1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
8 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
10 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
12 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
13 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
14 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
18 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
19 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
20 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
22 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
23 unique groups with empty lines.
25 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
26 used to identify the split points.
30 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS and UBIFS.
31 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses
32 inotify for files on those file systems, rather than the default (for unknown
33 file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
35 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
36 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
37 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
41 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
44 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
48 numfmt: reformat numbers
52 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
53 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
54 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
56 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
57 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
58 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
62 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
63 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
65 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
66 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
67 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
69 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
70 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
71 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
73 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
74 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
75 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
77 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
78 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
79 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
81 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
82 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
83 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
85 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
86 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
88 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
89 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
91 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
92 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
93 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
95 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
96 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
97 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
99 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
100 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
101 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
103 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
104 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
105 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
106 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
108 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
109 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
110 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
112 ** Changes in behavior
114 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
115 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
116 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
117 'total' in the target column.
119 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
120 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
121 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
123 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
124 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
128 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
129 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
131 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
132 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
134 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
138 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
139 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
140 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
141 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
142 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
143 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
144 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
145 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
146 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
147 for a patched distribution package.
149 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
150 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
152 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
153 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
154 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
155 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
158 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
162 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
164 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
165 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
166 sha384sum and sha512sum.
170 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
171 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
172 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
173 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
174 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
176 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
177 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
179 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
180 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
181 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
182 eventually exits nonzero.
184 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
185 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
186 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
187 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
188 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
190 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
191 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
192 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
194 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
195 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
196 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
198 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
199 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
200 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
202 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
203 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
204 Before, this would infloop:
205 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
206 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
208 ** Changes in behavior
210 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
214 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
215 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
216 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
217 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
218 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
221 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
222 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
223 format-changing options.
225 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
226 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
227 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
228 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
229 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
233 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
234 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
235 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
236 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
237 are run without following the instructions in README.
239 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
240 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
241 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
242 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
243 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
244 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
245 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
248 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
252 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
253 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
254 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
255 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
257 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
258 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
259 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
260 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
262 sort -u could read freed memory.
263 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
264 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
265 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
269 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
270 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
271 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
272 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
275 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
279 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
280 processes will not intersperse their output.
281 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
283 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
284 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
285 date: invalid date '\260'
286 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
288 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
289 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
290 lines output by df, can work reliably.
291 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
293 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
294 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
295 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
297 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
298 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
299 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
300 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
301 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
302 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
304 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
305 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
307 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
308 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
310 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
311 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
312 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
314 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
315 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
316 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
320 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
322 ** Changes in behavior
324 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
325 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
326 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
327 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
328 have any reason to include it here.
332 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
333 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
334 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
336 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
337 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
338 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
341 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
345 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
346 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
347 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
348 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
349 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
350 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
352 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
353 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
354 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
355 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
356 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
357 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
358 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
360 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
361 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
363 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
364 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
368 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
369 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
371 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
373 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
375 ** Changes in behavior
377 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
378 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
379 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
381 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
382 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
385 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
389 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
390 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
391 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
392 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
393 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
394 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
395 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
396 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
398 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
399 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
400 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
401 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
402 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
404 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
405 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
407 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
408 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
410 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
411 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
413 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
414 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
416 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
417 additional static suffix to output file names.
419 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
420 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
421 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
423 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
424 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
428 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
429 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
430 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
432 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
433 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
434 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
435 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
436 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
437 typically still point to one of the hard links.
439 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
440 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
441 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
442 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
443 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
445 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
446 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
447 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
448 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
452 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
453 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
454 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
456 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
457 instead of causing a usage failure.
459 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
462 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
466 realpath: print resolved file names.
470 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
471 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
473 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
474 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
476 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
477 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
478 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
479 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
480 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
481 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
483 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
484 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
485 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
487 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
488 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
489 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
491 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
492 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
493 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
494 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
495 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
497 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
499 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
500 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
502 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
503 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
504 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
506 ** Changes in behavior
508 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
509 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
510 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
511 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
512 usually-short referent instead.
514 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
515 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
516 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
517 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
520 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
524 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
525 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
526 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
528 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
529 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
531 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
532 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
536 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
537 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
539 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
540 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
541 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
542 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
544 ** Changes in behavior
546 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
547 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
548 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
552 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
553 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
554 only .tar.xz files is enough.
