1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 'base64 a b' now correctly diagnoses 'b' as the extra operand, not 'a'.
8 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
10 When B already exists, 'cp -il A B' no longer immediately fails
11 after asking the user whether to proceed.
12 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
14 df no longer corrupts displayed multibyte characters on macOS.
15 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.18]
17 shred, sort, and split no longer falsely report ftruncate errors
18 when outputting to less-common file types. For example, the shell
19 command 'sort /dev/null -o /dev/stdout | cat' no longer fails with
20 an "error truncating" diagnostic.
21 [bug was introduced with coreutils-8.18 for sort and split, and
22 (for shared memory objects only) with fileutils-4.1 for shred]
24 sync no longer fails for write-only file arguments.
25 [bug introduced with argument support to sync in coreutils-8.24]
27 'tail -f file | filter' no longer exits immediately on AIX.
28 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
30 'tail -f file | filter' no longer goes into an infinite loop
31 if filter exits and SIGPIPE is ignored.
32 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
34 ** Changes in behavior
36 echo now always processes backslash escapes when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
37 environment variable is set.
39 When possible 'ln A B' now merely links A to B and reports an error
40 if this fails, instead of statting A and B before linking. This
41 uses fewer system calls and avoids some races. The old statting
42 approach is still used in situations where hard links to directories
43 are allowed (e.g., NetBSD when superuser).
45 ls --group-directories-first will also group symlinks to directories.
47 'test -a FILE' is not supported anymore. Long ago, there were concerns about
48 the high probability of humans confusing the -a primary with the -a binary
49 operator, so POSIX changed this to 'test -e FILE'. Scripts using it were
50 already broken and non-portable; the -a unary operator was never documented.
54 id now supports specifying multiple users.
56 printf, seq, sleep, tail, and timeout now accept floating point
57 numbers in either the current or the C locale. For example, if the
58 current locale's decimal point is ',', 'sleep 0,1' and 'sleep 0.1'
59 now mean the same thing. Previously, these commands accepted only
60 C-locale syntax with '.' as the decimal point. The new behavior is
61 more compatible with other implementations in non-C locales.
63 test now supports the '-N FILE' unary operator (like e.g. bash) to check
64 whether FILE exists and has been modified since it was last read.
68 basenc is added to complement existing base64,base32 commands,
69 and encodes and decodes printable text using various common encodings:
70 base64,base64url,base32,base32hex,base16,base2,z85.
74 stat and tail now know about the "sdcardfs" file system on Android.
75 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
78 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.30 (2018-07-01) [stable]
82 'cp --symlink SRC DST' will again correctly validate DST.
83 If DST is a regular file and SRC is a symlink to DST,
84 then cp will no longer allow that operation to clobber DST.
85 Also with -d, if DST is a symlink, then it can always be replaced,
86 even if it points to SRC on a separate device.
87 [bugs introduced with coreutils-8.27]
89 'cp -n -u' and 'mv -n -u' now consistently ignore the -u option.
90 Previously, this option combination suffered from race conditions
91 that caused -u to sometimes override -n.
92 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
94 'cp -a --no-preserve=mode' now sets appropriate default permissions
95 for non regular files like fifos and character device nodes etc.,
96 and leaves mode bits of existing files unchanged.
97 Previously it would have set executable bits on created special files,
98 and set mode bits for existing files as if they had been created.
99 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.20]
101 'cp --remove-destination file symlink' now removes the symlink
102 even if it can't be traversed.
103 [bug introduced with --remove-destination in fileutils-4.1.1]
105 ls no longer truncates the abbreviated month names that have a
106 display width between 6 and 12 inclusive. Previously this would have
107 output ambiguous months for Arabic or Catalan locales.
109 'ls -aA' is now equivalent to 'ls -A', since -A now overrides -a.
110 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
112 'mv -n A B' no longer suffers from a race condition that can
113 overwrite a simultaneously-created B. This bug fix requires
114 platform support for the renameat2 or renameatx_np syscalls, found
115 in recent Linux and macOS kernels. As a side effect, ‘mv -n A A’
116 now silently does nothing if A exists.
117 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
119 ** Changes in behavior
121 'cp --force file symlink' now removes the symlink even if
122 it is self referential.
124 ls --color now matches file extensions case insensitively.
128 cp --reflink now supports --reflink=never to enforce a standard copy.
130 env supports a new -v/--debug option to show verbose information about
131 each processing step.
133 env supports a new -S/--split-string=S option to split a single argument
134 string into multiple arguments. Used to pass multiple arguments in scripts
137 md5sum accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output lines with a
138 NUL instead of a newline character. This also disables file name escaping.
139 This also applies to sha*sum and b2sum.
141 rm --preserve-root now supports the --preserve-root=all option to
142 reject any command line argument that is mounted to a separate file system.
146 cut supports line lengths up to the max file size on 32 bit systems.
147 Previously only offsets up to SIZE_MAX-1 were supported.
149 stat and tail now know about the "exfs" file system, which is a
150 version of XFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type,
151 and tail -f uses inotify.
153 wc avoids redundant processing of ASCII text in multibyte locales,
154 which is especially significant on macOS.
157 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.29 (2017-12-27) [stable]
161 b2sum no longer crashes when processing certain truncated check files.
162 [bug introduced with b2sum coreutils-8.26]
164 dd now ensures the correct cache ranges are specified for the "nocache"
165 and "direct" flags. Previously some pages in the page cache were not
166 invalidated. [bug introduced for "direct" in coreutils-7.5,
167 and with the "nocache" implementation in coreutils-8.11]
169 df no longer hangs when given a fifo argument.
170 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
172 ptx -S no longer infloops for a pattern which returns zero-length matches.
173 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
175 shred --remove will again repeatedly rename files with shortening names
176 to attempt to hide the original length of the file name.
177 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
179 stty no longer crashes when processing settings with -F also specified.
180 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
182 tail --bytes again supports non seekable inputs on all systems.
183 On systems like android it always tried to process as seekable inputs.
184 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
186 timeout will again notice its managed command exiting, even when
187 invoked with blocked CHLD signal, or in a narrow window where
188 this CHLD signal from the exiting child was missed. In each case
189 timeout would have then waited for the time limit to expire.
190 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
194 timeout now supports the --verbose option to diagnose forced termination.
198 dd now supports iflag=direct with arbitrary sized files on all file systems.
