1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
8 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
9 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
11 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
12 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
13 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
15 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
16 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
17 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
19 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
20 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
22 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
23 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
25 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
26 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
28 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
29 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
33 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
34 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
35 processed portion thereof.
37 ** Changes in behavior
39 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
40 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
41 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
43 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
44 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
45 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
47 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
48 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
50 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
51 Use --preserve-context instead.
53 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
56 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
60 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
61 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
62 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
63 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
64 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
66 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
67 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
69 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
70 reject file names invalid for that file system.
72 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
73 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
77 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
78 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
79 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
80 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
81 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
82 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
83 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
84 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
86 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
87 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
88 the same number of fields are output for each line.
90 ** Changes in behavior
92 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
93 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
94 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
97 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
101 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
102 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
103 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
106 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
110 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
111 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
113 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
114 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
116 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
117 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
119 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
120 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
121 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
122 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
124 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
125 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
127 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
128 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
129 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
131 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
133 ** Changes in behavior
135 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
136 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
137 to the number of available processors.
141 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
144 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
148 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
149 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
150 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
151 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
153 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
154 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
155 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
157 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
158 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
160 ** Changes in behavior
162 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
163 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
165 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
166 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
167 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
168 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
169 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
170 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
172 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
173 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
174 the same way as the others.
177 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
181 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
182 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
183 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
185 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
186 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
188 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
189 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
190 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
192 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
193 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
195 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
196 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
198 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
199 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
200 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
202 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
203 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
204 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
205 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
209 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
210 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
212 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
215 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
216 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
218 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
220 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
221 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
222 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
224 ** Changes in behavior
226 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
227 rather than its aliased target.
229 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
230 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
231 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
233 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
234 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
235 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
236 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
237 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
238 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
239 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
240 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
242 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
244 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
246 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
247 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
250 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
251 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
252 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
253 control like taskset for example.
255 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
257 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
258 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
259 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
260 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
261 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
262 includes %C when context information is available.
264 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
265 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
266 rather than a file system attribute.
268 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
269 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
270 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
271 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
273 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
274 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
275 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
277 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
278 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
279 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
282 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
286 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
287 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
289 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
291 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
292 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
294 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
295 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
296 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
297 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
299 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
300 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
301 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
305 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
306 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
308 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
309 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
310 duration after the initial signal was sent.
312 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
313 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
314 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
315 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
316 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
317 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
318 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
319 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
320 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
322 ** Changes in behavior
324 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
325 sequence when it would be a no-op.
327 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
328 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
331 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
335 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
336 of available processors, which may not have been the case
337 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
338 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
342 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
343 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
345 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
346 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
347 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
348 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
350 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
351 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
352 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
355 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
359 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
360 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
361 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
363 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
364 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
365 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
367 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
368 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
370 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
371 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
372 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
373 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
375 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
376 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
377 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
379 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
380 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
381 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
382 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
384 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
385 renamed-aside and then recreated.
386 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
388 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
389 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
390 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
391 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
393 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
394 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
395 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
397 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
398 processes will not intersperse their output.
399 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
402 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
406 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
407 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
409 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
410 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
412 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
413 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
414 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
415 the presence of the empty string argument.
416 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
418 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
419 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
420 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
421 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
423 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
424 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
426 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
427 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
428 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
430 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
431 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
432 and with a malicious user on the same system
433 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
434 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
437 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
441 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
442 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
443 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
445 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
446 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
447 offending directory and all "contents."
449 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
450 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
451 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
453 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
454 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
455 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
457 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
458 processes will not intersperse their output.
459 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
460 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
462 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
463 output the name of the file to stdout.
464 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
466 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
467 call fails with errno == EACCES.
468 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
470 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
471 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
474 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
475 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
476 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
478 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
479 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
480 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
481 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
482 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
483 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
485 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
486 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
487 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
488 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
490 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
491 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
493 ** Changes in behavior
495 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
496 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
497 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
498 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
499 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
501 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
502 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
503 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
504 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
506 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
508 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
509 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
510 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
511 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
512 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
516 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
520 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
521 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
523 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
524 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
526 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
527 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
528 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
530 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
531 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
534 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
538 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
539 when the source file doesn't have write access.
