1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
8 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
9 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
11 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
12 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
13 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
14 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
16 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
17 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
18 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
20 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
21 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
23 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
25 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
26 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
27 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
29 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
30 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
31 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
33 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
34 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
35 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
36 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
38 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
39 from the source, when copying across file systems.
40 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
42 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
43 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
44 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
46 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
47 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
49 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
50 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
51 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
52 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
54 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
55 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
56 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
58 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
59 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
60 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
64 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
65 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
66 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
68 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
69 used to identify the split points.
71 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
72 command line argument through to the output.
74 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
77 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
78 a NUL instead of a white space character.
80 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
81 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with -Z set the SMACK context where available.
83 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
85 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
86 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
87 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
89 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
90 unique groups with empty lines.
92 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
93 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
95 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
98 ** Changes in behavior
100 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
101 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
102 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
103 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
105 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
106 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
108 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
109 not just the transfer counts.
111 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
113 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
114 as per the documented interface.
118 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
120 md5sum uses libcrypto hash routines where available to potentially
121 get better performance through using more system specific code.
122 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
123 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
125 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, SNFS and UBIFS.
126 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses
127 inotify for files on those file systems, rather than the default (for unknown
128 file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
130 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
131 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
132 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
134 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
135 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
137 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
138 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
140 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
144 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
147 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
151 numfmt: reformat numbers
155 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
156 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
157 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
159 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
160 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
161 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
165 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
166 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
168 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
169 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
170 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
172 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
173 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
174 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
176 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
177 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
178 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
180 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
181 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
182 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
184 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
185 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
186 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
188 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
189 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
191 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
192 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
194 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
195 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
196 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
198 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
199 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
200 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
202 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
203 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
204 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
206 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
207 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
208 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
209 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
211 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
212 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
213 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
215 ** Changes in behavior
217 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
218 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
219 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
220 'total' in the target column.
222 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
223 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
224 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
226 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
227 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
231 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
232 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
234 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
235 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
237 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
241 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
242 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
243 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
244 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
245 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
246 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
247 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
248 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
249 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
250 for a patched distribution package.
252 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
253 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
255 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
256 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
257 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
258 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
261 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
265 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
267 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
268 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
269 sha384sum and sha512sum.
273 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
274 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
275 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
276 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
277 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
279 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
280 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
282 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
283 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
284 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
285 eventually exits nonzero.
287 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
288 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
289 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
290 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
291 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
293 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
294 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
295 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
297 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
298 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
299 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
301 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
302 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
303 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
305 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
306 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
307 Before, this would infloop:
308 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
309 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
311 ** Changes in behavior
313 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
317 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
318 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
319 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
320 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
321 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
324 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
325 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
326 format-changing options.
328 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
329 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
330 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
331 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
332 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
336 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
337 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
338 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
339 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
340 are run without following the instructions in README.
342 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
343 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
344 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
345 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
346 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
347 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
348 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
351 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
355 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
356 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
357 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
358 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
360 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
361 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
362 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
363 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
365 sort -u could read freed memory.
366 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
367 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
368 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
372 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
373 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
374 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
375 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
378 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
382 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
383 processes will not intersperse their output.
384 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
386 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
387 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
388 date: invalid date '\260'
389 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
391 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
392 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
393 lines output by df, can work reliably.
394 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
396 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
397 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
398 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
400 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
401 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
402 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
403 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
404 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
405 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
407 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
408 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
410 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
411 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
413 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
414 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
415 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
417 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
418 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
419 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
423 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
425 ** Changes in behavior
427 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
428 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
429 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
430 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
431 have any reason to include it here.
435 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
436 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
437 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
439 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
440 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
441 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
444 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
448 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
449 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
450 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
451 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
452 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
453 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
455 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
456 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
457 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
458 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
459 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
460 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
461 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
463 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
464 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
466 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
467 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
471 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
472 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
474 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
476 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
478 ** Changes in behavior
480 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
481 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
482 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
484 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
485 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
488 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
492 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
493 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
494 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
495 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
496 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
497 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
498 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
499 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
501 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
502 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
503 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
504 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
505 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
507 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
508 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
510 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
511 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
513 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
514 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
516 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
517 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
519 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
520 additional static suffix to output file names.
