1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 On GNU/Linux s390x and alpha, programs like 'cp' and 'ls' no longer
8 fail on files with inode numbers that do not fit into 32 bits.
9 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
11 'b2sum --check' will no longer read unallocated memory when
12 presented with malformed checksum lines.
13 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
15 'cp --parents' again succeeds when preserving mode for absolute directories.
16 Previously it would have failed with a "No such file or directory" error.
17 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
19 cksum again diagnoses read errors in its default CRC32 mode.
20 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
22 'cksum --check' now ensures filenames with a leading backslash character
23 are escaped appropriately in the status output.
24 This also applies to the standalone checksumming utilities.
25 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
27 dd again supports more than two multipliers for numbers.
28 Previously numbers of the form '1024x1024x32' gave "invalid number" errors.
29 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
31 factor, numfmt, and tsort now diagnose read errors on the input.
32 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
34 'install --strip' now supports installing to files with a leading hyphen.
35 Previously such file names would have caused the strip process to fail.
36 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
38 ls now shows symlinks specified on the command line that can't be traversed.
39 Previously a "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic was given.
40 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
42 pinky, uptime, users, and who no longer misbehave on 32-bit GNU/Linux
43 platforms like x86 and ARM where time_t was historically 32 bits.
44 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
46 'pr --length=1 --double-space' no longer enters an infinite loop.
47 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
49 tac now handles short reads on its input. Previously it may have exited
50 erroneously, especially with large input files with no separators.
51 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
53 'uptime' no longer incorrectly prints "0 users" on OpenBSD.
54 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
56 'wc -l' and 'cksum' no longer crash with an "Illegal instruction" error
57 on x86 Linux kernels that disable XSAVE YMM. This was seen on Xen VMs.
58 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
60 ** Changes in behavior
62 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will no longer output a message for each file skipped
63 due to -i, or -u. Instead they only output this information with --debug.
64 I.e., 'cp -u -v' etc. will have the same verbosity as before coreutils-9.3.
66 'cksum -b' no longer prints base64-encoded checksums. Rather that
67 short option is reserved to better support emulation of the standalone
68 checksum utilities with cksum.
70 'mv dir x' now complains differently if x/dir is a nonempty directory.
71 Previously it said "mv: cannot move 'dir' to 'x/dir': Directory not empty",
72 where it was unclear whether 'dir' or 'x/dir' was the problem.
73 Now it says "mv: cannot overwrite 'x/dir': Directory not empty".
74 Similarly for other renames where the destination must be the problem.
75 [problem introduced in coreutils-6.0]
79 cp, mv, and install now avoid copy_file_range on linux kernels before 5.3
80 irrespective of which kernel version coreutils is built against,
81 reinstating that behaviour from coreutils-9.0.
83 comm, cut, join, od, and uniq will now exit immediately upon receiving a
84 write error, which is significant when reading large / unbounded inputs.
86 split now uses more tuned access patterns for its potentially large input.
87 This was seen to improve throughput by 5% when reading from SSD.
89 split now supports a configurable $TMPDIR for handling any temporary files.
91 tac now falls back to '/tmp' if a configured $TMPDIR is unavailable.
94 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.3 (2023-04-18) [stable]
98 cp --reflink=auto (the default), mv, and install
99 will again fall back to a standard copy in more cases.
100 Previously copies could fail with permission errors on
101 more restricted systems like android or containers etc.
102 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
104 cp --recursive --backup will again operate correctly.
105 Previousy it may have issued "File exists" errors when
106 it failed to appropriately rename files being replaced.
107 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
109 date --file and dircolors will now diagnose a failure to read a file.
110 Previously they would have silently ignored the failure.
111 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
113 md5sum --check again correctly prints the status of each file checked.
114 Previously the status for files was printed as 'OK' once any file had passed.
115 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
116 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
118 wc will now diagnose if any total counts have overflowed.
119 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
121 `wc -c` will again correctly update the read offset of inputs.
122 Previously it deduced the size of inputs while leaving the offset unchanged.
123 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
125 Coreutils programs no longer fail for timestamps past the year 2038
126 on obsolete configurations with 32-bit signed time_t, because the
127 build procedure now rejects these configurations.
128 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
130 ** Changes in behavior
132 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now issue an error diagnostic if skipping a file,
133 to correspond with -n inducing a nonzero exit status as of coreutils 9.2.
134 Similarly 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will output a message for each file skipped
135 due to -n, -i, or -u.
139 cp and mv now support --update=none to always skip existing files
140 in the destination, while not affecting the exit status.