540 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
542 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
543 to accommodate leap seconds.
544 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
546 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
547 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
548 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
550 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
552 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
553 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
554 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
556 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
557 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
558 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
559 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
560 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
564 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
565 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
566 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
567 directory or a symlink to a directory.
569 ** Changes in behavior
571 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
572 environment variable is set.
574 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
575 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
576 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
580 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
581 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
582 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
583 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
585 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
586 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
587 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
588 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
592 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
593 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
594 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
596 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
597 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
598 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
599 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
600 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
601 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
604 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
605 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
608 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
612 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
613 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
614 and libraries tested at configure time.
615 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
617 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
618 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
620 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
621 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
623 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
624 printing a summary to stderr.
625 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
627 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
628 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
629 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
631 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
632 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
634 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
635 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
636 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
637 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
639 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
640 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
641 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
642 which is relatively unusual.
643 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
645 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
646 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
647 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
648 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
649 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
650 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
651 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
655 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
656 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
657 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
658 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
659 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
663 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
664 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
666 ** Changes in behavior
668 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
669 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
670 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
671 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
672 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
675 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
679 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
680 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
682 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
683 before data copying has started.
685 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
686 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
688 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
689 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
690 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
691 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
693 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
694 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
695 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
696 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
698 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
703 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
704 for its standard streams.
706 ** Changes in behavior
708 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
709 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
710 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
711 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
712 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
713 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
715 ** Deprecated options
717 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
718 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
722 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
724 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
725 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
728 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
730 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
731 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
733 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
734 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
737 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
741 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
742 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
743 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
744 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
746 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
747 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
748 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
749 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
750 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
755 make check: two tests have been corrected
759 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
760 inherited from gnulib.
763 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
767 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
768 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
769 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
770 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
772 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
773 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
775 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
777 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
778 systems without xattr support.
780 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
781 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
782 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
784 ** Changes in behavior
786 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
787 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
788 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
789 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
791 ** Improved robustness
793 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
794 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
795 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
796 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
797 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
798 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
799 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
800 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
801 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
805 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
806 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
808 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
809 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
810 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
811 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
812 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
815 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
819 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
820 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
821 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
825 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
826 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
827 data was read, or on process exit.
828 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
830 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
831 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
832 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
833 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
835 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
836 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
837 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
838 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
840 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
841 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
843 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
844 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
846 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
847 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
848 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
850 ** Changes in behavior
852 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
853 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
854 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
856 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
857 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
859 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
860 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
861 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
864 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
868 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
870 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
871 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
872 install: Never copies xattrs
874 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
875 from overwriting any existing destination file
877 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
878 mode where this feature is available.
880 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
881 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
882 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
883 do not modify the destination at all.
885 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
887 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
891 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
892 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
894 cp uses much less memory in some situations
896 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
897 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
899 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
900 processing the first file name
902 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
903 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
904 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
905 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
907 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
908 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
910 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
911 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
914 ** Changes in behavior
916 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
917 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
919 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
920 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
921 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
923 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
924 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
926 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
928 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
929 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
930 is still marked with a '+'.
933 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
937 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
938 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
942 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
943 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
944 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
945 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
946 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
947 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
949 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
950 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
952 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
953 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
955 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
957 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
958 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
959 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
961 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
962 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
964 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
965 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
966 used to factor large numbers.
968 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
971 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
973 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
975 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
976 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
978 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
979 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
980 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
981 maximum command-line (argv) length.
983 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
984 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
985 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
987 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
988 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
992 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
994 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
995 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
997 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
998 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1000 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1002 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1003 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1007 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1008 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1009 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1011 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1013 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1014 no matter how many files are in a given directory
1016 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1017 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1018 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1020 ** Changes in behavior
1022 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1023 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1026 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1030 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1032 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1033 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1034 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1036 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1037 with no USERNAME argument.
1039 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1040 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1041 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1043 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1044 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1045 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1046 number of fields for some inputs.