522 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
523 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
524 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
526 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
527 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
531 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
532 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
533 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
535 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
536 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
537 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
538 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
539 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
540 typically still point to one of the hard links.
542 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
543 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
544 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
545 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
546 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
548 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
549 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
550 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
551 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
555 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
556 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
557 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
559 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
560 instead of causing a usage failure.
562 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
565 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
569 realpath: print resolved file names.
573 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
574 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
576 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
577 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
579 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
580 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
581 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
582 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
583 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
584 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
586 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
587 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
588 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
590 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
591 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
592 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
594 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
595 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
596 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
597 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
598 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
600 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
602 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
603 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
605 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
606 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
607 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
609 ** Changes in behavior
611 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
612 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
613 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
614 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
615 usually-short referent instead.
617 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
618 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
619 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
620 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
623 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
627 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
628 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
629 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
631 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
632 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
634 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
635 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
639 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
640 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
642 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
643 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
644 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
645 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
647 ** Changes in behavior
649 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
650 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
651 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
655 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
656 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
657 only .tar.xz files is enough.
660 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
664 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
665 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
666 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
668 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
669 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
671 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
672 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
673 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
674 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
675 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
677 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
678 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
679 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
680 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
681 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
682 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
683 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
684 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
686 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
687 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
689 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
690 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
692 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
693 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
695 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
696 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
697 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
699 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
700 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
701 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
702 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
704 ** Changes in behavior
706 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
707 when -v or -c specified.
709 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
710 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
714 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
715 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
716 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
717 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
718 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
720 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
721 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
722 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
724 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
725 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
726 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
727 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
728 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
729 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
730 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
732 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
733 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
734 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
738 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
739 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
741 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
744 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
745 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
747 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
748 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
750 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
751 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
753 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
755 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
759 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
760 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
762 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
765 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
769 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
770 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
772 ** Changes in behavior
774 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
775 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
776 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
777 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
778 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
779 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
781 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
782 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
783 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
787 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
790 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
794 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
795 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
796 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
798 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
799 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
800 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
802 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
803 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
804 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
806 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
807 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
809 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
810 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
812 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
813 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
815 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
816 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
820 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
821 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
822 processed portion thereof.
824 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
825 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
827 ** Changes in behavior
829 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
830 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
831 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
833 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
834 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
835 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
837 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
838 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
840 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
841 Use --preserve-context instead.
843 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
846 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
850 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
851 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
852 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
853 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
854 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
856 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
857 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
859 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
860 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
861 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
863 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
864 reject file names invalid for that file system.
866 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
867 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
871 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
872 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
873 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
874 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
875 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
876 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
877 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
878 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
880 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
881 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
882 the same number of fields are output for each line.
884 ** Changes in behavior
886 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
887 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
888 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
891 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
895 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
896 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
897 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
900 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
904 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
905 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
907 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
908 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
910 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
911 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
913 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
914 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
915 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
916 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
918 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
919 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
921 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
922 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
923 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
925 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
927 ** Changes in behavior
929 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
930 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
931 to the number of available processors.
935 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
938 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
942 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
943 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
944 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
945 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
947 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
948 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
949 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
951 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
952 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
954 ** Changes in behavior
956 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
957 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
959 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
960 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
961 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
962 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
963 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
964 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
966 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
967 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
968 the same way as the others.
970 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
971 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
974 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
978 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
979 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
980 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
982 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
983 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
985 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
986 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
987 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
989 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
990 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
992 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
993 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
995 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
996 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
997 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
999 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
1000 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
1001 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
1002 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
1006 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
1007 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
1009 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
1012 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
1013 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
1015 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
1017 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
1018 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
1019 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
1021 ** Changes in behavior
1023 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
1024 rather than its aliased target.
