1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
7 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
8 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
10 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
11 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
12 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendent.
13 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
15 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
16 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
17 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
18 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
20 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
21 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
23 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
24 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
26 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
27 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
28 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
29 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
30 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
31 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
45 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
47 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
48 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
49 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
50 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
51 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
52 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
54 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
55 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
56 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
57 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
59 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
60 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
61 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
63 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
64 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
65 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
66 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
68 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
69 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
70 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
72 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
73 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
74 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
76 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
77 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
78 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
79 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
80 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
82 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
83 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
84 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
86 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
87 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
89 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
90 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
91 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
93 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
94 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
96 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
97 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
99 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
100 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
102 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
103 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
105 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
106 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
107 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
109 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
110 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
114 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
115 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
117 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
118 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
119 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
120 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
121 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
122 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
123 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
124 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
125 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
126 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
127 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
128 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
129 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
130 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
131 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
132 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
133 it suitable for embedded system.
135 ** Changes in behavior
137 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
138 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
140 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
141 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
143 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
144 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
145 will result in the delayed output of lines.
147 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
148 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
149 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
153 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
154 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
155 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
157 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
159 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
160 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
161 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
163 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
164 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
165 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
166 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
168 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
169 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
171 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
172 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
173 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
176 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
180 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
181 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
182 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
184 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
185 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
186 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
187 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
189 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
190 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
191 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
193 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
194 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
196 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
198 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
199 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
200 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
202 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
203 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
204 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
206 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
207 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
208 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
209 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
211 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
212 from the source, when copying across file systems.
213 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
215 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
216 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
217 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
219 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
220 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
222 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
223 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
224 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
225 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
227 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
228 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
229 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
231 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
232 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
233 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
237 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
238 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
239 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
241 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
242 used to identify the split points.
244 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
245 command line argument through to the output.
247 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
250 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
251 a NUL instead of a white space character.
253 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
254 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
256 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
258 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
259 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
260 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
262 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
263 unique groups with empty lines.
265 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
266 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
268 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
271 ** Changes in behavior
273 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
274 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
275 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
276 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
278 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
279 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
281 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
282 not just the transfer counts.
284 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
286 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
287 as per the documented interface.
291 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
293 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
294 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
295 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
296 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
298 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
299 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
300 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
301 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
303 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
304 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
305 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
307 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
308 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
310 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
311 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
313 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
317 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
320 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
324 numfmt: reformat numbers
328 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
329 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
330 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
332 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
333 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
334 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
336 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
337 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminite amount of time.
341 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
342 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
344 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
345 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
346 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
348 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
349 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
350 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
352 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
353 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
354 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
356 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
357 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
358 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
360 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
361 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
362 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
364 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
365 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
367 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
368 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
370 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
371 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
372 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
374 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
375 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
376 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
378 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
379 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
380 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
382 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
383 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
384 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
385 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
387 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
388 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
389 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
391 ** Changes in behavior
393 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
394 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
395 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
396 'total' in the target column.
398 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
399 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
400 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
402 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
403 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
405 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
406 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
410 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
411 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
413 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
414 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
416 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
420 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
421 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
422 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
423 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
424 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
425 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
426 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
427 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
428 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
429 for a patched distribution package.
431 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
432 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
434 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
435 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
436 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
437 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
440 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
444 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
446 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
447 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
448 sha384sum and sha512sum.
452 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
453 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
454 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
455 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
456 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
458 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
459 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
461 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
462 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
463 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
464 eventually exits nonzero.
466 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
467 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
468 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
469 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
470 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
472 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
473 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
474 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
476 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
477 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
478 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
480 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
481 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
482 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
484 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
485 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
486 Before, this would infloop:
487 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
488 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
490 ** Changes in behavior
492 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
496 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
497 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
498 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
499 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
500 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
503 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
504 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
505 format-changing options.
507 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
508 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
509 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
510 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
511 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
515 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
516 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
517 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
518 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
519 are run without following the instructions in README.
521 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
522 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
523 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
524 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
525 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
526 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
527 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
530 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
534 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
535 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
536 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
537 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
539 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
540 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
541 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
542 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
544 sort -u could read freed memory.
545 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
546 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
547 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
551 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
552 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
553 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
554 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
557 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
561 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
562 processes will not intersperse their output.