557 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
561 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
562 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
563 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
565 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
566 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
568 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
569 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
570 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
571 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
572 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
574 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
575 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
576 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
577 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
578 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
579 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
580 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
581 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
583 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
584 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
586 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
587 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
589 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
590 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
592 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
593 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
594 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
596 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
597 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
598 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
599 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
601 ** Changes in behavior
603 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
604 when -v or -c specified.
606 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
607 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
611 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
612 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
613 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
614 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
615 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
617 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
618 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
619 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
621 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
622 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
623 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
624 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
625 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
626 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
627 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
629 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
630 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
631 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
635 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
636 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
638 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
641 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
642 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
644 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
645 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
647 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
648 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
650 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
652 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
656 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
657 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
659 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
662 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
666 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
667 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
669 ** Changes in behavior
671 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
672 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
673 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
674 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
675 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
676 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
678 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
679 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
680 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
684 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
687 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
691 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
692 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
693 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
695 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
696 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
697 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
699 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
700 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
701 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
703 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
704 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
706 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
707 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
709 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
710 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
712 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
713 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
717 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
718 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
719 processed portion thereof.
721 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
722 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
724 ** Changes in behavior
726 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
727 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
728 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
730 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
731 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
732 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
734 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
735 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
737 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
738 Use --preserve-context instead.
740 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
743 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
747 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
748 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
749 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
750 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
751 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
753 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
754 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
756 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
757 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
758 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
760 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
761 reject file names invalid for that file system.
763 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
764 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
768 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
769 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
770 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
771 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
772 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
773 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
774 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
775 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
777 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
778 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
779 the same number of fields are output for each line.
781 ** Changes in behavior
783 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
784 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
785 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
788 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
792 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
793 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
794 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
797 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
801 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
802 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
804 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
805 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
807 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
808 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
810 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
811 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
812 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
813 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
815 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
816 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
818 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
819 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
820 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
822 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
824 ** Changes in behavior
826 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
827 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
828 to the number of available processors.
832 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
835 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
839 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
840 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
841 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
842 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
844 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
845 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
846 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
848 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
849 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
851 ** Changes in behavior
853 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
854 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
856 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
857 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
858 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
859 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
860 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
861 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
863 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
864 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
865 the same way as the others.
868 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
872 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
873 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
874 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
876 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
877 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
879 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
880 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
881 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
883 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
884 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
886 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
887 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
889 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
890 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
891 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
893 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
894 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
895 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
896 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
900 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
901 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
903 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
906 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
907 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
909 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
911 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
912 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
913 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
915 ** Changes in behavior
917 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
918 rather than its aliased target.
920 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
921 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
922 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
924 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
925 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
926 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
927 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
928 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
929 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
930 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
931 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
933 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
935 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
937 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
938 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
941 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
942 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
943 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
944 control like taskset for example.
946 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
948 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
949 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
950 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
951 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
952 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
953 includes %C when context information is available.
955 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
956 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
957 rather than a file system attribute.
959 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
960 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
961 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
962 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
964 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
965 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
966 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
968 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
969 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
970 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
973 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
977 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
978 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
980 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
982 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
983 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
985 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
986 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
987 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
988 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
990 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
991 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
992 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
996 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
997 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
999 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
1000 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
1001 duration after the initial signal was sent.
1003 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
1004 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
1005 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
1006 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
1007 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
1008 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
1009 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
1010 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
1011 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
1013 ** Changes in behavior
1015 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
1016 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1018 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1019 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1022 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1026 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1027 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1028 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1029 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1033 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1034 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1036 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1037 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1038 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1039 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1041 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1042 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1043 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1046 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1050 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1051 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1052 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1054 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1055 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1056 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1058 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1059 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1061 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1062 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1063 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1064 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1066 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1067 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1068 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1070 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1071 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1072 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1073 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1075 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1076 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1077 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1079 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1080 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1081 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1082 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1084 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1085 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1086 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1088 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1089 processes will not intersperse their output.
1090 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1093 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1097 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1098 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1100 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1101 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1103 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1104 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1105 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1106 the presence of the empty string argument.
1107 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1109 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1110 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1111 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1112 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1114 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1115 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1117 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1118 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1119 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1121 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1122 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1123 and with a malicious user on the same system
1124 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1125 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1128 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1132 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1133 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1134 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1136 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1137 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1138 offending directory and all "contents."