1026 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
1027 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
1028 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
1030 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
1031 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
1032 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
1033 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
1034 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
1035 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
1036 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
1037 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
1039 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
1041 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
1043 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
1044 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
1047 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
1048 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
1049 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
1050 control like taskset for example.
1052 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
1054 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
1055 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
1056 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
1057 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
1058 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
1059 includes %C when context information is available.
1061 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
1062 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
1063 rather than a file system attribute.
1065 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
1066 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
1067 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
1068 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
1070 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
1071 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
1072 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
1074 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
1075 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
1076 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
1079 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
1083 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
1084 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
1086 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
1088 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
1089 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1091 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
1092 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
1093 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
1094 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
1096 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
1097 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
1098 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1102 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
1103 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
1105 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
1106 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
1107 duration after the initial signal was sent.
1109 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
1110 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
1111 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
1112 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
1113 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
1114 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
1115 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
1116 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
1117 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
1119 ** Changes in behavior
1121 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
1122 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1124 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1125 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1128 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1132 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1133 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1134 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1135 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1139 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1140 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1142 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1143 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1144 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1145 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1147 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1148 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1149 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1152 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1156 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1157 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1158 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1160 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1161 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1162 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1164 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1165 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1167 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1168 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1169 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1170 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1172 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1173 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1174 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1176 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1177 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1178 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1179 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1181 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1182 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1183 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1185 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1186 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1187 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1188 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1190 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1191 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1192 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1194 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1195 processes will not intersperse their output.
1196 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1199 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1203 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1204 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1206 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1207 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1209 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1210 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1211 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1212 the presence of the empty string argument.
1213 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1215 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1216 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1217 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1218 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1220 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1221 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1223 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1224 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1225 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1227 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1228 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1229 and with a malicious user on the same system
1230 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1231 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1234 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1238 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1239 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1240 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1242 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1243 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1244 offending directory and all "contents."
1246 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1247 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1248 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1250 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1251 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1252 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1254 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1255 processes will not intersperse their output.
1256 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1257 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1259 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1260 output the name of the file to stdout.
1261 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1263 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1264 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1265 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1267 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1268 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1271 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1272 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1273 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1275 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1276 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1277 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1278 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1279 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1280 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1282 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1283 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1284 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1285 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1287 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1288 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1290 ** Changes in behavior
1292 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1293 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1294 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1295 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1296 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1298 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1299 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1300 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1301 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1303 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1305 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1306 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1307 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1308 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1309 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1313 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1317 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1318 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1320 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1321 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1323 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1324 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1325 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1327 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1328 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1331 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1335 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1336 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1337 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1339 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1340 to accommodate leap seconds.
1341 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1343 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1344 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1345 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1347 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1349 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1350 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1351 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1353 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1354 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1355 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1356 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1357 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1361 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1362 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1363 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1364 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1366 ** Changes in behavior
1368 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1369 environment variable is set.
1371 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1372 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1373 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1377 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1378 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1379 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1380 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1382 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1383 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1384 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1385 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1389 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1390 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1391 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1393 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1394 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1395 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1396 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1397 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1398 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1399 another improvement:
1401 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1402 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1405 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1409 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1410 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1411 and libraries tested at configure time.
1412 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1414 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1415 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1417 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1418 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1420 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1421 printing a summary to stderr.
1422 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1424 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1425 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1426 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1428 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1429 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1431 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1432 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1433 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1434 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1436 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1437 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1438 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1439 which is relatively unusual.
1440 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1442 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1443 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1444 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1445 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1446 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1447 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1448 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1452 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1453 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1454 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1455 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1456 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1460 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1461 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1463 ** Changes in behavior
1465 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1466 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1467 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1468 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1469 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1472 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1476 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1477 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1479 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1480 before data copying has started.
1482 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1483 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1485 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1486 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1487 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1488 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1490 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1491 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1492 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1493 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1495 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1500 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1501 for its standard streams.