1048 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1049 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1051 ** Changes in behavior
1053 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1054 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1057 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1061 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1063 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1064 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1065 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1066 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1068 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1069 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1071 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1072 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1074 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1075 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1077 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1078 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1079 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1080 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1082 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1083 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1084 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1085 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1086 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1087 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1089 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1090 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1092 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1093 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1094 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1096 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1097 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1099 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1100 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1102 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1103 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1104 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1105 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1107 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1108 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1110 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1111 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1113 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1114 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1115 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1119 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1120 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1122 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1123 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1124 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1125 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1129 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1130 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1132 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1134 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1138 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1139 which have negative errno values.
1143 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1147 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1151 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1152 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1155 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1159 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1160 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1161 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1163 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1164 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1165 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1166 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1170 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1171 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1172 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1173 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1176 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1180 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1182 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1183 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1184 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1187 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1191 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1192 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1194 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1196 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1198 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1200 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1204 ** Changes in behavior
1206 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1207 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1209 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1210 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1212 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1213 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1214 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1218 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1219 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1220 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1221 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1222 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1223 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1224 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1225 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1226 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1227 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1228 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1230 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1231 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1232 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1235 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1238 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1239 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1240 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1242 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1243 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1244 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1247 ** New build options
1249 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1250 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1251 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1252 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1254 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1255 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1256 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1257 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1258 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1259 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1260 of "make check" fail.
1262 ** Remove deprecated options
1264 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1265 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1266 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1267 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1268 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1270 ** Improved robustness
1272 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1273 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1274 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1275 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1276 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1277 loss of the contents of a/f.
1279 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1280 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1284 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1285 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1286 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1288 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1289 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1290 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1291 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1293 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1294 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1295 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1296 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1297 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1298 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1299 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1300 destination is a symlink.
1302 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1304 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1305 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1307 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1308 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1310 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1312 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1313 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1315 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1316 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1318 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1321 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1322 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1324 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1325 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1327 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1328 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1329 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1330 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1332 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1333 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1334 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1336 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1337 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1338 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1340 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1341 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1342 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1343 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1345 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1346 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1347 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1349 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1350 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1352 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1353 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1355 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1357 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1358 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1359 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1361 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1362 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1364 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1365 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1367 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1368 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1370 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1371 [present in the original version]
1374 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1378 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1380 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1381 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1382 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1384 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1385 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1387 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1391 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1392 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1394 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1395 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1397 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1398 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1400 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1401 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1402 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1403 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1404 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1405 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1407 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1408 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1411 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1412 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1414 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1417 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1418 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1419 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1421 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1422 directory is unreadable.
1424 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1425 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1426 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1428 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1429 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1430 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1431 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1432 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1435 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1436 Before it would print nothing.
1438 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1440 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1441 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1442 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1443 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1444 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1445 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1446 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1447 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1449 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1453 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1454 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1455 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1457 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1458 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1459 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1460 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1463 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1467 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1468 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1469 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1470 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1471 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1472 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1473 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1475 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1476 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1477 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1478 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1479 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1480 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1481 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1482 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1484 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1485 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1486 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1489 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1493 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1494 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1496 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1497 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1498 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1500 ** Improved robustness
1502 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1503 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1504 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1507 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1511 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1512 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1513 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1514 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1515 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1517 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1521 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1524 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1528 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1529 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1530 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1531 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1533 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1534 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1536 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1537 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1538 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1541 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1543 ** Improved robustness
1545 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1546 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1548 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1549 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1550 or NFS-mounted partition.
1552 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1553 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1557 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1558 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1559 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1560 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1561 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1562 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1564 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1565 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1567 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1568 or neglect to report file removal.
1570 For the "groups" command:
1572 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1573 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1575 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1577 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1579 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1583 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1584 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1587 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1589 ** Changes in behavior
1591 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1592 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1593 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1594 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1596 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1597 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1598 a final `./' or `../' component.
1600 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1601 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1602 this only for pipes.
1604 ** Infrastructure changes
1606 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1607 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1608 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1609 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1613 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1614 name is "." or "..".
1616 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1617 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1618 dirent.d_type support.