1140 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1141 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1142 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1144 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1145 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1146 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1148 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1149 processes will not intersperse their output.
1150 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1151 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1153 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1154 output the name of the file to stdout.
1155 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1157 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1158 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1159 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1161 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1162 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1165 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1166 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1167 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1169 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1170 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1171 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1172 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1173 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1174 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1176 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1177 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1178 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1179 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1181 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1182 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1184 ** Changes in behavior
1186 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1187 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1188 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1189 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1190 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1192 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1193 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1194 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1195 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1197 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1199 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1200 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1201 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1202 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1203 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1207 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1211 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1212 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1214 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1215 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1217 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1218 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1219 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1221 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1222 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1225 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1229 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1230 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1231 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1233 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1234 to accommodate leap seconds.
1235 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1237 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1238 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1239 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1241 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1243 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1244 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1245 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1247 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1248 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1249 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1250 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1251 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1255 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1256 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1257 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1258 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1260 ** Changes in behavior
1262 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1263 environment variable is set.
1265 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1266 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1267 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1271 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1272 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1273 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1274 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1276 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1277 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1278 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1279 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1283 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1284 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1285 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1287 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1288 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1289 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1290 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1291 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1292 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1293 another improvement:
1295 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1296 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1299 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1303 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1304 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1305 and libraries tested at configure time.
1306 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1308 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1309 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1311 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1312 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1314 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1315 printing a summary to stderr.
1316 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1318 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1319 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1320 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1322 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1323 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1325 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1326 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1327 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1328 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1330 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1331 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1332 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1333 which is relatively unusual.
1334 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1336 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1337 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1338 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1339 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1340 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1341 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1342 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1346 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1347 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1348 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1349 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1350 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1354 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1355 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1357 ** Changes in behavior
1359 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1360 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1361 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1362 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1363 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1366 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1370 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1371 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1373 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1374 before data copying has started.
1376 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1377 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1379 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1380 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1381 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1382 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1384 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1385 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1386 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1387 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1389 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1394 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1395 for its standard streams.
1397 ** Changes in behavior
1399 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1400 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1401 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1402 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1403 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1404 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1406 ** Deprecated options
1408 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1409 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1413 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1415 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1416 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1417 a btrfs file system.
1419 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1421 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1422 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1424 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1425 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1428 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1432 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1433 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1434 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1435 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1437 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1438 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1439 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1440 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1441 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1446 make check: two tests have been corrected
1450 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1451 inherited from gnulib.
1454 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1458 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1459 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1460 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1461 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1463 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1464 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1466 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1468 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1469 systems without xattr support.
1471 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1472 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1473 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1475 ** Changes in behavior
1477 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1478 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1479 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1480 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1482 ** Improved robustness
1484 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1485 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1486 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1487 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1488 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1489 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1490 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1491 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1492 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1496 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1497 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1499 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1500 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1501 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1502 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1503 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1506 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1510 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1511 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1512 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1516 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1517 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1518 data was read, or on process exit.
1519 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1521 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1522 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1523 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1524 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1526 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1527 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1528 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1529 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1531 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1532 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1534 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1535 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1537 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1538 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1539 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1541 ** Changes in behavior
1543 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1544 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1545 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1547 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1548 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1550 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1551 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1552 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1555 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1559 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1561 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1562 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1563 install: Never copies xattrs
1565 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1566 from overwriting any existing destination file
1568 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1569 mode where this feature is available.
1571 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1572 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1573 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1574 do not modify the destination at all.
1576 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1578 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1582 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1583 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1585 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1587 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1588 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1590 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1591 processing the first file name
1593 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1594 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1595 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1596 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1598 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1599 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1601 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1602 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1605 ** Changes in behavior
1607 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1608 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1610 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1611 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1612 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1614 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1615 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1617 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1619 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1620 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1621 is still marked with a '+'.
1624 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1628 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1629 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1633 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1634 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1635 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1636 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1637 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1638 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1640 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1641 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1643 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1644 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1646 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1648 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1649 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1650 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1652 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1653 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1655 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1656 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1657 used to factor large numbers.