1503 ** Changes in behavior
1505 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1506 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1507 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1508 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1509 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1510 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1512 ** Deprecated options
1514 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1515 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1519 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1521 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1522 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1523 a btrfs file system.
1525 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1527 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1528 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1530 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1531 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1534 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1538 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1539 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1540 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1541 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1543 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1544 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1545 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1546 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1547 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1552 make check: two tests have been corrected
1556 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1557 inherited from gnulib.
1560 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1564 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1565 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1566 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1567 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1569 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1570 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1572 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1574 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1575 systems without xattr support.
1577 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1578 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1579 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1581 ** Changes in behavior
1583 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1584 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1585 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1586 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1588 ** Improved robustness
1590 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1591 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1592 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1593 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1594 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1595 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1596 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1597 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1598 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1602 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1603 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1605 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1606 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1607 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1608 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1609 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1612 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1616 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1617 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1618 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1622 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1623 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1624 data was read, or on process exit.
1625 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1627 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1628 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1629 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1630 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1632 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1633 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1634 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1635 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1637 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1638 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1640 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1641 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1643 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1644 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1645 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1647 ** Changes in behavior
1649 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1650 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1651 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1653 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1654 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1656 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1657 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1658 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1661 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1665 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1667 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1668 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1669 install: Never copies xattrs
1671 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1672 from overwriting any existing destination file
1674 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1675 mode where this feature is available.
1677 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1678 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1679 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1680 do not modify the destination at all.
1682 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1684 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1688 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1689 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1691 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1693 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1694 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1696 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1697 processing the first file name
1699 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1700 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1701 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1702 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1704 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1705 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1707 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1708 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1711 ** Changes in behavior
1713 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1714 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1716 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1717 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1718 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1720 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1721 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1723 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1725 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1726 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1727 is still marked with a '+'.
1730 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1734 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1735 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1739 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1740 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1741 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1742 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1743 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1744 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1746 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1747 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1749 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1750 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1752 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1754 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1755 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1756 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1758 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1759 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1761 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1762 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1763 used to factor large numbers.
1765 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1768 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1770 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1772 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1773 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1775 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1776 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1777 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1778 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1780 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1781 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1782 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1784 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1785 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1789 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1791 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1792 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1794 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1795 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1797 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1799 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1800 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1804 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1805 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1806 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1808 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1810 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1811 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1812 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1814 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1815 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1816 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1818 ** Changes in behavior
1820 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1821 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1824 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1828 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1829 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1830 'futimens' system calls.
1834 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1836 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1837 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1838 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1840 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1841 with no USERNAME argument.
1843 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1844 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1845 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1847 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1848 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1849 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1850 number of fields for some inputs.
1852 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1853 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1855 ** Changes in behavior
1857 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1858 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1861 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1865 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1867 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1868 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1869 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1870 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1872 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1873 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1875 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1876 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1878 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1879 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1881 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1882 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1883 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1884 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1886 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1887 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1888 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1889 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1890 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1891 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1893 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1894 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1896 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1897 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1898 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1900 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1901 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1903 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1904 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1906 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1907 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1908 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1909 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1911 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1912 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1914 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1915 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1917 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1918 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1919 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1923 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1924 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1926 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1927 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1928 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1929 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1933 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1934 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1936 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1938 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1942 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1943 which have negative errno values.
1947 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1951 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1955 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1956 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1959 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1963 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1964 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1965 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1967 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1968 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1969 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1970 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1974 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1975 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1976 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1977 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1980 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1984 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1986 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1987 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1988 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1991 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1995 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1996 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1998 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
2000 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
2002 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
2004 ** Programs no longer installed by default
2008 ** Changes in behavior
2010 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
2011 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
2013 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
2014 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
2016 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
2017 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
2018 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
2022 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
2023 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
2024 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
2025 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
2026 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
2027 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
2028 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
2029 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
2030 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
2031 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
2032 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
2034 The following commands and options now support the standard size
2035 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
2036 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
2039 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
2042 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
2043 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
2044 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
2046 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
2047 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
2048 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
2051 ** New build options
2053 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
2054 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
2055 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
2056 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
2058 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
2059 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
2060 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
2061 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
2062 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
2063 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
2064 of "make check" fail.