563 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
565 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
566 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
567 date: invalid date '\260'
568 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
570 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
571 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
572 lines output by df, can work reliably.
573 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
575 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
576 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
577 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
579 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
580 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
581 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
582 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
583 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
584 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
586 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
587 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
589 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
590 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
592 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
593 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
594 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
596 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
597 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
598 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
602 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
604 ** Changes in behavior
606 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
607 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
608 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
609 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
610 have any reason to include it here.
614 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
615 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
616 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
618 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
619 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
620 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
623 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
627 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
628 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
629 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
630 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
631 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
632 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
634 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
635 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
636 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
637 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
638 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
639 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
640 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
642 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
643 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
645 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
646 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
650 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
651 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
653 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
655 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
657 ** Changes in behavior
659 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
660 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
661 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
663 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
664 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
667 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
671 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
672 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
673 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
674 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
675 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
676 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
677 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
678 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
680 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
681 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
682 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
683 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
684 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
686 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
687 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
689 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
690 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
692 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
693 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
695 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
696 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
698 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
699 additional static suffix to output file names.
701 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
702 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
703 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
705 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
706 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
710 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
711 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
712 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
714 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
715 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
716 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
717 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
718 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
719 typically still point to one of the hard links.
721 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
722 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
723 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
724 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
725 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
727 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
728 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
729 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
730 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
734 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
735 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
736 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
738 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
739 instead of causing a usage failure.
741 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
744 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
748 realpath: print resolved file names.
752 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
753 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
755 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
756 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
758 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
759 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
760 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
761 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
762 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
763 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
765 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
766 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
767 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
769 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
770 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
771 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
773 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
774 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
775 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
776 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
777 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
779 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
781 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
782 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
784 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
785 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
786 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
788 ** Changes in behavior
790 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
791 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
792 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
793 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
794 usually-short referent instead.
796 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
797 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
798 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
799 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
802 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
806 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
807 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
808 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
810 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
811 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
813 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
814 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
818 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
819 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
821 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
822 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
823 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
824 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
826 ** Changes in behavior
828 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
829 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
830 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
834 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
835 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
836 only .tar.xz files is enough.
839 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
843 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
844 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
845 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
847 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
848 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
850 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
851 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
852 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
853 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
854 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
856 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
857 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
858 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
859 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
860 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
861 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
862 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
863 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
865 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
866 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
868 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
869 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
871 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
872 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
874 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
875 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
876 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
878 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
879 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
880 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
881 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
883 ** Changes in behavior
885 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
886 when -v or -c specified.
888 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
889 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
893 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
894 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
895 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
896 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
897 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
899 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
900 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
901 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
903 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
904 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
905 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
906 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
907 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
908 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
909 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
911 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
912 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
913 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
917 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
918 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
920 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
923 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
924 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
926 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
927 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
929 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
930 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
932 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
934 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
938 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
939 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
941 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
944 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
948 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
949 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
951 ** Changes in behavior
953 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
954 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
955 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
956 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
957 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
958 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
960 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
961 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
962 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
966 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
969 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
973 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
974 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
975 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
977 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
978 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
979 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
981 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
982 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
983 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
985 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
986 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
988 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
989 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
991 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
992 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
994 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
995 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
999 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
1000 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
1001 processed portion thereof.
1003 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
1004 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
1006 ** Changes in behavior
1008 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1009 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
1010 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1012 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1013 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
1014 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
1016 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
1017 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
1019 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
1020 Use --preserve-context instead.
1022 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
1025 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
1029 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
1030 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
1031 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
1032 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
1033 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1035 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
1036 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1038 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
1039 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
1040 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
1042 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
1043 reject file names invalid for that file system.
1045 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
1046 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1050 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
1051 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
1052 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
1053 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
1054 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
1055 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
1056 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
1057 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
1059 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
1060 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
1061 the same number of fields are output for each line.
1063 ** Changes in behavior
1065 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
1066 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
1067 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
1070 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
1074 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
1075 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
1076 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1079 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
1083 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
1084 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
1086 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
1087 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
1089 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
1090 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1092 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
1093 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
1094 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
1095 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1097 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
1098 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1100 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
1101 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
1102 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
1104 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
1106 ** Changes in behavior
1108 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
1109 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
1110 to the number of available processors.