200 tail --bytes=NUM will efficiently seek to the end of block devices,
201 rather than reading from the start.
203 Utilities which do not support long options (other than the default --help
204 and --version), e.g. cksum and sleep, now use more consistent error diagnostic
205 for unknown long options.
209 Default man pages are now distributed which are used if perl is
210 not available on the build system, or when cross compiling.
213 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.28 (2017-09-01) [stable]
217 cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
218 Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
219 mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
220 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
222 When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
223 races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances. Since
224 the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
225 later, the races are still present on other platforms.
226 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
228 cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
229 backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
230 E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
231 now fails instead of losing the data.
232 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
234 cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
235 For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix='' are now no-ops.
236 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
238 date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
239 user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
240 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
242 dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
243 consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
244 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
246 df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
247 specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
248 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
250 df no longer interacts with dummy file system types, so for example
251 no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounted via system.automount(5).
252 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
254 `groups inva:lid root` no longer exits immediately upon failure.
255 Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
256 [bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]
258 kill now converts from number to signal name correctly on AIX.
259 Previously it would have always returned the 'EXIT' name.
260 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
262 ls now quotes symlink targets consistently. Previously it may not
263 have quoted the target name if the link name itself didn't need quoting.
264 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
266 split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
267 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
269 md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
270 ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
271 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
273 tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
274 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
276 tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
277 Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
278 or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
279 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
281 tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
282 non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
283 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
285 uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
286 as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
287 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
289 expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
290 number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.
294 expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
295 by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
296 useful for visualizing diff output for example.
298 ls supports a new --hyperlink[=when] option to output file://
299 format links to files, supported by some terminals.
301 split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
302 lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
304 env now has a --chdir (-C) option to change the working directory before
305 executing the subsidiary program.
307 expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.
309 ** Changes in behavior
311 tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped and the reader of
312 the pipe terminates. That allows `tail -f file | grep -q foo` to return
313 responsively, but does make `tail -f file | :` exit immediately without
314 waiting for data. Instead one should now `tail -f file | grep -q .`
318 mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
320 stat -f -c %l, used to output the max file name length on a file system,
321 is now supported on FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
323 tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
324 when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
325 is effective in this case.
328 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
332 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
333 as appropriate for the -a, --preseve=context, or -Z options.
334 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
336 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
337 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
338 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
340 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
341 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
342 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
344 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
345 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
346 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
348 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
349 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
350 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
352 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
353 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
354 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
355 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
356 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
358 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
359 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
360 depending on the size of the first file processed.
361 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
365 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
366 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
367 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
368 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
370 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
371 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
372 time zone is indeterminate.
374 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
375 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
376 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
377 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
379 stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
380 to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
381 file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
383 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
384 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
386 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
387 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
388 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
392 expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
393 after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
394 specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
397 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
401 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
402 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
405 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
406 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
407 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
409 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
410 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
411 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
412 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
413 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
415 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
416 System V style platforms where this information is available only
417 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
419 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
420 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
422 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
423 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
424 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
426 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
427 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
428 defaults to a different SELinux context.
430 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
431 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
433 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
434 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
435 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
437 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
438 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
440 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
441 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
442 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
444 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
446 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
447 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
449 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
450 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
452 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
453 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
455 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
456 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
458 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
459 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
460 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
461 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
463 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
464 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
465 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
467 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
468 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
469 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
471 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
472 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
473 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
475 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
476 only doing so if --retry is specified.
477 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
479 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
480 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
482 ** Changes in behavior
484 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
486 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
487 values for any argument.
489 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
490 they are out of localtime range.
492 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
493 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
494 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
495 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
499 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
500 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
501 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
503 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
504 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
506 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
507 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
509 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
511 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
512 written to a terminal.
514 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
515 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
517 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
518 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
519 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
520 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
521 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
522 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
523 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
524 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
525 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
526 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
527 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
529 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
530 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
534 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
535 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
539 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
541 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
542 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
544 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
547 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
551 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
552 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
553 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
554 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
556 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
557 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
559 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
560 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
561 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
563 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
564 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
566 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
567 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
568 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
570 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
571 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
573 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
574 that specify an offset for the first field.
575 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
577 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
578 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
582 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
583 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
587 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
588 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
590 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
591 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
592 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
593 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
594 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
596 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
597 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
598 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
600 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
601 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
602 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
604 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
605 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
607 ** Changes in behavior
609 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
610 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
612 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
613 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
615 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
616 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
618 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
619 when outputting to a terminal.
621 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
625 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
626 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
628 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
629 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
631 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
632 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
633 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
635 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
636 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
638 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
639 upon detection of a directory cycle.
640 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
642 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
644 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
645 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
646 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
648 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
649 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
652 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
656 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
657 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
659 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
660 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
662 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
663 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
664 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
666 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
667 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
668 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
669 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
671 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
672 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
673 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
674 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
676 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
677 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
679 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
680 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
682 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
683 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
684 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
686 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
687 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
688 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
690 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
691 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
692 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
694 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
695 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
696 character at the 4GiB position.
697 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
699 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
700 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
702 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
703 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
705 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
706 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
707 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
709 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
710 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
712 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
713 replaced before inotify watches were created.
714 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
716 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
717 [bug introduced in the beginning]
719 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
720 when those files are being created or renamed.
721 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
725 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
726 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
727 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
728 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
730 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
731 on stderr approximately every second.
733 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
734 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
736 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
737 other than the default newline character.
739 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
740 a useful setting with high latency links.
742 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
743 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
745 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
746 and output errors in general.
748 ** Changes in behavior
750 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
751 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
752 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
753 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
755 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
756 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
757 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
758 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
759 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
761 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
762 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
764 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
766 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
767 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
769 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
770 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
774 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
775 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
777 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
778 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
780 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
781 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
783 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
784 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
786 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
788 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
789 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
790 documentation are provided.
793 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
797 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
798 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
800 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
801 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
802 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
803 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
805 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
806 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
807 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
808 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
810 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
811 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
813 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
814 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
816 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
817 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
818 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
819 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
820 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
821 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
835 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
837 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
838 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
839 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
840 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
841 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
842 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
844 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
845 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
846 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
847 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
849 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
850 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
851 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
853 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
854 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
855 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
856 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
858 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
859 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
860 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
862 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
863 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
864 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
866 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
867 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
868 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
869 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
870 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
872 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
873 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
874 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
876 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
877 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
879 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
880 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
881 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
883 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
884 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
886 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
887 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
889 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
890 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
892 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
893 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
895 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
896 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
897 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
899 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
900 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
904 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
905 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
907 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
908 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
909 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
910 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
911 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
912 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
913 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
914 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
915 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
916 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
917 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
918 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
919 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
920 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
921 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
922 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
923 it suitable for embedded system.