2066 ** Remove deprecated options
2068 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2069 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
2070 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2071 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
2072 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
2074 ** Improved robustness
2076 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
2077 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
2078 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
2079 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
2080 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
2081 loss of the contents of a/f.
2083 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
2084 in its 35-colon command-line argument
2088 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
2089 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
2090 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2092 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
2093 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
2094 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
2095 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2097 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
2098 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
2099 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
2100 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
2101 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
2102 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
2103 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
2104 destination is a symlink.
2106 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
2108 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
2109 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
2111 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
2112 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
2114 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
2116 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
2117 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
2119 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
2120 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
2122 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2125 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2126 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2128 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2129 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2131 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2132 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2133 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2134 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2136 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2137 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2138 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2140 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2141 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2142 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2144 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2145 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2146 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2147 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2149 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2150 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2151 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2153 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2154 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2156 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2157 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2159 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2161 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2162 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2163 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2165 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2166 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2168 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2169 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2171 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2172 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2174 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2175 [present in the original version]
2178 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2182 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2184 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2185 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2186 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2188 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2189 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2191 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2195 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2196 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2198 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2199 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2201 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2202 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2204 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2205 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2206 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2207 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2208 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2209 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2211 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2212 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2215 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2216 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2218 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2221 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2222 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2223 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2225 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2226 directory is unreadable.
2228 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2229 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2230 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2232 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2233 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2234 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2235 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2236 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2239 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2240 Before it would print nothing.
2242 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2244 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2245 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2246 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2247 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2248 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2249 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2250 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2251 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2253 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2257 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2258 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2259 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2261 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2262 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2263 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2264 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2267 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2271 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2272 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2273 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2274 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2275 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2276 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2277 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2279 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2280 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2281 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2282 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2283 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2284 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2285 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2286 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2288 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2289 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2290 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2293 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2297 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2298 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2300 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2301 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2302 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2304 ** Improved robustness
2306 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2307 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2308 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2311 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2315 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2316 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2317 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2318 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2319 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2321 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2325 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2328 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2332 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2333 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2334 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2335 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2337 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2338 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2340 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2341 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2342 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2345 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2347 ** Improved robustness
2349 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2350 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2352 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2353 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2354 or NFS-mounted partition.
2356 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2357 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2361 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2362 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2363 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2364 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2365 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2366 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2368 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2369 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2371 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2372 or neglect to report file removal.
2374 For the "groups" command:
2376 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2377 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2379 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2381 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2383 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2387 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2388 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2391 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2393 ** Changes in behavior
2395 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2396 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2397 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2398 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2400 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2401 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2402 a final './' or '../' component.
2404 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2405 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2406 this only for pipes.
2408 ** Infrastructure changes
2410 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2411 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2412 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2413 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2417 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2418 name is "." or "..".
2420 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2421 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2422 dirent.d_type support.
2424 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2425 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2427 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2428 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2429 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2430 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2433 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2435 ** Changes in behavior
2437 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2441 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2442 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2446 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2447 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2448 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2450 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2451 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2453 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2454 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2456 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2458 ** Improved robustness
2460 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2461 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2462 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2464 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2465 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2468 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2469 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2471 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2472 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2474 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2475 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2477 ** Changes in behavior
2479 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2480 where the two are distinct.
2482 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2483 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2484 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2485 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2486 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2487 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2488 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2489 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2490 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2491 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2492 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2493 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2494 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2495 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2496 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2497 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2498 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2500 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2501 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2502 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2504 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2505 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2506 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2507 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2510 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2511 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2515 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2516 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2517 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2518 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2520 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2521 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2522 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2524 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2525 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2526 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2527 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2528 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2531 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2532 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2534 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2535 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2536 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2537 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2539 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2540 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2541 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2543 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2544 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2545 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2546 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2548 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2549 and sticky) with the -m option.