1114 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
1117 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
1121 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
1122 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
1123 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
1124 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
1126 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
1127 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
1128 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
1130 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
1131 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1133 ** Changes in behavior
1135 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
1136 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
1138 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
1139 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
1140 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
1141 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
1142 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
1143 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
1145 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
1146 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
1147 the same way as the others.
1149 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
1150 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
1153 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
1157 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
1158 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
1159 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
1161 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
1162 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
1164 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
1165 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
1166 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
1168 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
1169 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
1171 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
1172 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
1174 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
1175 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
1176 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1178 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
1179 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
1180 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
1181 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
1185 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
1186 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
1188 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
1191 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
1192 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
1194 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
1196 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
1197 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
1198 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
1200 ** Changes in behavior
1202 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
1203 rather than its aliased target.
1205 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
1206 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
1207 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
1209 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
1210 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
1211 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
1212 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
1213 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
1214 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
1215 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
1216 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
1218 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
1220 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
1222 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
1223 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
1226 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
1227 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
1228 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
1229 control like taskset for example.
1231 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
1233 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
1234 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
1235 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
1236 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
1237 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
1238 includes %C when context information is available.
1240 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
1241 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
1242 rather than a file system attribute.
1244 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
1245 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
1246 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
1247 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
1249 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
1250 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
1251 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
1253 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
1254 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
1255 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
1258 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
1262 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
1263 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
1265 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
1267 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
1268 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1270 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
1271 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
1272 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
1273 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
1275 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
1276 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
1277 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1281 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
1282 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
1284 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
1285 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
1286 duration after the initial signal was sent.
1288 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
1289 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
1290 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
1291 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
1292 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
1293 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
1294 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
1295 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
1296 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
1298 ** Changes in behavior
1300 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
1301 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1303 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1304 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1307 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1311 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1312 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1313 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1314 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1318 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1319 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1321 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1322 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1323 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1324 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1326 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1327 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1328 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1331 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1335 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1336 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1337 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1339 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1340 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1341 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1343 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1344 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1346 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1347 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1348 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1349 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1351 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1352 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1353 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1355 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1356 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1357 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1358 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1360 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1361 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1362 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1364 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1365 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1366 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1367 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1369 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1370 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1371 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1373 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1374 processes will not intersperse their output.
1375 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1378 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1382 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1383 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1385 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1386 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1388 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1389 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1390 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1391 the presence of the empty string argument.
1392 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1394 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1395 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1396 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1397 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1399 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1400 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1402 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1403 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1404 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1406 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1407 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1408 and with a malicious user on the same system
1409 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1410 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1413 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1417 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1418 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1419 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1421 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1422 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1423 offending directory and all "contents."
1425 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1426 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1427 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1429 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1430 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1431 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1433 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1434 processes will not intersperse their output.
1435 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1436 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1438 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1439 output the name of the file to stdout.
1440 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1442 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1443 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1444 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1446 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1447 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1450 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1451 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1452 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1454 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1455 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1456 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1457 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1458 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1459 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1461 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1462 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1463 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1464 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1466 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1467 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1469 ** Changes in behavior
1471 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1472 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1473 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1474 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1475 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1477 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1478 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1479 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1480 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1482 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1484 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1485 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1486 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1487 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1488 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1492 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1496 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1497 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1499 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1500 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1502 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1503 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1504 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1506 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1507 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1510 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1514 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1515 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1516 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1518 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1519 to accommodate leap seconds.
1520 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1522 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1523 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1524 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1526 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1528 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1529 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1530 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1532 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1533 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1534 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1535 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1536 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1540 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1541 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1542 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1543 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1545 ** Changes in behavior
1547 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1548 environment variable is set.
1550 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1551 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1552 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1556 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1557 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1558 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1559 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1561 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1562 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1563 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1564 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1568 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1569 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1570 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1572 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1573 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1574 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1575 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1576 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1577 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1578 another improvement:
1580 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1581 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1584 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1588 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1589 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1590 and libraries tested at configure time.
1591 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1593 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1594 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1596 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1597 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1599 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1600 printing a summary to stderr.
1601 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1603 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1604 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1605 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1607 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1608 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1610 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1611 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1612 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1613 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1615 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1616 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1617 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1618 which is relatively unusual.