1659 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1662 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1664 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1666 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1667 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1669 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1670 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1671 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1672 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1674 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1675 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1676 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1678 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1679 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1683 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1685 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1686 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1688 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1689 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1691 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1693 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1694 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1698 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1699 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1700 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1702 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1704 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1705 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1706 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1708 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1709 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1710 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1712 ** Changes in behavior
1714 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1715 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1718 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1722 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1723 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1724 'futimens' system calls.
1728 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1730 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1731 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1732 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1734 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1735 with no USERNAME argument.
1737 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1738 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1739 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1741 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1742 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1743 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1744 number of fields for some inputs.
1746 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1747 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1749 ** Changes in behavior
1751 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1752 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1755 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1759 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1761 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1762 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1763 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1764 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1766 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1767 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1769 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1770 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1772 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1773 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1775 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1776 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1777 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1778 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1780 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1781 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1782 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1783 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1784 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1785 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1787 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1788 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1790 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1791 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1792 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1794 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1795 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1797 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1798 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1800 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1801 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1802 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1803 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1805 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1806 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1808 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1809 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1811 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1812 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1813 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1817 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1818 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1820 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1821 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1822 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1823 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1827 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1828 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1830 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1832 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1836 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1837 which have negative errno values.
1841 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1845 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1849 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1850 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1853 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1857 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1858 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1859 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1861 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1862 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1863 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1864 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1868 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1869 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1870 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1871 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1874 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1878 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1880 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1881 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1882 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1885 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1889 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1890 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1892 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1894 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1896 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1898 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1902 ** Changes in behavior
1904 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1905 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1907 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1908 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1910 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1911 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1912 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1916 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1917 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1918 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1919 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1920 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1921 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1922 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1923 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1924 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1925 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1926 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1928 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1929 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1930 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1933 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1936 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1937 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1938 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1940 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1941 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1942 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1945 ** New build options
1947 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1948 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1949 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1950 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1952 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1953 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1954 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1955 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1956 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1957 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1958 of "make check" fail.
1960 ** Remove deprecated options
1962 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1963 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1964 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1965 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1966 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1968 ** Improved robustness
1970 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1971 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1972 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1973 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1974 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1975 loss of the contents of a/f.
1977 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1978 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1982 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1983 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1984 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1986 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1987 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1988 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1989 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1991 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1992 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1993 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1994 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1995 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1996 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1997 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1998 destination is a symlink.
2000 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
2002 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
2003 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
2005 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
2006 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
2008 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
2010 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
2011 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
2013 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
2014 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
2016 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2019 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2020 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2022 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2023 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2025 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2026 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2027 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2028 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2030 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2031 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2032 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2034 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2035 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2036 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2038 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2039 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2040 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2041 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2043 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2044 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2045 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2047 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2048 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2050 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2051 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2053 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2055 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2056 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2057 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2059 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2060 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2062 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2063 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2065 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2066 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2068 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2069 [present in the original version]
2072 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2076 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2078 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2079 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2080 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2082 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2083 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2085 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2089 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2090 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2092 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2093 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2095 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2096 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2098 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2099 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2100 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2101 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2102 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2103 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2105 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2106 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2109 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2110 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2112 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2115 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2116 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2117 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2119 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2120 directory is unreadable.
2122 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2123 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2124 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2126 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2127 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2128 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2129 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2130 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2133 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2134 Before it would print nothing.
2136 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2138 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2139 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2140 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2141 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2142 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2143 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2144 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2145 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2147 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2151 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2152 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2153 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2155 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2156 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2157 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2158 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2161 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2165 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2166 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2167 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2168 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2169 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2170 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2171 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2173 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2174 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2175 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2176 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2177 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2178 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2179 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2180 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2182 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2183 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2184 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2187 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2191 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2192 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2194 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2195 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2196 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2198 ** Improved robustness
2200 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2201 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2202 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2205 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2209 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2210 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2211 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2212 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2213 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2215 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2219 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2222 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2226 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2227 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2228 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2229 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2231 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2232 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2234 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2235 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2236 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2239 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2241 ** Improved robustness
2243 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2244 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2246 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2247 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2248 or NFS-mounted partition.
2250 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2251 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2255 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2256 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2257 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2258 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2259 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2260 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2262 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2263 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2265 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2266 or neglect to report file removal.