2551 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2552 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2553 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2554 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2555 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2557 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2558 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2560 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2564 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2565 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2566 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2567 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2569 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2571 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2573 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2574 silently ignoring one of them.
2576 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2577 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2578 containing this change was 5.92.
2580 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2581 automatically newline terminated.
2583 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2584 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2585 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2586 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2589 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2590 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2591 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2594 ** Scheduled for removal
2596 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2597 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2599 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2600 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2601 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2602 command to unlink a directory.
2604 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2605 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2606 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2607 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2611 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2612 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2613 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2614 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2615 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2616 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2620 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2621 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2623 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2625 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2626 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2627 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2629 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2630 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2633 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2634 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2636 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2637 list directories before files.
2639 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2640 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2641 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2642 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2645 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2647 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2649 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2650 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2651 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2653 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2654 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2658 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2659 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2660 usually printing nothing.
2662 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2664 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2665 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2666 them with hard-linked directories.
2668 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2669 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2670 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2672 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2673 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2674 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2676 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2679 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2680 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2682 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2683 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2685 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2686 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2688 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2689 all command-line arguments.
2691 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2693 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2695 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2696 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2698 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2700 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2701 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2702 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2703 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2704 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2706 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2707 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2709 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2710 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2711 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2712 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2714 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2716 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2720 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2721 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2723 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2724 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2726 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2727 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2729 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2730 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2732 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2733 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2735 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2737 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2738 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2739 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2742 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2744 ** Build-related bug fixes
2746 installing .mo files would fail
2749 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2753 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2755 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2758 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2762 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2763 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2767 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2769 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2770 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2772 ** Deprecated options
2774 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2775 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2777 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2781 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2783 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2784 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2785 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2786 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2788 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2791 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2797 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2802 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2804 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2806 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2807 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2808 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2810 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2811 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2812 problematic usages. These include:
2814 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2815 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2816 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2817 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2818 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2819 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2820 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2821 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2822 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2824 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2825 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2827 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2828 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2829 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2830 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2832 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2833 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2834 between binary and text files.
2836 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2840 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2844 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2845 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2847 head tac tail tee tr
2848 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2850 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2851 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2853 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2854 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2855 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2857 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2859 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2861 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2862 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2863 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2867 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2869 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2870 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2872 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2873 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2874 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2878 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2879 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2883 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2884 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2885 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2889 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2890 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2894 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2896 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2898 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2902 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2903 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2904 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2906 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2907 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2908 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2909 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2910 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2912 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2916 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2917 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2918 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2920 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2922 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2923 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2924 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2925 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2927 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2929 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2930 rather than silently wrapping around.
2932 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2933 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2935 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2936 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2938 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2939 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2940 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2941 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2943 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2945 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2947 ** Improved robustness
2949 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2950 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2951 no matter how large the result.
2953 ** Improved portability
2955 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2956 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2958 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2960 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2961 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2962 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2964 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2965 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2969 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2970 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2972 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2974 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2975 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2976 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2977 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2979 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2980 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2982 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2983 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2984 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2986 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2988 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2989 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2991 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2992 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2994 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2996 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2997 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2999 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
3000 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
3002 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
3003 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
3004 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
3006 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
3008 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
3010 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
3014 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
3016 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
3017 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
3018 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
3020 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
3021 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
3023 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
3024 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
3025 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
3027 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
3028 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
3030 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
3031 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
3032 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
3033 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
3035 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
3036 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
3038 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
3039 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
3040 the file system does not support it.
3042 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
3044 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
3045 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
3047 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
3049 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
3050 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
3052 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
3053 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
3054 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
3055 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
3057 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
3058 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
3061 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
3062 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
3063 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
3064 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
3066 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
3067 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
3068 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
3069 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
3071 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
3072 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
3074 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
3076 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
3077 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
3078 reporting incorrect results.