1619 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1621 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1622 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1623 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1624 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1625 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1626 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1627 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1631 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1632 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1633 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1634 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1635 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1639 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1640 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1642 ** Changes in behavior
1644 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1645 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1646 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1647 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1648 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1651 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1655 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1656 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1658 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1659 before data copying has started.
1661 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1662 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1664 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1665 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1666 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1667 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1669 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1670 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1671 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1672 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1674 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1679 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1680 for its standard streams.
1682 ** Changes in behavior
1684 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1685 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1686 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1687 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1688 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1689 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1691 ** Deprecated options
1693 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1694 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1698 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1700 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1701 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1702 a btrfs file system.
1704 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1706 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1707 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1709 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1710 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1713 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1717 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1718 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1719 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1720 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1722 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1723 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1724 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1725 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1726 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1731 make check: two tests have been corrected
1735 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1736 inherited from gnulib.
1739 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1743 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1744 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1745 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1746 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1748 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1749 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1751 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1753 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1754 systems without xattr support.
1756 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1757 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1758 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1760 ** Changes in behavior
1762 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1763 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1764 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1765 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1767 ** Improved robustness
1769 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1770 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1771 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1772 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1773 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1774 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1775 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1776 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1777 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1781 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1782 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1784 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1785 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1786 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1787 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1788 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1791 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1795 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1796 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1797 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1801 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1802 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1803 data was read, or on process exit.
1804 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1806 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1807 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1808 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1809 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1811 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1812 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1813 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1814 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1816 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1817 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1819 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1820 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1822 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1823 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1824 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1826 ** Changes in behavior
1828 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1829 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1830 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1832 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1833 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1835 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1836 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1837 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1840 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1844 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1846 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1847 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1848 install: Never copies xattrs
1850 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1851 from overwriting any existing destination file
1853 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1854 mode where this feature is available.
1856 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1857 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1858 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1859 do not modify the destination at all.
1861 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1863 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1867 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1868 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1870 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1872 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1873 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1875 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1876 processing the first file name
1878 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1879 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1880 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1881 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1883 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1884 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1886 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1887 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1890 ** Changes in behavior
1892 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1893 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1895 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1896 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1897 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1899 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1900 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1902 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1904 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1905 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1906 is still marked with a '+'.
1909 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1913 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1914 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1918 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1919 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1920 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1921 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1922 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1923 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1925 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1926 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1928 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1929 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1931 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1933 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1934 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1935 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1937 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1938 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1940 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1941 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1942 used to factor large numbers.
1944 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1947 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1949 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1951 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1952 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1954 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1955 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1956 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1957 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1959 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1960 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1961 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1963 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1964 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1968 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1970 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1971 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1973 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1974 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1976 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1978 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1979 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1983 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1984 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1985 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1987 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1989 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1990 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1991 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1993 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1994 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1995 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1997 ** Changes in behavior
1999 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
2000 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
2003 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
2007 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
2008 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
2009 'futimens' system calls.
2013 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
2015 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
2016 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
2017 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
2019 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
2020 with no USERNAME argument.
2022 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
2023 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
2024 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
2026 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
2027 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
2028 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
2029 number of fields for some inputs.
2031 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
2032 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
2034 ** Changes in behavior
2036 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
2037 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
2040 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
2044 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
2046 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
2047 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
2048 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
2049 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2051 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
2052 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
2054 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
2055 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
2057 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
2058 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
2060 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
2061 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
2062 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2063 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2065 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
2066 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
2067 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
2068 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
2069 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2070 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
2072 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
2073 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
2075 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
2076 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
2077 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2079 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
2080 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2082 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
2083 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2085 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
2086 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
2087 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
2088 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
2090 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
2091 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
2093 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
2094 in more cases when a directory is empty.
2096 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
2097 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
2098 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2102 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2103 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2105 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
2106 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
2107 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
2108 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
2112 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
2113 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
2115 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
2117 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
2121 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
2122 which have negative errno values.