1620 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1621 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1623 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1624 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1625 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1626 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1629 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1631 ** Changes in behavior
1633 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1637 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1638 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1642 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1643 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1644 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1646 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1647 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1649 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1650 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1652 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1654 ** Improved robustness
1656 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1657 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1658 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1660 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1661 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1664 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1665 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1667 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1668 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1670 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1671 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1673 ** Changes in behavior
1675 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1676 where the two are distinct.
1678 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1679 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1680 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1681 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1682 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1683 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1684 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1685 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1686 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1687 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1688 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1689 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1690 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1691 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1692 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1693 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1694 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1696 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1697 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1698 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1700 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1701 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1702 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1703 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1706 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1707 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1711 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1712 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1713 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1714 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1716 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1717 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1718 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1720 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1721 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1722 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1723 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1724 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1727 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1728 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1730 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1731 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1732 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1733 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1735 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1736 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1737 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1739 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1740 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1741 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1742 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1744 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1745 and sticky) with the -m option.
1747 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1748 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1749 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1750 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1751 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1753 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1754 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1756 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1760 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1761 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1762 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1763 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1765 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1767 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1769 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1770 silently ignoring one of them.
1772 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1773 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1774 containing this change was 5.92.
1776 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1777 automatically newline terminated.
1779 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1780 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1781 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1782 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1785 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1786 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1787 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1790 ** Scheduled for removal
1792 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1793 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1795 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1796 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1797 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1798 command to unlink a directory.
1800 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1801 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1802 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1803 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1807 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1808 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1809 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1810 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1811 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1812 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1816 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1817 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1819 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1821 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1822 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1823 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1825 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1826 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1829 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1830 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1832 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1833 list directories before files.
1835 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1836 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1837 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1838 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1841 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1843 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1845 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1846 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1847 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1849 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1850 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1854 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1855 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1856 usually printing nothing.
1858 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1860 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1861 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1862 them with hard-linked directories.
1864 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1865 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1866 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1868 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1869 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1870 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1872 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1875 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1876 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1878 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1879 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1881 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1882 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1884 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1885 all command-line arguments.
1887 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1889 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1891 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1892 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1894 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1896 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1897 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1898 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1899 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1900 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1902 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1903 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1905 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1906 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1907 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1908 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1910 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1912 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1916 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1917 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1919 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1920 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1922 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1923 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1925 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1926 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1928 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1929 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1931 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1933 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1934 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1935 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1938 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1940 ** Build-related bug fixes
1942 installing .mo files would fail
1945 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1949 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1951 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1954 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1958 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1959 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1963 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1965 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1966 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1968 ** Deprecated options
1970 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1971 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1973 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1977 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1979 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1980 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1981 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1982 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1984 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1987 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1993 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1998 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2000 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2002 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2003 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
2004 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
2006 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2007 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2008 problematic usages. These include:
2010 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2011 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2012 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2013 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2014 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2015 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2016 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2017 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2018 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2020 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2021 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2023 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2024 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2025 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2026 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2028 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2029 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2030 between binary and text files.
2032 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2036 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2040 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2041 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2043 head tac tail tee tr
2044 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2046 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2047 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2049 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2050 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2051 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2053 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2055 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2057 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2058 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2059 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2063 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2065 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2066 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2068 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2069 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2070 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2074 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2075 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2079 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2080 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2081 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2085 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2086 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2090 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2092 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2094 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2098 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2099 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2100 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2102 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2103 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2104 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2105 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2106 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2108 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2112 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2113 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2114 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2116 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2118 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2119 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2120 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2121 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2123 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2125 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2126 rather than silently wrapping around.
2128 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2129 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2131 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2132 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2134 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
2135 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2136 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2137 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2139 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2141 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2143 ** Improved robustness
2145 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2146 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2147 no matter how large the result.
2149 ** Improved portability
2151 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2152 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2154 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2156 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2157 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2158 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2160 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2161 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2165 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2166 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2168 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2170 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2171 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2172 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2173 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2175 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2176 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2178 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2179 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2180 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2182 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2184 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2185 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2187 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2188 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2190 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2192 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2193 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2195 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2196 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2198 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2199 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2200 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2202 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2204 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2206 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2210 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2212 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2213 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2214 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2216 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2217 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2219 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2220 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2221 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2223 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2224 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2226 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2227 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2228 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2229 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2231 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2232 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2234 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2235 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2236 the file system does not support it.