3082 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
3083 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
3085 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
3088 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
3090 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
3091 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
3093 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
3094 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
3096 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
3099 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
3100 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
3101 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
3102 the file name does not look like a page range.
3104 printf has several changes:
3106 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
3107 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
3109 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
3110 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
3111 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
3113 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
3114 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
3117 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
3118 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
3120 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
3121 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
3123 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3125 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3126 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3128 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3130 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3132 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3133 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3134 when first encountering the directory.
3138 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3139 output; POSIX requires this.
3141 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3142 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3144 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3146 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3147 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3149 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3150 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3152 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3153 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3154 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3155 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3156 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3157 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3158 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3160 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3161 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3162 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3164 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3165 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3167 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3169 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3171 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3172 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3173 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3174 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3176 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3180 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3181 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3182 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3183 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3184 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3186 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3187 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3188 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3190 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3191 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3193 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3194 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3196 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3197 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
3198 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
3199 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3200 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
3202 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3203 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3205 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3206 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3208 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3210 nocreat do not create the output file
3211 excl fail if the output file already exists
3212 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3213 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3215 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3217 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3218 direct use direct I/O for data
3219 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3220 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3221 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3222 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3223 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3225 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3227 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3228 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3231 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3232 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3233 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3234 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3235 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3236 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3238 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3239 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3241 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3244 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3246 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3248 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3249 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3251 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3252 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3253 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3255 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3256 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3257 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3259 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3261 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3262 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3264 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3265 for compatibility with bash.
3267 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3269 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3270 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3271 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3272 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3274 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3275 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3277 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3278 ls supports TABSIZE.
3279 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3280 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3281 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3283 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3286 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3288 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3289 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3290 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3291 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3292 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3293 an offset, not as a file name.
3295 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3296 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3298 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3299 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3301 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3302 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3304 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3305 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3306 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3308 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3309 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3311 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3312 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3316 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3318 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3320 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3324 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3325 or more arguments between partitions.
3327 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3328 holes in the destination.
3330 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3331 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3332 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3333 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3334 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3335 terminates immediately.
3337 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3339 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3341 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3342 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3343 not the empty string.
3345 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3346 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3350 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3351 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3352 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3355 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3362 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3366 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3367 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3369 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3370 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3372 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3373 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3374 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3377 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3381 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3382 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3384 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3385 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3387 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3388 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3389 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3391 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3393 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3396 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3398 ** Configuration option
3400 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3401 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3405 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3406 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3410 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3411 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3412 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3415 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3416 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3417 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3418 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3419 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3420 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3421 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3424 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3428 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3429 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3430 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3432 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3433 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3435 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3437 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3438 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3439 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3440 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3442 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3444 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3445 not just the ones that reference directories
3447 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3448 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3450 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3451 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3452 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3454 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3455 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3456 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3457 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3458 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3459 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3461 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3466 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3467 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3469 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3471 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3473 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3475 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3476 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3478 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3479 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3481 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3483 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3487 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3489 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3491 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3492 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3493 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3494 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3495 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3497 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3498 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3500 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3501 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3503 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3504 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3506 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3507 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3508 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3512 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3513 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3514 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3515 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3516 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3517 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3518 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3519 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3520 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3521 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3522 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3523 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3524 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3525 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3527 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3529 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3530 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3532 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3534 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3536 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3537 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3539 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3541 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3542 without a trailing newline.
3544 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3545 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3547 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3550 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3554 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3556 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3558 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3559 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3560 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3561 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3563 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3565 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3566 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3567 be printed without leading spaces.
3569 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3570 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3575 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3576 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3577 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3579 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3581 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3582 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3584 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3585 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3587 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3588 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3590 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3592 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3594 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3596 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3597 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3599 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3601 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3603 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3604 byte offsets are specified.
3607 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3610 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3613 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3614 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3615 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3616 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3617 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3618 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3619 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3620 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3621 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3622 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3623 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3624 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3625 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3626 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3627 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3628 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3629 directory where M has write access.