2268 For the "groups" command:
2270 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2271 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2273 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2275 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2277 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2281 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2282 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2285 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2287 ** Changes in behavior
2289 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2290 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2291 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2292 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2294 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2295 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2296 a final './' or '../' component.
2298 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2299 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2300 this only for pipes.
2302 ** Infrastructure changes
2304 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2305 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2306 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2307 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2311 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2312 name is "." or "..".
2314 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2315 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2316 dirent.d_type support.
2318 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2319 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2321 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2322 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2323 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2324 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2327 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2329 ** Changes in behavior
2331 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2335 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2336 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2340 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2341 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2342 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2344 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2345 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2347 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2348 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2350 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2352 ** Improved robustness
2354 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2355 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2356 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2358 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2359 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2362 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2363 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2365 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2366 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2368 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2369 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2371 ** Changes in behavior
2373 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2374 where the two are distinct.
2376 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2377 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2378 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2379 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2380 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2381 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2382 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2383 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2384 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2385 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2386 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2387 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2388 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2389 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2390 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2391 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2392 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2394 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2395 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2396 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2398 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2399 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2400 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2401 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2404 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2405 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2409 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2410 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2411 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2412 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2414 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2415 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2416 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2418 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2419 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2420 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2421 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2422 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2425 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2426 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2428 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2429 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2430 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2431 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2433 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2434 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2435 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2437 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2438 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2439 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2440 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2442 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2443 and sticky) with the -m option.
2445 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2446 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2447 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2448 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2449 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2451 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2452 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2454 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2458 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2459 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2460 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2461 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2463 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2465 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2467 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2468 silently ignoring one of them.
2470 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2471 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2472 containing this change was 5.92.
2474 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2475 automatically newline terminated.
2477 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2478 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2479 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2480 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2483 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2484 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2485 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2488 ** Scheduled for removal
2490 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2491 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2493 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2494 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2495 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2496 command to unlink a directory.
2498 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2499 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2500 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2501 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2505 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2506 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2507 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2508 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2509 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2510 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2514 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2515 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2517 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2519 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2520 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2521 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2523 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2524 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2527 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2528 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2530 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2531 list directories before files.
2533 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2534 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2535 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2536 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2539 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2541 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2543 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2544 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2545 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2547 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2548 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2552 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2553 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2554 usually printing nothing.
2556 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2558 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2559 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2560 them with hard-linked directories.
2562 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2563 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2564 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2566 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2567 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2568 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2570 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2573 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2574 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2576 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2577 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2579 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2580 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2582 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2583 all command-line arguments.
2585 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2587 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2589 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2590 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2592 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2594 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2595 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2596 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2597 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2598 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2600 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2601 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2603 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2604 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2605 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2606 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2608 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2610 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2614 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2615 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2617 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2618 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2620 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2621 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2623 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2624 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2626 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2627 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2629 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2631 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2632 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2633 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2636 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2638 ** Build-related bug fixes
2640 installing .mo files would fail
2643 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2647 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2649 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2652 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2656 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2657 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2661 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2663 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2664 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2666 ** Deprecated options
2668 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2669 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2671 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2675 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2677 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2678 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2679 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2680 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2682 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2685 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2691 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2696 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2698 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2700 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2701 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2702 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2704 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2705 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2706 problematic usages. These include:
2708 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2709 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2710 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2711 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2712 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2713 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2714 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2715 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2716 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2718 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2719 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2721 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2722 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2723 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2724 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2726 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2727 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2728 between binary and text files.
2730 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2734 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2738 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2739 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2741 head tac tail tee tr
2742 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2744 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2745 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2747 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2748 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2749 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2751 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2753 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2755 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2756 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2757 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2761 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2763 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2764 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2766 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2767 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2768 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2772 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2773 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2777 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2778 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2779 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2783 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2784 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2788 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2790 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2792 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2796 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2797 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2798 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2800 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2801 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2802 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2803 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2804 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2806 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2810 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2811 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2812 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2814 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2816 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2817 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2818 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2819 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2821 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2823 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2824 rather than silently wrapping around.
2826 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2827 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2829 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2830 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2832 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2833 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2834 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2835 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2837 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2839 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2841 ** Improved robustness
2843 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2844 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2845 no matter how large the result.