2238 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2240 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2241 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2243 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2245 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2246 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2248 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2249 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2250 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2251 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2253 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2254 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2257 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2258 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2259 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2260 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2262 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2263 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2264 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2265 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2267 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2268 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2270 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2272 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2273 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2274 reporting incorrect results.
2278 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2279 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2281 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2284 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2286 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2287 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2289 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2290 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2292 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2295 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2296 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2297 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2298 the file name does not look like a page range.
2300 printf has several changes:
2302 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2303 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2305 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2306 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2307 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2309 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2310 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2313 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2314 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2316 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2317 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2319 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2321 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2322 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2324 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2326 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2328 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2329 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2330 when first encountering the directory.
2334 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2335 output; POSIX requires this.
2337 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2338 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2340 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2342 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2343 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2345 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2346 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2348 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2349 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2350 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2351 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2352 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2353 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2354 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2356 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2357 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2358 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2360 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2361 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2363 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2365 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2367 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2368 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2369 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2370 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2372 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2376 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2377 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2378 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2379 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2380 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2382 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2383 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2384 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2386 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2387 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2389 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2390 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2392 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2393 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2394 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2395 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2396 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2398 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2399 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2401 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2402 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2404 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2406 nocreat do not create the output file
2407 excl fail if the output file already exists
2408 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2409 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2411 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2413 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2414 direct use direct I/O for data
2415 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2416 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2417 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2418 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2419 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2421 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2423 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2424 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2427 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2428 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2429 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2430 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2431 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2432 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2434 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2435 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2437 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2440 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2442 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2444 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2445 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2447 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2448 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2449 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2451 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2452 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2453 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2455 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2457 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2458 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2460 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2461 for compatibility with bash.
2463 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2465 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2466 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2467 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2468 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2470 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2471 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2473 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2474 ls supports TABSIZE.
2475 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2476 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2477 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2479 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2482 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2484 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2485 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2486 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2487 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2488 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2489 an offset, not as a file name.
2491 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2492 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2494 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2495 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2497 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2498 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2500 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2501 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2502 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2504 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2505 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2507 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2508 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2512 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2514 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2516 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2520 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2521 or more arguments between partitions.
2523 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2524 holes in the destination.
2526 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2527 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2528 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2529 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2530 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2531 terminates immediately.
2533 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2535 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2537 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2538 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2539 not the empty string.
2541 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2542 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2546 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2547 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2548 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2551 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2558 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2562 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2563 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2565 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2566 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2568 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2569 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2570 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2573 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2577 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2578 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2580 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2581 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2583 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2584 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2585 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2587 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2589 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2592 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2594 ** Configuration option
2596 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2597 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2601 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2602 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2606 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2607 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2608 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2611 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2612 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2613 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2614 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2615 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2616 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2617 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2620 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2624 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2625 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2626 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2628 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2629 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2631 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2633 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2634 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2635 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2636 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2638 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2640 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2641 not just the ones that reference directories
2643 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2644 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2646 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2647 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2648 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2650 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2651 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2652 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2653 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2654 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2655 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2657 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2662 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2663 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2665 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2667 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2669 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2671 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2672 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2674 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2675 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2677 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2679 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2683 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2685 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2687 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2688 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2689 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2690 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2691 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2693 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2694 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2696 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2697 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2699 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2700 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2702 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2703 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2704 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2708 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2709 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2710 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2711 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2712 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2713 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2714 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2715 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2716 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2717 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2718 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2719 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2720 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2721 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2723 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2725 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2726 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2728 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2730 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2732 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2733 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2735 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2737 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2738 without a trailing newline.
2740 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2741 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2743 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2746 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2750 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2752 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2754 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2755 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2756 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2757 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2759 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2761 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2762 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2763 be printed without leading spaces.
2765 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2766 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2771 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2772 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2773 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2775 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2777 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2778 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2780 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2781 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2783 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2784 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2786 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2788 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2790 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2792 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2793 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2795 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2797 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2799 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2800 byte offsets are specified.
