and some other systems, a large performance improvement, 
    because we can eliminate many of the calls to lstat() (in extreme
    cases, 99% of them).  Limited testing shows a 2x speedup on NFS
    filesystems.  Other systems which can make use of this enhancement
    include Mac OS X and *BSD.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.12, 2005-01-22
**  Functionality Changes
*** find is now POSIX-compliant, as far as I know.
*** -exec ... {} + now works.
*** New actions -execdir and -okdir which are like -exec and -ok but more secure.
*** "locate -w" is now a synonym for "locate --wholepath".
*** An empty path entry in the locate database path (for example "::" in 
    $LOCATE_PATH or in the argument to "locate -d") is taken to mean
    the default database, whose name is hard-coded in locate.
**  Bug Fixes
*** If find or xargs cannot write to stdout, for example because 
    output is redirected to a file and the disk is full, the 
    relevant program will return a non-zero exit status.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.11, 2004-12-12
**  Bug Fixes
*** Compilation fix for systems without EOVERFLOW.
*** More helpful error message if you make a mistake with (, ), -o or -a.
**  Functionality Changes
*** If you have unclosed parentheses on the find command line, 
    or any of a number of similar problems, find will now produce 
    a more helpful error message.
*** locate -b is now a synonym for locate --basename
*** locate now supports a --statistics (or -S) option, which prints some
    statistics about the locate databases.
*** Implemented the -samefile option.
**  Documentation improvements
*** New chapter in the manual, "Security Considerations". 
*** Better documentation for -prune (Mainly thanks to   Stepan Kasal)
**  Bug Fixes
*** locate's options -i and -w now work with the -e option (previously a bug 
    prevented this).
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.10, 2004-12-06
**  Bug Fixes
*** Portability fix for fstype.c: should now compile on UNICOS, and possibly 
    also produce useful results on BeOS and Dolphin, perhaps other
    systems too.   
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.9, 2004-12-05
**  Functionality Changes
*** 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_". 
*** xargs now supports the POSIX options -E, -I and -L.   These are synonyms 
    for the existing options -e, -i and -l, but the latter three are
    now deprecated.
**  Bug Fixes
*** xargs -n NUM now invokes a command as soon as it has NUM arguments.  
    Previously, it waited until NUM+1 items had been read, and then
    invoked the command with NUM arguments, saving the remaining one
    for next time. 
*** If "find -L" discovers a symbolic link loop, an error message is issued.
*** If you specify a directory on the find command line, but -prune 
    is applied to it, find will no longer chdir() into it anyway.
**  Documentation improvements
*** The precise interpretation of the arguments to the -atime, -ctime 
    and similar tests in find has been documented more clearly.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.8, 2004-11-24
*** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.7 automount handling on Solaris.  This 
    worked to some extent in findutils-4.2.7, but is much improved in
    findutils-4.2.8.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.7, 2004-11-21
**  Functionality Changes
*** xargs can now read a list of arguments from a named file, allowing 
    the invoked program to use the same stdin as xargs started with
    (for example ``xargs --arg-file=todo emacs'').
**  Documentation improvements
*** The Texinfo manual now has an extra chapter, "Error Messages".  Most 
    error messages are self-explanatory, but some of the ones which
    are not are explained in this chapter.
**  Bug Fixes
*** Avoid trying to link against -lsun on UNICOS, which doesn't need it or 
    have it.
*** Bugfix to the findutils 4.2.6 automount handling (which hadn't been enabled
    on Solaris).
*** Reenabled internationalisation support (which had been accidentally 
    disabled in findutils-4.2.5).
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.6, 2004-11-21
**  Bug Fixes
*** find now copes rather better when a directory appears to change just as
    it is about to start examining it, which happens with automount.
    This is because automount mounts filesystems as you change
    directory into them.  This should resolve Savannah bugs #3998,
    #9043.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.5, 2004-11-11
**  Functionality Changes
*** The POSIX options -H and -L are supported.  These control whether or not
    find will follow symbolic links.
*** The BSD option -P is also now supported (though in any case 
    it is the default).
**  Documentation improvements
***  Better documentation for "xargs -i".
**  Bug Fixes
*** "make install" now respects DESTDIR when generating localstatedir.
    (this is only relevant if you are installing to some location
    other than the one that you indictaed when you ran "configure").
*** Compatible with automake versions 1.8 and 1.9.
*** Build problems on UNICOS now fixed, though the linker will still generate 
    warnings because we try to link with the nonexistent library
    "-lsun".  Edit $(LIBS) to work around this problem.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.4, 2004-11-08
**  Functionality Changes
*** If your system sort command has a working "-z" option, updatedb will
    now correctly handle newline characters in filenames (as will
    locate).
*** xargs now uses 128Kb of command line by default (less if the system 
    doesn't support that much).
*** If you specify a 'find' option after non-option, a warning message 
    is now issued.  Options should be specified immediately after the 
    list of paths to search.  These warnings are enabled if you
    specify the -warn option, or if stdin is a tty.  They are diabled
    by the use of the -nowarn option.  
*** Like find, the locate program now supports an option --null (short form -0)
    which changes the result separator from newline to NULL.
*** Locate supports the option -c (long form --count) which suppresses normal
    output but prints on stdout the number of results produced (like
    grep -c).
*** Locate supports the option -l (long form --limit) which limits the 
    number of results.  This is useful if you only want to find out if
    there are copies of a certain file on the system, but don't want
    to wait for the entire locate database to be searched.
*** Locate now has an option --basename which forces the specified pattern to 
    be matched against the basename of the entries in the locate
    database, rather than the whole name.  The default behaviour