2847 ** Improved portability
2849 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2850 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2852 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2854 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2855 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2856 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2858 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2859 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2863 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2864 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2866 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2868 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2869 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2870 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2871 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2873 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2874 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2876 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2877 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2878 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2880 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2882 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2883 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2885 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2886 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2888 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2890 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2891 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2893 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2894 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2896 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2897 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2898 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2900 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2902 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2904 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2908 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2910 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2911 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2912 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2914 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2915 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2917 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2918 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2919 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2921 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2922 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2924 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2925 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2926 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2927 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2929 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2930 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2932 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2933 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2934 the file system does not support it.
2936 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2938 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2939 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2941 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2943 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2944 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2946 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2947 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2948 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2949 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2951 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2952 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2955 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2956 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2957 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2958 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2960 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2961 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2962 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2963 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2965 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2966 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2968 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2970 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2971 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2972 reporting incorrect results.
2976 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2977 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2979 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2982 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2984 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2985 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2987 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2988 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2990 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2993 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2994 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2995 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2996 the file name does not look like a page range.
2998 printf has several changes:
3000 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
3001 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
3003 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
3004 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
3005 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
3007 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
3008 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
3011 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
3012 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
3014 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
3015 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
3017 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3019 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3020 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3022 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3024 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3026 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3027 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3028 when first encountering the directory.
3032 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3033 output; POSIX requires this.
3035 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3036 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3038 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3040 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3041 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3043 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3044 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3046 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3047 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3048 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3049 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3050 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3051 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3052 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3054 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3055 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3056 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3058 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3059 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3061 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3063 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3065 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3066 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3067 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3068 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3070 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3074 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3075 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3076 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3077 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3078 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3080 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3081 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3082 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3084 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3085 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3087 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3088 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3090 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3091 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
3092 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
3093 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3094 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
3096 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3097 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3099 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3100 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3102 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3104 nocreat do not create the output file
3105 excl fail if the output file already exists
3106 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3107 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3109 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3111 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3112 direct use direct I/O for data
3113 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3114 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3115 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3116 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3117 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3119 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3121 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3122 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3125 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3126 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3127 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3128 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3129 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3130 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3132 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3133 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3135 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3138 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3140 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3142 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3143 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3145 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3146 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3147 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3149 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3150 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3151 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3153 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3155 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3156 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3158 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3159 for compatibility with bash.
3161 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3163 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3164 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3165 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3166 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3168 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3169 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3171 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3172 ls supports TABSIZE.
3173 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3174 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3175 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3177 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3180 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3182 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3183 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3184 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3185 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3186 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3187 an offset, not as a file name.
3189 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3190 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3192 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3193 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3195 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3196 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3198 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3199 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3200 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3202 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3203 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3205 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3206 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3210 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3212 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3214 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3218 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3219 or more arguments between partitions.
3221 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3222 holes in the destination.
3224 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3225 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3226 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3227 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3228 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3229 terminates immediately.
3231 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3233 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3235 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3236 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3237 not the empty string.
3239 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3240 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3244 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3245 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3246 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3249 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3256 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3260 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3261 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3263 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3264 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3266 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3267 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3268 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3271 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3275 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3276 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3278 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3279 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3281 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3282 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3283 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3285 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3287 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3290 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3292 ** Configuration option
3294 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3295 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3299 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3300 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3304 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3305 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3306 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3309 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3310 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3311 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3312 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3313 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3314 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3315 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3318 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3322 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3323 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3324 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3326 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3327 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3329 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3331 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3332 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3333 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3334 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3336 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3338 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3339 not just the ones that reference directories
3341 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3342 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3344 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3345 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3346 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3348 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3349 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3350 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3351 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3352 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3353 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3355 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3360 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3361 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3363 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3365 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3367 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3369 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3370 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3372 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3373 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3375 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3377 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3381 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3383 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3385 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3386 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3387 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3388 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3389 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3391 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3392 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3394 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3395 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3397 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3398 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3400 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3401 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3402 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3406 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3407 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3408 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3409 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3410 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3411 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3412 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3413 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3414 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3415 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3416 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3417 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3418 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3419 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3421 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3423 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3424 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3426 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3428 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3430 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3431 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3433 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3435 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3436 without a trailing newline.
3438 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3439 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3441 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3444 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3448 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3450 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3452 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3453 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3454 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3455 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3457 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3459 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3460 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3461 be printed without leading spaces.