2803 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2806 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2809 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2810 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2811 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2812 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2813 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2814 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2815 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2816 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2817 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2818 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2819 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2820 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2821 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2822 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2823 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2824 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2825 directory where M has write access.
2826 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2827 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2828 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2831 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2832 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2833 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2834 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2835 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2836 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2837 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2838 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2839 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2840 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2841 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2842 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2843 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2844 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2845 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2846 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2847 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2848 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2849 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2850 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2851 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2852 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2853 appeared one additional time.
2855 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2856 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2857 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2858 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2861 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2862 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2863 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2864 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2865 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2866 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2867 if there were more than 338.
2869 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2870 - false --help now exits nonzero
2873 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2874 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2875 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2876 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2879 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2880 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2881 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2882 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2883 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2886 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2887 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2888 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2889 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2890 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2891 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2892 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2895 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2896 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2897 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2898 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2899 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2900 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2902 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2903 under certain unusual conditions
2904 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2905 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2908 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2909 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2910 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2911 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2912 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2913 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2914 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2915 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2916 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2917 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2918 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2919 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2920 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2921 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2922 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2923 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2926 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2927 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2930 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2931 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2932 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2933 involving hard-linked directories
2934 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2935 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2936 character-special and block files
2939 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2940 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2941 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2942 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2943 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2944 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2945 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2946 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2947 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2949 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2950 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2951 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2952 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2953 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2954 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2955 specified on the command line.
2956 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2957 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2958 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2959 the first file untouched.
2960 * readlink: new program
2961 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2962 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2963 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2964 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2965 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2966 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2969 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2970 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2971 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2972 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2973 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2974 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2975 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2976 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2977 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2978 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2979 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2980 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2982 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2983 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2984 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2986 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2987 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2988 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2989 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2990 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2991 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2992 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2993 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2996 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2997 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3000 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3001 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3002 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3003 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3004 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
3005 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3006 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3009 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3010 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3012 ========================================================================
3013 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3014 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3017 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3019 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3020 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3021 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3022 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3023 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3024 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3025 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3026 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
3027 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3028 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3029 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3030 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3032 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3033 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3034 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3035 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3037 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3040 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3042 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3043 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3044 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3045 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3046 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3047 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3048 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3051 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3052 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3053 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3054 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3055 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
3056 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3057 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
3058 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3059 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3060 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3061 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
3062 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
3063 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3064 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3065 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3066 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3068 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3069 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3071 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3072 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3073 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3074 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3075 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3076 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3078 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3079 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3080 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3081 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3082 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3083 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3084 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3086 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3087 the source files in the following example:
3088 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3089 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3090 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3091 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3092 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3093 links between source files with --preserve=links
3094 * cp accepts new options:
3095 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3096 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3097 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3098 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3099 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3100 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3101 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3102 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
3103 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3105 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3106 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3107 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3108 even though it's older than dest.
3109 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3110 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3111 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3112 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3113 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3115 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3116 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3117 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3118 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3119 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3120 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3121 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3123 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3124 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3125 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3127 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3128 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3129 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3130 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3131 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3132 This is the default.
3134 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3135 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3136 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3137 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3138 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3140 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3143 ========================================================================
3144 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3145 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3148 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3149 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3151 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3152 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3153 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3154 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3155 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3157 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3158 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3159 that specifies a non-directory
3162 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3163 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3164 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3165 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3166 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3167 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3168 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3169 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3170 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3171 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3172 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3173 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3174 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3175 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3176 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3177 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3178 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3179 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3180 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3181 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3182 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3183 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3184 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3185 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3187 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3188 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3189 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3191 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3193 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3194 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3196 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3197 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3198 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3199 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3200 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3202 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3203 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3204 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3205 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3206 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3208 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3210 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3211 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3212 * still more portability fixes
3213 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3214 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3216 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3218 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3220 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3222 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3223 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3224 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3225 there is any time remaining
3226 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3228 ========================================================================
3229 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3230 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3232 This package began as the union of the following:
3233 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3235 ========================================================================
3237 Copyright (C) 2001-2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3239 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3240 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3241 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3242 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3243 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3244 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.