2126 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
2130 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
2134 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
2135 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
2138 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
2142 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
2143 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
2144 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2146 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
2147 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
2148 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
2149 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2153 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
2154 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
2155 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
2156 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
2159 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
2163 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
2165 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
2166 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
2167 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2170 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
2174 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
2175 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
2177 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
2179 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
2181 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
2183 ** Programs no longer installed by default
2187 ** Changes in behavior
2189 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
2190 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
2192 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
2193 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
2195 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
2196 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
2197 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
2201 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
2202 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
2203 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
2204 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
2205 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
2206 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
2207 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
2208 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
2209 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
2210 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
2211 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
2213 The following commands and options now support the standard size
2214 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
2215 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
2218 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
2221 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
2222 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
2223 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
2225 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
2226 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
2227 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
2230 ** New build options
2232 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
2233 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
2234 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
2235 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
2237 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
2238 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
2239 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
2240 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
2241 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
2242 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
2243 of "make check" fail.
2245 ** Remove deprecated options
2247 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2248 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
2249 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2250 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
2251 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
2253 ** Improved robustness
2255 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
2256 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
2257 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
2258 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
2259 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
2260 loss of the contents of a/f.
2262 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
2263 in its 35-colon command-line argument
2267 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
2268 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
2269 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2271 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
2272 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
2273 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
2274 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2276 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
2277 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
2278 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
2279 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
2280 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
2281 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
2282 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
2283 destination is a symlink.
2285 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
2287 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
2288 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
2290 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
2291 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
2293 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
2295 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
2296 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
2298 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
2299 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
2301 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2304 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2305 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2307 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2308 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2310 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2311 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2312 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2313 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2315 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2316 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2317 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2319 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2320 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2321 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2323 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2324 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2325 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2326 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2328 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2329 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2330 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2332 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2333 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2335 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2336 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2338 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2340 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2341 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2342 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2344 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2345 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2347 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2348 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2350 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2351 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2353 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2354 [present in the original version]
2357 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2361 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2363 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2364 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2365 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2367 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2368 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2370 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2374 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2375 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2377 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2378 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2380 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2381 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2383 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2384 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2385 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2386 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2387 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2388 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2390 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2391 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2394 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2395 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2397 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2400 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2401 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2402 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2404 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2405 directory is unreadable.
2407 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2408 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2409 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2411 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2412 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2413 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2414 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2415 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2418 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2419 Before it would print nothing.
2421 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2423 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2424 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2425 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2426 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2427 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2428 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2429 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2430 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2432 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2436 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2437 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2438 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2440 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2441 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2442 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2443 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2446 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2450 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2451 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2452 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2453 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2454 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2455 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2456 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2458 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2459 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2460 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2461 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2462 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2463 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2464 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2465 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2467 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2468 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2469 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2472 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2476 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2477 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2479 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2480 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2481 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2483 ** Improved robustness
2485 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2486 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2487 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2490 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2494 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2495 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2496 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2497 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2498 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2500 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2504 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2507 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2511 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2512 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2513 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2514 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2516 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2517 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2519 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2520 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2521 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2524 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2526 ** Improved robustness
2528 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2529 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2531 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2532 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2533 or NFS-mounted partition.
2535 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2536 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2540 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2541 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2542 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2543 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2544 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2545 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2547 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2548 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2550 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2551 or neglect to report file removal.
2553 For the "groups" command:
2555 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2556 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2558 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2560 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2562 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2566 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2567 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2570 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2572 ** Changes in behavior
2574 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2575 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2576 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2577 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2579 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2580 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2581 a final './' or '../' component.
2583 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2584 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2585 this only for pipes.
2587 ** Infrastructure changes
2589 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2590 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2591 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2592 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2596 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2597 name is "." or "..".
2599 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2600 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2601 dirent.d_type support.
2603 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2604 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2606 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2607 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2608 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2609 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2612 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2614 ** Changes in behavior
2616 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2620 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2621 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2625 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2626 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2627 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2629 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2630 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2632 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2633 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2635 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2637 ** Improved robustness
2639 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2640 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2641 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2643 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2644 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2647 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2648 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2650 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2651 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2653 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2654 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2656 ** Changes in behavior
2658 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2659 where the two are distinct.
2661 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2662 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2663 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2664 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2665 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2666 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2667 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2668 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2669 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2670 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2671 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2672 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2673 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2674 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2675 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2676 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2677 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2679 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2680 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2681 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2683 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2684 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2685 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2686 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2689 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2690 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2694 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2695 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2696 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2697 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2699 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2700 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2701 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2703 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2704 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2705 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2706 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2707 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2710 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2711 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2713 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2714 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2715 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2716 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2718 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2719 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2720 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2722 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2723 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2724 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2725 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2727 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2728 and sticky) with the -m option.