925 ** Changes in behavior
927 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
928 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
930 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
931 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
933 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
934 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
935 will result in the delayed output of lines.
937 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
938 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
939 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
943 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
944 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
945 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
947 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
949 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
950 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
951 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
953 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
954 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
955 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
956 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
958 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
959 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
961 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
962 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
963 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
966 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
970 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
971 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
972 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
974 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
975 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
976 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
977 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
979 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
980 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
981 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
983 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
984 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
986 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
988 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
989 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
990 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
992 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
993 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
994 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
996 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
997 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
998 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
999 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1001 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
1002 from the source, when copying across file systems.
1003 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1005 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
1006 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
1007 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1009 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
1010 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1012 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
1013 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
1014 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
1015 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1017 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
1018 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
1019 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1021 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
1022 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
1023 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1027 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
1028 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
1029 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
1031 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
1032 used to identify the split points.
1034 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
1035 command line argument through to the output.
1037 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
1040 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
1041 a NUL instead of a white space character.
1043 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
1044 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
1046 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
1048 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
1049 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
1050 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1052 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
1053 unique groups with empty lines.
1055 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
1056 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
1058 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
1061 ** Changes in behavior
1063 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
1064 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
1065 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
1066 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
1068 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
1069 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
1071 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
1072 not just the transfer counts.
1074 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
1076 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
1077 as per the documented interface.
1081 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
1083 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
1084 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
1085 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
1086 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1088 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
1089 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
1090 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
1091 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1093 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
1094 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
1095 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
1097 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
1098 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
1100 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
1101 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
1103 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
1107 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1110 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
1114 numfmt: reformat numbers
1118 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
1119 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
1120 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
1122 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
1123 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
1124 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
1126 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
1127 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
1131 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
1132 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1134 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
1135 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
1136 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1138 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
1139 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
1140 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1142 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
1143 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
1144 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1146 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
1147 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
1148 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
1150 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
1151 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
1152 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
1154 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
1155 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1157 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
1158 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
1160 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
1161 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
1162 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1164 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
1165 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
1166 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1168 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
1169 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
1170 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1172 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
1173 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
1174 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
1175 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1177 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
1178 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
1179 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1181 ** Changes in behavior
1183 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
1184 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
1185 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
1186 'total' in the target column.
1188 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
1189 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
1190 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
1192 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
1193 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
1195 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
1196 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
1200 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
1201 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1203 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1204 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
1206 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
1210 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
1211 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
1212 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
1213 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
1214 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
1215 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
1216 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
1217 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
1218 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
1219 for a patched distribution package.
1221 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
1222 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1224 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
1225 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
1226 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
1227 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1230 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
1234 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
1236 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
1237 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
1238 sha384sum and sha512sum.
1242 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
1243 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
1244 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
1245 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
1246 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
1248 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
1249 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
1251 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
1252 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
1253 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
1254 eventually exits nonzero.
1256 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
1257 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
1258 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
1259 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
1260 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
1262 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
1263 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
1264 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
1266 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
1267 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
1268 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
1270 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
1271 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
1272 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1274 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
1275 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
1276 Before, this would infloop:
1277 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
1278 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1280 ** Changes in behavior
1282 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
1286 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
1287 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
1288 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
1289 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
1290 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
1293 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
1294 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
1295 format-changing options.
1297 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
1298 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
1299 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
1300 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
1301 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
1305 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
1306 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
1307 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
1308 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
1309 are run without following the instructions in README.
1311 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
1312 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
1313 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
1314 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
1315 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
1316 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
1317 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
1320 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
1324 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
1325 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
1326 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
1327 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1329 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
1330 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
1331 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
1332 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1334 sort -u could read freed memory.
1335 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
1336 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
1337 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1341 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
1342 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
1343 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
1344 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
1347 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
1351 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1352 processes will not intersperse their output.
1353 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1355 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
1356 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
1357 date: invalid date '\260'
1358 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1360 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
1361 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
1362 lines output by df, can work reliably.
1363 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1365 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
1366 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
1367 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
1369 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
1370 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
1371 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
1372 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
1373 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
1374 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1376 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
1377 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
1379 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
1380 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1382 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
1383 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
1384 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
1386 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
1387 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1388 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
1392 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
1394 ** Changes in behavior
1396 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
1397 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
1398 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
1399 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
1400 have any reason to include it here.
1404 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
1405 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
1406 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
1408 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
1409 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
1410 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
1413 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
1417 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
1418 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
1419 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
1420 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
1421 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
1422 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1424 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
1425 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
1426 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
1427 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
1428 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
1429 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
1430 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1432 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
1433 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1435 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
1436 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
1440 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
1441 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
1443 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
1445 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
1447 ** Changes in behavior
1449 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
1450 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
1451 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
1453 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
1454 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
1457 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
1461 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
1462 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
1463 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
1464 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
1465 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
1466 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
1467 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
1468 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
1470 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
1471 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
1472 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
1473 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
1474 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
1476 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
1477 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
1479 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
1480 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
1482 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
1483 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
1485 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
1486 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
1488 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
1489 additional static suffix to output file names.
1491 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
1492 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
1493 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1495 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
1496 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1500 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
1501 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
1502 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1504 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
1505 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
1506 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
1507 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
1508 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
1509 typically still point to one of the hard links.
1511 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
1512 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
1513 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
1514 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
1515 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
1517 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
1518 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
1519 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
1520 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
1524 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
1525 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
1526 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
1528 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
1529 instead of causing a usage failure.
1531 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
1534 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
1538 realpath: print resolved file names.
1542 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
1543 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1545 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
1546 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
1548 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
1549 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
1550 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
1551 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
1552 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
1553 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
1555 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
1556 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
1557 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
1559 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
1560 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
1561 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
1563 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
1564 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
1565 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
1566 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
1567 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
1569 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
1571 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
1572 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1574 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
1575 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1576 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
1578 ** Changes in behavior
1580 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
1581 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
1582 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
1583 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
1584 usually-short referent instead.