    (matching against the whole name of the file including all the
    parent directory names) corresponds to the option --wholename.
*** updatedb has a new option, --findoptions, that can be used to 
    pass extra options through to the find command that it uses.
**  Bug Fixes
*** "find -printf '%H\n'" now works (rather than segfaulting) on
    systems that have non-writable string constants.
*** Better POSIX compliance for the -s option to xargs (out of range 
    values should just result in bounding to the correct range, not an
    error, so now we just print a warning message and adjust the
    value).
*** Corrected section numbers of manual page cross-references
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.3, 2004-10-30
**  Functionality Changes
*** Added new action -delete which deletes things that find matches.
*** Added new action -quit which causes find to exit immediately.
*** A new format directive '%D' for "find -printf" prints the device number.
*** The -ls predicate no longer truncates user or group names.
*** Added new option "-d" which is a synonym for "-depth" for compatibility
    with Mac OS, OpenBSD and FreeBSD.  This option is already
    deprecated since the POSIX standard specifies "-depth".   
*** Added two new format specifiers to the -printf action; these are 
    %y and %Y.  They indicate the type of the file as a single letter;
    these are the same latters as are used by the "-type" test.
*** If a parent directory changes during the execution of find, 
    the error message we issue identifies the nature of the change
    (for example the previous and current inode numbers of the 
    directory we've just returned out of).
** Other Changes
*** Non-functional code changes to silence compiler warnings.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.2, 2004-10-24
**  Documentation improvements
*** "find ... -exec {}+" is not yet supported.
** Bug Fixes
*** Fixed compilation problems on Solaris, RedHat EL AS 2.1, Irix, AIX
*** Work around possible compiler bug on HP-UX 11.23 for ia64
*** The built-in internationalisation support now works again.
** Other Changes
*** We now import the gnulib source in the way it is intended to be used,
    which means among other things that we only have one config.h file
    now.
*** Functions which findutils requires but which are not present in 
    gnulib are now defined in "libfind.a".  This is in the lib
    directory, while gnulib is in the gnulib subdirectory.
*** Fixed a typo in the address of the FSF in many of the file headers.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.1, 2004-10-17
** Bug Fixes
*** 'find -name \*bar now matches .foobar, because the POSIX standard 
     requires it, as explained at
     http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/interp/1003-2-92_int/pasc-1003.2-126.html
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.1, 2004-10-17
** Bug Fixes
*** find -iname now works correctly on systems that have an fnmatch() function 
    that does not support FNM_CASEFOLD
*** updatedb now uses signal names for "trap" instead of numbers, 
    as per bug #9465 (see http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/trap.html)
*** Better support for systems lacking intmax_t
** Other Changes
**** findutils now uses a newer version of gnulib (dated 2004-10-17).
\f
* Major changes in release 4.2.0, 2003-06-14
** Functionality Changes
*** xargs now works better when the environment variables are very extensive.
    The xargs command used to run into difficulties if the environment 
    data contained more than 20480 bytes.
*** New options -wholename and -iwholename 
    As per the GNU Projecvt coding standard, These are preferred over 
    the -path and -ipath options.  Using -ipath now generates a warning,
    though -path does not (since HPUX also offers -path).   
*** The environment variable FIND_BLOCK_SIZE is now ignored.
*** New option "-ignore_readdir_race"
    silences an error messages which would otherwise occur if a file is removed
    after find has read it from the directory using readdir(), but before 
    find stats the file.  There is also an option
    -noignore_readdir_race which has the opposite effect.   
**  Documentation improvements
*** The -size option of find is now documented in more detail
*** POSIX compliance and GNU extensions
    The find manual page also now includes a section 
    which describes the relationship between the features of GNU 
    find and the POSIX standard.  Some other small improvements 
    to the find and xargs manual pages have been made.
*** The argument to the -fprintf directive is now better documented.
    The escape code '\0' for the `-printf' predicate of find is now
    documented, and the documentation for the %k and %b specifiers
    has been improved.  
*** xargs -i is now more clearly documented.
** Bug Fixes
*** locate 'pa*d' will now find /etc/passwd (if it exists, of course)
*** xargs standard input is not inherited by child processes
    If the command invoked by xargs reads from its standard input, 
    it now gets nothing, as opposed to stealing data from the 
    list of files that xargs is trying to read.
*** Better support for 64-bit systems.
*** The command "xargs -i -n1" now works as one might expect, 
    I think this is a strange thing to want to do.  
*** Arguments to find -mtime that are too large are now diagnosed 
    Previously, this just used to cause find just to do the wrong thing.
*** updatedb is now somewhat more robust
    The updatedb shell script now does not generate an empty 
    database if it fails.  
*** Sanity-check on some data read from locatedb
    Locate now detects some types of file corruption in the 
    locate database.
*** The %k format specifier for -fprintf now works
    This was broken in 4.1.20.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.1.20, 2003-06-14:
** New maintainer, James Youngman <jay@gnu.org>
** As far as I know, this is the first release after 4.1.7, but I've left 
   a gap just in case. 
** We now use an "imported" version of gnulib, rather than including 
   a copy of the gnulib code in our CVS repository.   There are no
   differences in the build instructions, though (unless you are 
   building directly from CVS, in which case please read the file
   README-CVS).
** There are no (deliberate) functional changes in version 4.1.20.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.1.7, 2001-05-20:
fix problem so that default "-print" is added when "-prune" is used.
security fixes related to directories changing while find is executing.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.1.6, 2000-10-10:
correct bug in prune.
added --ignore-case option for locate