2730 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2731 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2732 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2733 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2734 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2736 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2737 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2739 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2743 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2744 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2745 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2746 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2748 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2750 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2752 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2753 silently ignoring one of them.
2755 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2756 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2757 containing this change was 5.92.
2759 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2760 automatically newline terminated.
2762 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2763 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2764 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2765 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2768 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2769 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2770 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2773 ** Scheduled for removal
2775 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2776 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2778 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2779 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2780 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2781 command to unlink a directory.
2783 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2784 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2785 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2786 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2790 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2791 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2792 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2793 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2794 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2795 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2799 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2800 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2802 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2804 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2805 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2806 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2808 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2809 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2812 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2813 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2815 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2816 list directories before files.
2818 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2819 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2820 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2821 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2824 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2826 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2828 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2829 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2830 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2832 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2833 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2837 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2838 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2839 usually printing nothing.
2841 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2843 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2844 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2845 them with hard-linked directories.
2847 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2848 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2849 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2851 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2852 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2853 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2855 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2858 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2859 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2861 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2862 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2864 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2865 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2867 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2868 all command-line arguments.
2870 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2872 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2874 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2875 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2877 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2879 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2880 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2881 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2882 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2883 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2885 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2886 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2888 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2889 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2890 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2891 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2893 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2895 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2899 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2900 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2902 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2903 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2905 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2906 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2908 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2909 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2911 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2912 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2914 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2916 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2917 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2918 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2921 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2923 ** Build-related bug fixes
2925 installing .mo files would fail
2928 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2932 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2934 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2937 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2941 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2942 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2946 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2948 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2949 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2951 ** Deprecated options
2953 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2954 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2956 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2960 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2962 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2963 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2964 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2965 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2967 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2970 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2976 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2981 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2983 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2985 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2986 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2987 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2989 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2990 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2991 problematic usages. These include:
2993 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2994 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2995 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2996 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2997 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2998 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2999 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
3000 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
3001 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
3003 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
3004 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
3006 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
3007 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
3008 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
3009 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
3011 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
3012 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
3013 between binary and text files.
3015 The following programs now always use text input/output:
3019 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
3023 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
3024 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
3026 head tac tail tee tr
3027 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
3029 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
3030 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
3032 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
3033 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
3034 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
3036 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
3038 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
3040 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
3041 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
3042 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
3046 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
3048 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
3049 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3051 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
3052 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
3053 blocks until F contains N blocks.
3057 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
3058 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
3062 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
3063 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
3064 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
3068 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
3069 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
3073 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
3075 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
3077 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
3081 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
3082 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
3083 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
3085 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
3086 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
3087 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
3088 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
3089 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
3091 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
3095 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
3096 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
3097 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
3099 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
3101 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
3102 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
3103 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
3104 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
3106 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
3108 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
3109 rather than silently wrapping around.
3111 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
3112 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
3114 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
3115 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
3117 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
3118 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
3119 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
3120 file /tmp/a/b/file".
3122 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
3124 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
3126 ** Improved robustness
3128 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
3129 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
3130 no matter how large the result.
3132 ** Improved portability
3134 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
3135 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
3137 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
3139 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
3140 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
3141 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
3143 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
3144 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
3148 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
3149 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
3151 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
3153 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
3154 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
3155 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
3156 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
3158 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
3159 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
3161 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
3162 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
3163 categories if not specified by dircolors.
3165 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
3167 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
3168 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
3170 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
3171 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
3173 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
3175 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
3176 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
3178 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
3179 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
3181 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
3182 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
3183 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
3185 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
3187 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
3189 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
3193 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
3195 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
3196 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
3197 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
3199 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
3200 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
3202 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
3203 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
3204 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
3206 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
3207 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
3209 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
3210 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
3211 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
3212 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
3214 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
3215 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
3217 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
3218 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
3219 the file system does not support it.
3221 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
3223 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
3224 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
3226 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
3228 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
3229 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
3231 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
3232 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
3233 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
3234 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
3236 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
3237 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
3240 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
3241 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
3242 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
3243 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
3245 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
3246 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
3247 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
3248 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
3250 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
3251 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
3253 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
3255 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
3256 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
3257 reporting incorrect results.