3463 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3464 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3469 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3470 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3471 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3473 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3475 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3476 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3478 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3479 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3481 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3482 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3484 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3486 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3488 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3490 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3491 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3493 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3495 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3497 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3498 byte offsets are specified.
3501 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3504 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3507 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3508 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3509 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3510 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3511 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3512 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3513 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3514 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3515 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3516 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3517 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3518 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3519 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3520 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3521 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3522 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3523 directory where M has write access.
3524 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3525 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3526 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3529 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3530 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3531 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3532 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3533 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3534 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3535 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3536 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3537 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3538 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3539 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3540 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3541 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3542 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3543 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3544 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3545 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3546 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3547 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3548 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3549 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3550 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3551 appeared one additional time.
3553 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3554 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3555 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3556 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3559 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3560 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3561 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3562 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3563 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3564 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3565 if there were more than 338.
3567 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3568 - false --help now exits nonzero
3571 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3572 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3573 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3574 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3577 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3578 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3579 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3580 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3581 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3584 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3585 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3586 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3587 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3588 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3589 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3590 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3593 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3594 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3595 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3596 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3597 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3598 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3600 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3601 under certain unusual conditions
3602 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3603 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3606 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3607 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3608 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3609 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3610 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3611 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3612 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3613 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3614 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3615 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3616 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3617 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3618 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3619 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3620 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3621 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3624 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3625 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3628 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3629 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3630 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3631 involving hard-linked directories
3632 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3633 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3634 character-special and block files
3637 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3638 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3639 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3640 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3641 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3642 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3643 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3644 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3645 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3647 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3648 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3649 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3650 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3651 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3652 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3653 specified on the command line.
3654 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3655 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3656 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3657 the first file untouched.
3658 * readlink: new program
3659 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3660 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3661 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3662 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3663 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3664 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3667 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3668 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3669 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3670 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3671 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3672 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3673 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3674 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3675 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3676 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3677 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3678 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3680 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3681 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3682 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3684 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3685 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3686 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3687 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3688 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3689 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3690 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3691 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3694 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3695 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3698 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3699 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3700 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3701 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3702 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3703 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3704 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3707 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3708 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3710 ========================================================================
3711 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3712 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3715 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3717 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3718 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3719 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3720 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3721 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3722 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3723 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3724 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3725 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3726 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3727 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3728 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3730 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3731 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3732 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3733 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3735 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3738 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3740 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3741 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3742 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3743 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3744 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3745 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3746 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3749 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3750 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3751 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3752 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3753 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3754 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3755 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3756 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3757 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3758 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3759 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3760 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3761 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3762 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3763 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3764 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3766 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3767 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3769 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3770 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3771 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3772 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3773 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3774 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3776 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3777 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3778 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3779 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3780 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3781 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3782 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3784 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3785 the source files in the following example:
3786 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3787 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3788 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3789 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3790 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3791 links between source files with --preserve=links
3792 * cp accepts new options:
3793 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3794 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3795 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3796 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3797 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3798 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3799 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3800 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3801 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3803 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3804 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3805 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3806 even though it's older than dest.
3807 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3808 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3809 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3810 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3811 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3813 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3814 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3815 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3816 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3817 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3818 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3819 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3821 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3822 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3823 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3825 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3826 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3827 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3828 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3829 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3830 This is the default.
3832 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3833 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3834 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3835 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3836 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3838 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3841 ========================================================================
3842 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3843 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3846 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3847 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3849 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3850 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3851 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3852 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3853 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3855 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3856 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3857 that specifies a non-directory
3860 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3861 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3862 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3863 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3864 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3865 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3866 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3867 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3868 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3869 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3870 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3871 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3872 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3873 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3874 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3875 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3876 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3877 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3878 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3879 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3880 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3881 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3882 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3883 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3885 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3886 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3887 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3889 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3891 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3892 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3894 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3895 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3896 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3897 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3898 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3900 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3901 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3902 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3903 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3904 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3906 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3908 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3909 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3910 * still more portability fixes
3911 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3912 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3914 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3916 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3918 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3920 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3921 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3922 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3923 there is any time remaining
3924 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3926 ========================================================================
3927 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3928 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3930 This package began as the union of the following:
3931 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3933 ========================================================================
3935 Copyright (C) 2001-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3937 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3938 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3939 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3940 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3941 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3942 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.