* Major changes in release 4.1.5, 2000-04-12:
Add support for large files

* Major changes in release 4.1.4, 2000-02-26:
bug fixes, more up-to-date languages.

* Major changes in release 4.1.3, 2000-01-27:
added internationalization and localization.

* Major changes in release 4.1.2, 2000-01-18:
None.

* Major changes in release 4.1.1, 1999-08-8:
attempt at successful compilation on many platforms after years of neglect
 "--existing" option added to locate "--prunefs" option added to updatedb

* Major changes in release 4.1, 1994-11-3:

** Distribution renamed to findutils.
** updatedb is now a user command, installed in $exec_prefix/bin
  instead of $exec_prefix/libexec.
** A few problems in Makefiles and testsuite corrected.
\f
* Major changes in release 4.0, 1994-11-2:

** Documentation:
*** Texinfo manual.
*** Man page for updatedb.
*** Man page for the locate database formats.

** find:
*** Takes less CPU time on long paths, because it uses chdir to descend
   trees, so it does fewer inode lookups.
*** Does not get trapped in symbolic link loops when -follow is given.
*** Supports "-fstype afs" if you have /afs and /usr/afsws/include
   and you configure using the --with-afs option.
*** New action -fls FILE; like -ls but writes to FILE.

** locate:
*** Supports a new database format, which is 8-bit clean and
   allows machines with different byte orderings and integer sizes to
   share the databases.  The new locate can also detect and read the
   old database format automatically.  The new databases are typically
   30% or more larger than the old ones (due to allowing all 8 bits in
   file names).  Search times are approximately the same, or faster on
   some systems.
*** Warns if a file name database is more than 8 days old.

** updatedb:
*** Takes command-line options.

** xargs:
*** Performance improved 10-20%.
*** The EOF string is not used when -0 is given.
*** Now has a test suite.  Some minor bugs fixed as a result.
\f
* Major changes in release 3.8, 1993-03-29:

** case insensitive versions of -lname, -name, -path, -regex:
  -ilname, -iname, -ipath, -iregex
** %F directive for -printf, -fprintf to print file system type
\f
* Major changes in release 3.7:

** locate can search multiple databases
** locate has an option to specify the database path
** updatedb no longer goes into an infinite loop with some versions of tail
\f
* No NEWS was kept for earlier releases.  Known release dates include:
** release 3.2, 1991-08-28
** release 3.1, 1991-08-21
** release 3.0, 1991-08-21
** release 2.2, 1991-04-05
** release 2.1, 1991-01-01
** release 2.0, 1990-11-20
** release 1.2, 1990-07-03
** release 1.1, 1990-06-24
** release 1.0, 1990-06-22
** beginning of findutils history, 1987-02-21

                        --//--
This is used by Emacs' spell checker ispell.el:

LocalWords: ansi knr strftime xargs updatedb sh fnmatch hin strcpy
LocalWords: lib getstr getline frcode bigram texi depcomp automake
LocalWords: strncasecmp strcasecmp LIBOBJS FUNC prunefs allout libexec
LocalWords: testsuite Texinfo chdir inode fstype afs fls ls EOF lname
LocalWords: regex ilname iname ipath iregex printf fprintf