3261 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
3262 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
3264 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
3267 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
3269 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
3270 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
3272 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
3273 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
3275 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
3278 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
3279 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
3280 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
3281 the file name does not look like a page range.
3283 printf has several changes:
3285 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
3286 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
3288 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
3289 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
3290 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
3292 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
3293 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
3296 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
3297 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
3299 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
3300 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
3302 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3304 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3305 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3307 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3309 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3311 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3312 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3313 when first encountering the directory.
3317 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3318 output; POSIX requires this.
3320 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3321 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3323 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3325 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3326 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3328 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3329 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3331 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3332 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3333 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3334 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3335 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3336 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3337 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3339 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3340 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3341 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3343 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3344 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3346 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3348 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3350 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3351 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3352 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3353 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3355 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3359 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3360 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3361 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3362 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3363 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3365 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3366 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3367 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3369 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3370 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3372 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3373 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3375 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3376 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
3377 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
3378 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3379 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
3381 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3382 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3384 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3385 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3387 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3389 nocreat do not create the output file
3390 excl fail if the output file already exists
3391 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3392 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3394 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3396 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3397 direct use direct I/O for data
3398 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3399 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3400 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3401 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3402 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3404 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3406 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3407 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3410 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3411 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3412 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3413 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3414 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3415 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3417 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3418 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3420 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3423 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3425 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3427 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3428 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3430 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3431 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3432 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3434 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3435 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3436 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3438 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3440 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3441 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3443 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3444 for compatibility with bash.
3446 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3448 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3449 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3450 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3451 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3453 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3454 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3456 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3457 ls supports TABSIZE.
3458 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3459 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3460 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3462 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3465 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3467 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3468 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3469 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3470 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3471 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3472 an offset, not as a file name.
3474 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3475 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3477 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3478 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3480 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3481 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3483 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3484 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3485 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3487 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3488 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3490 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3491 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3495 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3497 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3499 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3503 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3504 or more arguments between partitions.
3506 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3507 holes in the destination.
3509 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3510 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3511 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3512 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3513 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3514 terminates immediately.
3516 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3518 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3520 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3521 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3522 not the empty string.
3524 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3525 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3529 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3530 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3531 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3534 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3541 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3545 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3546 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3548 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3549 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3551 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3552 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3553 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3556 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3560 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3561 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3563 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3564 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3566 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3567 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3568 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3570 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3572 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3575 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3577 ** Configuration option
3579 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3580 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3584 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3585 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3589 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3590 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3591 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3594 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3595 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3596 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3597 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3598 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3599 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3600 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3603 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3607 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3608 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3609 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3611 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3612 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3614 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3616 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3617 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3618 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3619 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3621 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3623 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3624 not just the ones that reference directories
3626 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3627 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3629 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3630 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3631 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3633 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3634 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3635 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3636 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3637 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3638 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3640 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3645 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3646 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3648 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3650 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3652 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3654 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3655 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3657 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3658 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3660 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3662 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3666 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3668 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3670 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3671 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3672 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3673 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3674 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3676 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3677 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3679 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3680 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3682 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3683 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3685 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3686 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3687 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3691 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3692 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3693 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3694 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3695 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3696 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3697 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3698 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3699 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3700 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3701 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3702 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3703 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3704 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3706 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3708 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3709 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3711 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3713 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3715 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3716 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3718 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3720 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3721 without a trailing newline.
3723 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3724 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3726 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3729 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3733 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3735 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3737 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3738 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3739 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3740 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3742 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3744 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3745 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3746 be printed without leading spaces.
3748 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3749 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3754 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3755 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3756 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3758 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3760 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3761 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3763 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3764 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3766 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3767 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3769 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3771 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3773 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3775 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3776 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3778 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3780 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3782 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3783 byte offsets are specified.
3786 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3789 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3792 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3793 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3794 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3795 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3796 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3797 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3798 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3799 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3800 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3801 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3802 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3803 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3804 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3805 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3806 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3807 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3808 directory where M has write access.