1586 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
1587 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
1588 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
1589 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
1592 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
1596 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
1597 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
1598 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1600 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
1601 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
1603 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
1604 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1608 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
1609 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1611 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
1612 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
1613 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
1614 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
1616 ** Changes in behavior
1618 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
1619 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
1620 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
1624 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
1625 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
1626 only .tar.xz files is enough.
1629 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
1633 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
1634 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
1635 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
1637 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
1638 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1640 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
1641 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
1642 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
1643 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
1644 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1646 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
1647 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
1648 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
1649 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
1650 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1651 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
1652 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
1653 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1655 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
1656 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
1658 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
1659 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
1661 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
1662 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1664 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
1665 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
1666 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1668 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
1669 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
1670 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
1671 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1673 ** Changes in behavior
1675 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
1676 when -v or -c specified.
1678 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
1679 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
1683 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
1684 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
1685 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
1686 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
1687 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
1689 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
1690 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
1691 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1693 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
1694 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
1695 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
1696 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
1697 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
1698 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
1699 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
1701 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
1702 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
1703 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
1707 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
1708 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
1710 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
1713 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
1714 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
1716 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
1717 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
1719 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
1720 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
1722 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
1724 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
1728 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
1729 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
1731 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
1734 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
1738 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
1739 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1741 ** Changes in behavior
1743 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
1744 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
1745 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
1746 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
1747 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
1748 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
1749 resolved for 2.6.39.
1750 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
1751 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
1752 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
1756 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
1759 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
1763 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
1764 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
1765 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1767 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
1768 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
1769 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1771 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
1772 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
1773 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1775 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
1776 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1778 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
1779 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1781 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
1782 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1784 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
1785 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1789 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
1790 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
1791 processed portion thereof.
1793 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
1794 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
1796 ** Changes in behavior
1798 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1799 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
1800 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1802 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1803 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
1804 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
1806 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
1807 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
1809 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
1810 Use --preserve-context instead.
1812 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
1815 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
1819 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
1820 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
1821 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
1822 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
1823 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1825 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
1826 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1828 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
1829 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
1830 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
1832 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
1833 reject file names invalid for that file system.
1835 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
1836 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1840 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
1841 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
1842 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
1843 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
1844 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
1845 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
1846 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
1847 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
1849 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
1850 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
1851 the same number of fields are output for each line.
1853 ** Changes in behavior
1855 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
1856 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
1857 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
1860 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
1864 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
1865 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
1866 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1869 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
1873 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
1874 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
1876 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
1877 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
1879 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
1880 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1882 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
1883 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
1884 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
1885 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1887 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
1888 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1890 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
1891 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
1892 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
1894 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
1896 ** Changes in behavior
1898 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
1899 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
1900 to the number of available processors.
1904 split accepts the --number/-n option to generate a specific number of
1905 files, as well as the --elide-empty-files/-e and --unbuffered/-u
1906 options to fine-tune the resulting output.
1909 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
1913 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
1914 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
1915 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
1916 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
1918 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
1919 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
1920 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
1922 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
1923 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1925 ** Changes in behavior
1927 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
1928 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
1930 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
1931 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
1932 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
1933 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
1934 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
1935 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
1937 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
1938 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
1939 the same way as the others.
1941 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
1942 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
1945 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
1949 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
1950 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
1951 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
1953 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
1954 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
1956 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
1957 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
1958 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
1960 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
1961 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
1963 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
1964 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
1966 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
1967 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
1968 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1970 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
1971 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
1972 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
1973 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
1977 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
1978 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
1980 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
1983 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
1984 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
1986 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
1988 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
1989 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
1990 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
1992 ** Changes in behavior
1994 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
1995 rather than its aliased target.
1997 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
1998 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
1999 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
2001 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
2002 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
2003 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
2004 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
2005 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
2006 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
2007 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
2008 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
2010 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
2012 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
2014 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
2015 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
2018 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
2019 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
2020 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
2021 control like taskset for example.
2023 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
2025 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
2026 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
2027 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
2028 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
2029 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
2030 includes %C when context information is available.
2032 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
2033 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
2034 rather than a file system attribute.
2036 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
2037 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
2038 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
2039 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
2041 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
2042 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
2043 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
2045 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
2046 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
2047 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
2050 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
2054 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
2055 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
2057 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
2059 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
2060 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2062 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
2063 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
2064 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
2065 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
2067 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
2068 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
2069 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2073 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
2074 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
2076 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
2077 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
2078 duration after the initial signal was sent.
2080 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
2081 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
2082 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
2083 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
2084 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
2085 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
2086 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
2087 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
2088 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
2090 ** Changes in behavior
2092 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
2093 sequence when it would be a no-op.
2095 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
2096 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
2099 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
2103 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
2104 of available processors, which may not have been the case
2105 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
2106 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2110 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
2111 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
2113 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
2114 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
2115 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
2116 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
2118 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
2119 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
2120 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
2123 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
2127 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
2128 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
2129 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
2131 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
2132 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
2133 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2135 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
2136 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2138 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
2139 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2140 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
2141 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2143 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
2144 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
2145 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2147 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
2148 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
2149 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
2150 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2152 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
2153 renamed-aside and then recreated.
2154 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2156 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
2157 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
2158 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
2159 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2161 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
2162 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
2163 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2165 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
2166 processes will not intersperse their output.
2167 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
2170 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
2174 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
2175 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2177 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
2178 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2180 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
2181 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2182 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
2183 the presence of the empty string argument.
2184 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2186 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2187 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
2188 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
2189 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2191 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
2192 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2194 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2195 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
2196 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2198 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
2199 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
2200 and with a malicious user on the same system
2201 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
2202 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
2205 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
2209 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
2210 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
2211 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2213 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
2214 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
2215 offending directory and all "contents."
2217 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
2218 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
2219 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
2221 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
2222 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
2223 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2225 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2226 processes will not intersperse their output.
2227 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2228 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2230 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
2231 output the name of the file to stdout.
2232 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2234 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
2235 call fails with errno == EACCES.