3630 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3631 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3632 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3635 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3636 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3637 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3638 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3639 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3640 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3641 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3642 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3643 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3644 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3645 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3646 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3647 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3648 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3649 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3650 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3651 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3652 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3653 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3654 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3655 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3656 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3657 appeared one additional time.
3659 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3660 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3661 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3662 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3665 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3666 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3667 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3668 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3669 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3670 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3671 if there were more than 338.
3673 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3674 - false --help now exits nonzero
3677 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3678 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3679 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3680 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3683 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3684 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3685 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3686 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3687 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3690 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3691 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3692 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3693 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3694 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3695 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3696 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3699 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3700 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3701 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3702 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3703 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3704 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3706 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3707 under certain unusual conditions
3708 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3709 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3712 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3713 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3714 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3715 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3716 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3717 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3718 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3719 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3720 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3721 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3722 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3723 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3724 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3725 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3726 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3727 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3730 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3731 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3734 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3735 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3736 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3737 involving hard-linked directories
3738 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3739 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3740 character-special and block files
3743 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3744 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3745 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3746 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3747 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3748 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3749 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3750 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3751 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3753 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3754 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3755 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3756 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3757 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3758 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3759 specified on the command line.
3760 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3761 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3762 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3763 the first file untouched.
3764 * readlink: new program
3765 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3766 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3767 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3768 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3769 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3770 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3773 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3774 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3775 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3776 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3777 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3778 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3779 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3780 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3781 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3782 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3783 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3784 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3786 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3787 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3788 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3790 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3791 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3792 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3793 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3794 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3795 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3796 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3797 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3800 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3801 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3804 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3805 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3806 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3807 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3808 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3809 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3810 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3813 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3814 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3816 ========================================================================
3817 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3818 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3821 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3823 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3824 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3825 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3826 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3827 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3828 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3829 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3830 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3831 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3832 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3833 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3834 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3836 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3837 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3838 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3839 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3841 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3844 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3846 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3847 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3848 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3849 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3850 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3851 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3852 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3855 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3856 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3857 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3858 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3859 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3860 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3861 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3862 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3863 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3864 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3865 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3866 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3867 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3868 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3869 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3870 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3872 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3873 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3875 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3876 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3877 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3878 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3879 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3880 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3882 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3883 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3884 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3885 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3886 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3887 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3888 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3890 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3891 the source files in the following example:
3892 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3893 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3894 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3895 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3896 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3897 links between source files with --preserve=links
3898 * cp accepts new options:
3899 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3900 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3901 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3902 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3903 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3904 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3905 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3906 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3907 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3909 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3910 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3911 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3912 even though it's older than dest.
3913 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3914 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3915 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3916 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3917 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3919 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3920 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3921 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3922 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3923 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3924 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3925 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3927 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3928 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3929 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3931 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3932 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3933 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3934 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3935 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3936 This is the default.
3938 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3939 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3940 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3941 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3942 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3944 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3947 ========================================================================
3948 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3949 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3952 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3953 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3955 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3956 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3957 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3958 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3959 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3961 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3962 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3963 that specifies a non-directory
3966 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3967 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3968 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3969 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3970 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3971 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3972 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3973 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3974 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3975 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3976 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3977 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3978 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3979 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3980 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3981 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3982 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3983 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3984 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3985 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3986 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3987 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3988 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3989 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3991 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3992 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3993 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3995 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3997 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3998 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
4000 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
4001 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
4002 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
4003 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
4004 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
4006 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
4007 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
4008 required support; from Bruno Haible.
4009 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
4010 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
4012 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
4014 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
4015 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
4016 * still more portability fixes
4017 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
4018 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4020 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
4022 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
4024 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
4026 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
4027 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
4028 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
4029 there is any time remaining
4030 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
4032 ========================================================================
4033 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4034 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
4036 This package began as the union of the following:
4037 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
4039 ========================================================================
4041 Copyright (C) 2001-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4043 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
4044 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
4045 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
4046 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
4047 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
4048 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.