3809 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3810 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3811 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3814 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3815 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3816 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3817 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3818 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3819 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3820 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3821 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3822 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3823 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3824 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3825 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3826 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3827 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3828 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3829 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3830 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3831 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3832 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3833 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3834 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3835 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3836 appeared one additional time.
3838 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3839 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3840 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3841 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3844 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3845 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3846 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3847 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3848 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3849 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3850 if there were more than 338.
3852 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3853 - false --help now exits nonzero
3856 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3857 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3858 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3859 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3862 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3863 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3864 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3865 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3866 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3869 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3870 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3871 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3872 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3873 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3874 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3875 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3878 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3879 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3880 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3881 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3882 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3883 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3885 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3886 under certain unusual conditions
3887 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3888 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3891 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3892 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3893 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3894 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3895 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3896 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3897 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3898 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3899 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3900 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3901 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3902 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3903 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3904 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3905 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3906 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3909 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3910 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3913 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3914 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3915 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3916 involving hard-linked directories
3917 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3918 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3919 character-special and block files
3922 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3923 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3924 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3925 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3926 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3927 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3928 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3929 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3930 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3932 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3933 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3934 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3935 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3936 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3937 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3938 specified on the command line.
3939 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3940 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3941 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3942 the first file untouched.
3943 * readlink: new program
3944 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3945 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3946 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3947 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3948 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3949 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3952 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3953 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3954 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3955 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3956 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3957 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3958 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3959 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3960 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3961 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3962 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3963 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3965 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3966 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3967 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3969 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3970 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3971 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3972 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3973 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3974 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3975 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3976 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3979 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3980 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3983 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3984 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3985 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3986 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3987 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3988 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3989 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3992 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3993 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3995 ========================================================================
3996 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3997 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4000 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
4002 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4003 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
4004 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
4005 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
4006 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
4007 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
4008 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
4009 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
4010 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
4011 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
4012 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
4013 The old options will continue to work for a while.
4015 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
4016 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
4017 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
4018 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
4020 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
4023 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
4025 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
4026 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
4027 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
4028 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
4029 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
4030 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
4031 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
4034 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
4035 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
4036 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
4037 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
4038 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
4039 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
4040 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
4041 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
4042 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
4043 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
4044 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
4045 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
4046 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
4047 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
4048 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
4049 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
4051 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
4052 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
4054 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
4055 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
4056 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
4057 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
4058 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
4059 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
4061 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
4062 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
4063 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
4064 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
4065 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
4066 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
4067 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
4069 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
4070 the source files in the following example:
4071 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
4072 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
4073 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
4074 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
4075 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
4076 links between source files with --preserve=links
4077 * cp accepts new options:
4078 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
4079 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
4080 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
4081 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
4082 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
4083 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
4084 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
4085 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
4086 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
4088 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
4089 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
4090 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
4091 even though it's older than dest.
4092 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
4093 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
4094 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
4095 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
4096 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
4098 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
4099 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
4100 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
4101 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
4102 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
4103 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
4104 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
4106 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
4107 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
4108 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
4110 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
4111 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
4112 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
4113 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
4114 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
4115 This is the default.
4117 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
4118 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
4119 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
4120 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
4121 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
4123 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
4126 ========================================================================
4127 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
4128 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4131 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
4132 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
4134 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4135 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
4136 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
4137 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
4138 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
4140 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
4141 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
4142 that specifies a non-directory
4145 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
4146 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
4147 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
4148 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
4149 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4150 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
4151 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
4152 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4153 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
4154 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
4155 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
4156 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
4157 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
4158 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
4159 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
4160 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
4161 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
4162 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
4163 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
4164 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
4165 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
4166 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
4167 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
4168 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
4170 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
4171 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
4172 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
4174 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
4176 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
4177 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
4179 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
4180 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
4181 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
4182 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
4183 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
4185 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
4186 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
4187 required support; from Bruno Haible.
4188 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
4189 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
4191 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
4193 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
4194 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
4195 * still more portability fixes
4196 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
4197 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4199 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
4201 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
4203 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
4205 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
4206 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
4207 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
4208 there is any time remaining
4209 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
4211 ========================================================================
4212 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4213 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
4215 This package began as the union of the following:
4216 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
4218 ========================================================================
4220 Copyright (C) 2001-2014 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4222 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
4223 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
4224 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
4225 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
4226 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
4227 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.