2236 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2238 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
2239 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
2242 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
2243 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
2244 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
2246 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
2247 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
2248 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
2249 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
2250 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
2251 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2253 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
2254 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
2255 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
2256 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
2258 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
2259 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
2261 ** Changes in behavior
2263 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
2264 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
2265 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
2266 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
2267 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
2269 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
2270 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
2271 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
2272 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
2274 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
2276 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
2277 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
2278 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
2279 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
2280 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
2284 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
2288 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
2289 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
2291 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
2292 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2294 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
2295 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
2296 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
2298 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
2299 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
2302 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
2306 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
2307 when the source file doesn't have write access.
2308 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2310 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
2311 to accommodate leap seconds.
2312 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2314 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
2315 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
2316 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2318 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
2320 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
2321 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
2322 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
2324 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
2325 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
2326 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
2327 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
2328 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
2332 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
2333 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
2334 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
2335 directory or a symlink to a directory.
2337 ** Changes in behavior
2339 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
2340 environment variable is set.
2342 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
2343 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
2344 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
2348 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
2349 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
2350 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
2351 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
2353 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
2354 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
2355 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
2356 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
2360 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
2361 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
2362 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
2364 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
2365 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
2366 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
2367 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
2368 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
2369 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
2370 another improvement:
2372 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
2373 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
2376 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
2380 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
2381 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
2382 and libraries tested at configure time.
2383 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2385 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
2386 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2388 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
2389 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2391 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
2392 printing a summary to stderr.
2393 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2395 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
2396 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
2397 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
2399 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
2400 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
2402 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
2403 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
2404 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
2405 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2407 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
2408 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
2409 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
2410 which is relatively unusual.
2411 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2413 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
2414 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
2415 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
2416 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
2417 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
2418 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
2419 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2423 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
2424 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
2425 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
2426 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
2427 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
2431 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
2432 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
2434 ** Changes in behavior
2436 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2437 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2438 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
2439 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
2440 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
2443 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
2447 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
2448 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
2450 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
2451 before data copying has started.
2453 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
2454 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2456 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
2457 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
2458 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
2459 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2461 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
2462 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
2463 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
2464 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2466 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
2471 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
2472 for its standard streams.
2474 ** Changes in behavior
2476 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
2477 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
2478 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
2479 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
2480 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
2481 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
2483 ** Deprecated options
2485 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
2486 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
2490 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
2492 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
2493 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
2494 a btrfs file system.
2496 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
2498 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
2499 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
2501 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
2502 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
2505 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
2509 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
2510 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
2511 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
2512 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
2514 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
2515 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
2516 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
2517 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
2518 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
2523 make check: two tests have been corrected
2527 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
2528 inherited from gnulib.
2531 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
2535 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
2536 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
2537 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
2538 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
2540 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
2541 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
2543 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
2545 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
2546 systems without xattr support.
2548 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
2549 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
2550 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2552 ** Changes in behavior
2554 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
2555 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
2556 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
2557 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
2559 ** Improved robustness
2561 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
2562 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
2563 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
2564 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
2565 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
2566 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
2567 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
2568 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
2569 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2573 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
2574 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
2576 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
2577 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
2578 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
2579 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2580 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2583 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
2587 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
2588 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
2589 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
2593 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
2594 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
2595 data was read, or on process exit.
2596 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2598 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
2599 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
2600 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
2601 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2603 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
2604 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
2605 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
2606 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2608 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
2609 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
2611 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
2612 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2614 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
2615 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
2616 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
2618 ** Changes in behavior
2620 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
2621 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
2622 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
2624 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
2625 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
2627 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
2628 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
2629 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
2632 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
2636 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
2638 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
2639 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
2640 install: Never copies xattrs
2642 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
2643 from overwriting any existing destination file
2645 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
2646 mode where this feature is available.
2648 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
2649 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
2650 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
2651 do not modify the destination at all.
2653 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
2655 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
2659 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
2660 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
2662 cp uses much less memory in some situations
2664 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
2665 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
2667 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
2668 processing the first file name
2670 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
2671 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
2672 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
2673 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2675 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
2676 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
2678 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
2679 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
2682 ** Changes in behavior
2684 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
2685 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
2687 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
2688 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
2689 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
2691 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
2692 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
2694 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
2696 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
2697 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
2698 is still marked with a '+'.
2701 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
2705 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
2706 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
2710 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
2711 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
2712 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
2713 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
2714 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
2715 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
2717 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2718 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2720 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
2721 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
2723 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
2725 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
2726 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
2727 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
2729 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
2730 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
2732 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
2733 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
2734 used to factor large numbers.
2736 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
2739 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
2741 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
2743 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
2744 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
2746 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
2747 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
2748 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
2749 maximum command-line (argv) length.
2751 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
2752 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
2753 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
2755 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
2756 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
2760 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
2762 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
2763 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
2765 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
2766 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
2768 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
2770 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
2771 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
2775 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
2776 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
2777 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
2779 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
2781 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
2782 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
2783 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
2785 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
2786 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
2787 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
2789 ** Changes in behavior
2791 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
2792 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
2795 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
2799 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
2800 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
2801 'futimens' system calls.
2805 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
2807 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
2808 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
2809 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
2811 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
2812 with no USERNAME argument.
2814 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
2815 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
2816 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
2818 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
2819 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
2820 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
2821 number of fields for some inputs.
2823 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
2824 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
2826 ** Changes in behavior
2828 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
2829 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
2832 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
2836 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
2838 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
2839 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
2840 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
2841 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2843 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
2844 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
2846 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
2847 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
2849 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
2850 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
2852 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
2853 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
2854 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2855 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2857 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
2858 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
2859 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
2860 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
2861 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2862 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
2864 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
2865 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
2867 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
2868 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
2869 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2871 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
2872 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2874 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
2875 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2877 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
2878 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
2879 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
2880 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
2882 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
2883 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
2885 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
2886 in more cases when a directory is empty.
2888 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
2889 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
2890 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2894 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2895 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2897 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
2898 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
2899 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
2900 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
2904 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
2905 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
2907 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
2909 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
2913 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
2914 which have negative errno values.
2918 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
2922 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
2926 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
2927 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
2930 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
2934 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
2935 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
2936 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2938 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
2939 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
2940 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
2941 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2945 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
2946 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
2947 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
2948 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
2951 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
2955 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
2957 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
2958 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
2959 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2962 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
2966 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
2967 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
2969 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
2971 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
2973 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
2975 ** Programs no longer installed by default
2979 ** Changes in behavior
2981 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
2982 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
2984 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
2985 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
2987 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
2988 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
2989 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
2993 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
2994 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
2995 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
2996 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
2997 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
2998 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
2999 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
3000 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
3001 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
3002 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
3003 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
3005 The following commands and options now support the standard size
3006 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
3007 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
3010 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
3013 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
3014 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
3015 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
3017 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
3018 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
3019 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
3022 ** New build options
3024 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
3025 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
3026 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
3027 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
3029 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
3030 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
3031 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
3032 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
3033 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
3034 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
3035 of "make check" fail.
3037 ** Remove deprecated options
3039 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3040 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
3041 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3042 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
3043 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
3045 ** Improved robustness
3047 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
3048 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
3049 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
3050 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
3051 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
3052 loss of the contents of a/f.
3054 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
3055 in its 35-colon command-line argument
3059 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
3060 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
3061 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3063 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
3064 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
3065 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
3066 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3068 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
3069 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
3070 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
3071 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
3072 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
3073 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
3074 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
3075 destination is a symlink.
3077 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
3079 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
3080 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
3082 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
3083 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
3085 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
3087 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
3088 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
3090 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
3091 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
3093 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
3096 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
3097 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
3099 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
3100 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
3102 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
3103 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
3104 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
3105 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3107 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
3108 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
3109 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3111 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
3112 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
3113 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
3115 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
3116 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
3117 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
3118 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
3120 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
3121 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
3122 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
3124 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
3125 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
3127 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
3128 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
3130 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
3132 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
3133 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
3134 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
3136 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
3137 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
3139 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
3140 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
3142 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
3143 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
3145 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
3146 [present in the original version]
3149 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
3153 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
3155 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
3156 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
3157 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
3159 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
3160 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
3162 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
3166 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
3167 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
3169 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
3170 support but with insufficient /proc support.
3172 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
3173 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
3175 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
3176 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
3177 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
3178 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
3179 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
3180 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
3182 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
3183 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
3186 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
3187 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
3189 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
3192 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
3193 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
3194 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
3196 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
3197 directory is unreadable.
3199 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
3200 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
3201 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
3203 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
3204 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
3205 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
3206 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
3207 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
3210 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
3211 Before it would print nothing.
3213 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
3215 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
3216 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
3217 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
3218 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
3219 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
3220 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
3221 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
3222 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
3224 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
3228 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
3229 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
3230 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
3232 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
3233 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
3234 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
3235 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
3238 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
3242 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
3243 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
3244 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
3245 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
3246 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
3247 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
3248 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3250 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
3251 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
3252 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
3253 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
3254 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
3255 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
3256 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
3257 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3259 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
3260 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
3261 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
3264 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
3268 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
3269 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
3271 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
3272 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
3273 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
3275 ** Improved robustness
3277 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
3278 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
3279 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
3282 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
3286 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
3287 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
3288 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
3289 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
3290 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3292 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
3296 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
3299 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
3303 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
3304 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
3305 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
3306 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3308 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
3309 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
3311 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
3312 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
3313 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
3316 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
3318 ** Improved robustness
3320 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
3321 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
3323 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
3324 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
3325 or NFS-mounted partition.
3327 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
3328 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
3332 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
3333 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
3334 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
3335 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
3336 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
3337 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
3339 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
3340 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
3342 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
3343 or neglect to report file removal.
3345 For the "groups" command:
3347 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
3348 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
3350 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
3352 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
3354 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
3358 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
3359 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
3362 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
3364 ** Changes in behavior
3366 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
3367 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
3368 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
3369 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
3371 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
3372 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
3373 a final './' or '../' component.
3375 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
3376 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
3377 this only for pipes.
3379 ** Infrastructure changes
3381 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
3382 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
3383 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
3384 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
3388 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
3389 name is "." or "..".
3391 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
3392 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
3393 dirent.d_type support.
3395 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
3396 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
3398 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
3399 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
3400 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
3401 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
3404 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
3406 ** Changes in behavior
3408 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
3412 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
3413 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
3417 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
3418 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
3419 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
3421 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
3422 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3424 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
3425 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3427 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
3429 ** Improved robustness
3431 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
3432 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
3433 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
3435 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
3436 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
3439 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
3440 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
3442 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
3443 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
3445 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
3446 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
3448 ** Changes in behavior
3450 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
3451 where the two are distinct.
3453 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
3454 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
3455 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
3456 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
3457 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
3458 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
3459 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
3460 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
3461 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
3462 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
3463 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
3464 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
3465 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
3466 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
3467 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
3468 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
3469 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
3471 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
3472 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
3473 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
3475 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
3476 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
3477 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
3478 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
3481 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
3482 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
3486 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
3487 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
3488 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
3489 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
3491 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
3492 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
3493 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
3495 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
3496 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
3497 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
3498 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
3499 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
3502 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
3503 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
3505 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
3506 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
3507 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
3508 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
3510 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
3511 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
3512 successful and the output is easier to parse.
3514 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
3515 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
3516 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
3517 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
3519 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
3520 and sticky) with the -m option.
3522 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
3523 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
3524 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
3525 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
3526 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
3528 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
3529 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
3531 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
3535 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
3536 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
3537 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
3538 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
3540 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
3542 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
3544 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
3545 silently ignoring one of them.
3547 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
3548 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
3549 containing this change was 5.92.
3551 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
3552 automatically newline terminated.
3554 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
3555 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
3556 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
3557 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
3560 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
3561 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3562 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
3565 ** Scheduled for removal
3567 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
3568 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
3570 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
3571 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
3572 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
3573 command to unlink a directory.
3575 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
3576 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
3577 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
3578 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
3582 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
3583 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
3584 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
3585 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
3586 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
3587 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
3591 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
3592 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
3594 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
3596 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
3597 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
3598 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
3600 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
3601 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
3604 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
3605 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
3607 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
3608 list directories before files.
3610 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
3611 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
3612 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
3613 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
3616 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
3618 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
3620 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
3621 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
3622 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
3624 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3625 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3629 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
3630 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
3631 usually printing nothing.
3633 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
3635 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
3636 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
3637 them with hard-linked directories.
3639 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
3640 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
3641 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
3643 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
3644 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
3645 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
3647 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
3650 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
3651 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
3653 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
3654 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
3656 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
3657 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
3659 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
3660 all command-line arguments.
3662 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
3664 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
3666 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
3667 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
3669 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
3671 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
3672 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
3673 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
3674 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
3675 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
3677 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
3678 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
3680 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
3681 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
3682 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
3683 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
3685 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
3687 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
3691 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
3692 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
3694 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
3695 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
3697 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
3698 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
3700 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
3701 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
3703 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
3704 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
3706 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
3708 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
3709 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
3710 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
3713 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
3715 ** Build-related bug fixes
3717 installing .mo files would fail
3720 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
3724 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
3726 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
3729 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
3733 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
3734 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
3738 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
3740 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
3741 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
3743 ** Deprecated options
3745 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
3746 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
3748 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
3752 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
3754 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
3755 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
3756 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
3757 conforming to older POSIX versions.
3759 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
3762 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
3768 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
3773 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
3775 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
3777 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
3778 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
3779 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
3781 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
3782 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
3783 problematic usages. These include:
3785 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
3786 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
3787 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
3788 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
3789 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
3790 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
3791 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
3792 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
3793 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
3795 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
3796 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
3798 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
3799 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
3800 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
3801 Meeting <https://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
3803 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
3804 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
3805 between binary and text files.
3807 The following programs now always use text input/output:
3811 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
3815 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
3816 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
3818 head tac tail tee tr
3819 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
3821 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
3822 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
3824 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
3825 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
3826 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
3828 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
3830 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
3832 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
3833 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
3834 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
3838 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
3840 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
3841 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3843 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
3844 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
3845 blocks until F contains N blocks.
3849 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
3850 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
3854 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
3855 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
3856 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
3860 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
3861 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
3865 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
3867 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
3869 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
3873 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
3874 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
3875 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
3877 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
3878 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
3879 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6232>.
3880 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
3881 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6233>.
3883 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
3887 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
3888 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
3889 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
3891 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
3893 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
3894 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
3895 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
3896 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
3898 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
3900 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
3901 rather than silently wrapping around.
3903 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
3904 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
3906 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
3907 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
3909 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
3910 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
3911 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
3912 file /tmp/a/b/file".
3914 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
3916 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
3918 ** Improved robustness
3920 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
3921 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
3922 no matter how large the result.
3924 ** Improved portability
3926 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
3927 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
3929 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
3931 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
3932 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
3933 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
3935 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
3936 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
3940 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
3941 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
3943 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
3945 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
3946 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
3947 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
3948 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
3950 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
3951 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
3953 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
3954 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
3955 categories if not specified by dircolors.
3957 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
3959 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
3960 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
3962 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
3963 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
3965 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
3967 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
3968 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
3970 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
3971 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
3973 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
3974 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
3975 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
3977 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
3979 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
3981 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
3985 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
3987 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
3988 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
3989 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
3991 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
3992 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
3994 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
3995 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
3996 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
3998 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
3999 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
4001 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
4002 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
4003 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
4004 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
4006 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
4007 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
4009 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
4010 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
4011 the file system does not support it.
4013 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
4015 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
4016 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
4018 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
4020 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
4021 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
4023 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
4024 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
4025 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
4026 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
4028 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
4029 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
4032 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
4033 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
4034 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
4035 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
4037 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
4038 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
4039 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
4040 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
4042 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
4043 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
4045 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
4047 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
4048 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
4049 reporting incorrect results.
4053 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
4054 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
4056 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
4059 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
4061 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
4062 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
4064 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
4065 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
4067 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
4070 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
4071 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
4072 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
4073 the file name does not look like a page range.
4075 printf has several changes:
4077 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
4078 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
4080 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
4081 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
4082 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
4084 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
4085 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
4088 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
4089 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
4091 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
4092 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
4094 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
4096 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
4097 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
4099 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
4101 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
4103 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
4104 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
4105 when first encountering the directory.
4109 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
4110 output; POSIX requires this.
4112 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
4113 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
4115 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
4117 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
4118 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
4120 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
4121 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
4123 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
4124 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
4125 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
4126 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
4127 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
4128 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
4129 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
4131 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
4132 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
4133 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
4135 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
4136 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
4138 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
4140 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
4142 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
4143 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
4144 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
4145 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
4147 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
4151 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
4152 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
4153 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
4154 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
4155 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
4157 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
4158 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
4159 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
4161 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
4162 is longer than PATH_MAX.
4164 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
4165 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
4167 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
4168 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
4169 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
4170 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
4171 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
4173 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
4174 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
4176 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
4177 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
4179 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
4181 nocreat do not create the output file
4182 excl fail if the output file already exists
4183 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
4184 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
4186 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
4188 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
4189 direct use direct I/O for data
4190 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
4191 sync likewise, but also for metadata
4192 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
4193 nofollow do not follow symlinks
4194 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
4196 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
4198 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
4199 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
4202 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
4203 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
4204 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
4205 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
4206 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
4207 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
4209 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4210 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4212 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
4215 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
4217 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
4219 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
4220 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
4222 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
4223 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
4224 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
4226 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
4227 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
4228 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
4230 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
4232 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
4233 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
4235 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
4236 for compatibility with bash.
4238 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
4240 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
4241 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
4242 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
4243 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
4245 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
4246 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
4248 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
4249 ls supports TABSIZE.
4250 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
4251 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
4252 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
4254 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
4257 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
4259 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
4260 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
4261 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
4262 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
4263 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
4264 an offset, not as a file name.
4266 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
4267 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
4269 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
4270 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
4272 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
4273 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
4275 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
4276 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
4277 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
4279 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
4280 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
4282 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
4283 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
4287 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
4289 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
4291 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
4295 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
4296 or more arguments between partitions.
4298 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
4299 holes in the destination.
4301 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
4302 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
4303 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
4304 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
4305 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
4306 terminates immediately.
4308 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
4310 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
4312 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
4313 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
4314 not the empty string.
4316 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
4317 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
4321 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
4322 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
4323 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
4326 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
4333 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
4337 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
4338 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
4340 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
4341 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
4343 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
4344 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
4345 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
4348 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
4352 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
4353 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
4355 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
4356 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
4358 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
4359 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
4360 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
4362 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
4364 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
4367 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
4369 ** Configuration option
4371 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
4372 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
4376 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
4377 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
4381 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
4382 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
4383 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
4386 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
4387 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
4388 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
4389 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
4390 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
4391 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
4392 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4395 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
4399 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
4400 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
4401 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
4403 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
4404 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
4406 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
4408 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
4409 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
4410 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
4411 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
4413 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
4415 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
4416 not just the ones that reference directories
4418 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
4419 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
4421 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
4422 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
4423 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
4425 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
4426 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
4427 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
4428 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
4429 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
4430 ragged when a datum was too wide.
4432 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
4437 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
4438 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
4440 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
4442 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
4444 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
4446 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
4447 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
4449 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
4450 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
4452 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
4454 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
4458 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
4460 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
4462 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
4463 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
4464 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
4465 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
4466 resolution is the best we can do right now.
4468 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
4469 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
4471 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
4472 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
4474 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
4475 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
4477 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
4478 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
4479 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
4483 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
4484 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
4485 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
4486 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
4487 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
4488 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
4489 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
4490 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
4491 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
4492 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
4493 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
4494 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
4495 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
4496 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
4498 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
4500 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
4501 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
4503 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
4505 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
4507 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
4508 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
4510 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
4512 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
4513 without a trailing newline.
4515 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
4516 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
4518 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
4521 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
4525 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
4527 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
4529 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
4530 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
4531 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
4532 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
4534 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
4536 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
4537 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
4538 be printed without leading spaces.
4540 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
4541 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
4546 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
4547 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
4548 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
4550 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
4552 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
4553 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
4555 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
4556 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
4558 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
4559 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
4561 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
4563 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
4565 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
4567 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
4568 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
4570 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
4572 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
4574 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
4575 byte offsets are specified.
4578 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
4581 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
4584 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
4585 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
4586 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
4587 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
4588 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
4589 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
4590 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
4591 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
4592 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
4593 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
4594 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
4595 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
4596 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
4597 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
4598 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
4599 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
4600 directory where M has write access.
4601 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
4602 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
4603 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
4606 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
4607 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
4608 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
4609 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
4610 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
4611 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
4612 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
4613 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
4614 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
4615 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
4616 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
4617 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
4618 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
4619 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
4620 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
4621 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
4622 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
4623 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
4624 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
4625 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
4626 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
4627 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
4628 appeared one additional time.
4630 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
4631 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
4632 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
4633 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
4636 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
4637 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
4638 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
4639 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
4640 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
4641 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
4642 if there were more than 338.
4644 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
4645 - false --help now exits nonzero
4648 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
4649 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
4650 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
4651 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
4654 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
4655 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
4656 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
4657 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
4658 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
4661 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
4662 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
4663 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
4664 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
4665 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
4666 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
4667 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
4670 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
4671 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
4672 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
4673 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
4674 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
4675 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
4677 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4678 under certain unusual conditions
4679 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
4680 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
4683 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
4684 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
4685 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
4686 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
4687 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
4688 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
4689 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
4690 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
4691 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
4692 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
4693 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
4694 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
4695 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
4696 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
4697 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
4698 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
4701 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
4702 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
4705 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
4706 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
4707 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
4708 involving hard-linked directories
4709 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
4710 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
4711 character-special and block files
4714 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
4715 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
4716 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
4717 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
4718 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
4719 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
4720 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
4721 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
4722 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
4724 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
4725 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
4726 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
4727 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
4728 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
4729 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
4730 specified on the command line.
4731 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
4732 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
4733 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
4734 the first file untouched.
4735 * readlink: new program
4736 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
4737 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
4738 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
4739 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
4740 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
4741 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
4744 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
4745 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
4746 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
4747 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
4748 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
4749 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
4750 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
4751 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
4752 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
4753 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
4754 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
4755 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
4757 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
4758 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
4759 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
4761 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
4762 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
4763 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
4764 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
4765 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
4766 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
4767 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
4768 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
4771 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
4772 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
4775 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
4776 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
4777 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
4778 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
4779 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
4780 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
4781 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
4784 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
4785 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
4787 ========================================================================
4788 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
4789 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4792 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
4794 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4795 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
4796 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
4797 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
4798 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
4799 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
4800 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
4801 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
4802 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
4803 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
4804 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
4805 The old options will continue to work for a while.
4807 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
4808 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
4809 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
4810 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
4812 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
4815 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
4817 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
4818 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
4819 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
4820 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
4821 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
4822 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
4823 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
4826 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
4827 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
4828 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
4829 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
4830 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
4831 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
4832 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
4833 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
4834 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
4835 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
4836 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
4837 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
4838 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
4839 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
4840 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
4841 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
4843 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
4844 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
4846 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
4847 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
4848 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
4849 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
4850 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
4851 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
4853 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
4854 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
4855 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
4856 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
4857 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
4858 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
4859 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
4861 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
4862 the source files in the following example:
4863 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
4864 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
4865 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
4866 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
4867 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
4868 links between source files with --preserve=links
4869 * cp accepts new options:
4870 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
4871 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
4872 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
4873 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
4874 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
4875 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
4876 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
4877 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
4878 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
4880 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
4881 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
4882 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
4883 even though it's older than dest.
4884 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
4885 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
4886 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
4887 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
4888 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
4890 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
4891 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
4892 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
4893 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
4894 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
4895 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
4896 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
4898 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
4899 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
4900 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
4902 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
4903 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
4904 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
4905 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
4906 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
4907 This is the default.
4909 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
4910 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
4911 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
4912 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
4913 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
4915 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
4918 ========================================================================
4919 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
4920 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4923 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
4924 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
4926 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4927 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
4928 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
4929 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
4930 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
4932 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
4933 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
4934 that specifies a non-directory
4937 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
4938 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
4939 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
4940 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
4941 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4942 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
4943 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
4944 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4945 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
4946 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
4947 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
4948 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
4949 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
4950 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
4951 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
4952 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
4953 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
4954 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
4955 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
4956 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
4957 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
4958 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
4959 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
4960 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
4962 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
4963 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
4964 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
4966 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
4968 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
4969 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
4971 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
4972 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
4973 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
4974 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
4975 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
4977 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
4978 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
4979 required support; from Bruno Haible.
4980 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
4981 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
4983 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
4985 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
4986 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
4987 * still more portability fixes
4988 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
4989 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4991 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
4993 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
4995 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
4997 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
4998 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
4999 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
5000 there is any time remaining
5001 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
5003 ========================================================================
5004 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5005 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
5007 This package began as the union of the following:
5008 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
5010 ========================================================================
5012 Copyright (C) 2001-2019 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5014 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
5015 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
5016 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
5017 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
5018 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
5019 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.