141 This is equivalent to the --no-clobber behavior from before v9.2.
144 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.2 (2023-03-20) [stable]
148 'comm --output-delimiter="" --total' now delimits columns in the total
149 line with the NUL character, consistent with NUL column delimiters in
150 the rest of the output. Previously no delimiters were used for the
151 total line in this case.
152 [bug introduced with the --total option in coreutils-8.26]
154 'cp -p' no longer has a security hole when cloning into a dangling
155 symbolic link on macOS 10.12 and later.
156 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
158 'cp -rx / /mnt' no longer complains "cannot create directory /mnt/".
159 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
161 cp, mv, and install avoid allocating too much memory, and possibly
162 triggering "memory exhausted" failures, on file systems like ZFS,
163 which can return varied file system I/O block size values for files.
164 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
166 cp, mv, and install now immediately acknowledge transient errors
167 when creating copy-on-write or cloned reflink files, on supporting
168 file systems like XFS, BTRFS, APFS, etc.
169 Previously they would have tried again with other copy methods
170 which may have resulted in data corruption.
171 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5 and enabled by default in coreutils-9.0]
173 cp, mv, and install now handle ENOENT failures across CIFS file systems,
174 falling back from copy_file_range to a better supported standard copy.
175 [issue introduced in coreutils-9.0]
177 'mv --backup=simple f d/' no longer mistakenly backs up d/f to f~.
178 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
180 rm now fails gracefully when memory is exhausted.
181 Previously it may have aborted with a failed assertion in some cases.
182 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
184 rm -d (--dir) now properly handles unreadable empty directories.
185 E.g., before, this would fail to remove d: mkdir -m0 d; src/rm -d d
186 [bug introduced in v8.19 with the addition of this option]
188 runcon --compute no longer looks up the specified command in the $PATH
189 so that there is no mismatch between the inspected and executed file.
190 [bug introduced when runcon was introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
192 'sort -g' no longer infloops when given multiple NaNs on platforms
193 like x86_64 where 'long double' has padding bits in memory.
194 Although the fix alters sort -g's NaN ordering, that ordering has
195 long been documented to be platform-dependent.
196 [bug introduced 1999-05-02 and only partly fixed in coreutils-8.14]
198 stty ispeed and ospeed options no longer accept and silently ignore
199 invalid speed arguments, or give false warnings for valid speeds.
200 Now they're validated against both the general accepted set,
201 and the system supported set of valid speeds.
202 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
204 stty now wraps output appropriately for the terminal width.
205 Previously it may have output 1 character too wide for certain widths.
206 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3]
208 tail --follow=name works again with non seekable files. Previously it
209 exited with an "Illegal seek" error when such a file was replaced.
210 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
212 'wc -c' will again efficiently determine the size of large files
213 on all systems. It no longer redundantly reads data from certain
214 sized files larger than SIZE_MAX.
215 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
217 ** Changes in behavior
219 Programs now support the new Ronna (R), and Quetta (Q) SI prefixes,
220 corresponding to 10^27 and 10^30 respectively,
221 along with their binary counterparts Ri (2^90) and Qi (2^100).
222 In some cases (e.g., 'sort -h') these new prefixes simply work;
223 in others, where they exceed integer width limits, they now elicit
224 the same integer overflow diagnostics as other large prefixes.
226 'cp --reflink=always A B' no longer leaves behind a newly created
227 empty file B merely because copy-on-write clones are not supported.
229 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now exit with nonzero status if they skip their
230 action because the destination exists, and likewise for 'cp -i',
231 'ln -i', and 'mv -i' when the user declines. (POSIX specifies this
232 for 'cp -i' and 'mv -i'.)
234 cp, mv, and install again read in multiples of the reported block size,
235 to support unusual devices that may have this constraint.
236 [behavior inadvertently changed in coreutils-7.2]
238 du --apparent now counts apparent sizes only of regular files and
239 symbolic links. POSIX does not specify the meaning of apparent
240 sizes (i.e., st_size) for other file types, and counting those sizes
241 could cause confusing and unwanted size mismatches.
243 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' go back to sorting ".0" before ".A",
244 reverting to the behavior in coreutils-9.0 and earlier.
245 This behavior is now documented.
247 ls --color now matches a file extension case sensitively
248 if there are different sequences defined for separate cases.
250 printf unicode \uNNNN, \UNNNNNNNN syntax, now supports all valid
251 unicode code points. Previously is was restricted to the C
252 universal character subset, which restricted most points <= 0x9F.
254 runcon now exits with status 125 for internal errors. Previously upon
255 internal errors it would exit with status 1, which was less distinguishable
256 from errors from the invoked command.
258 'split -n N' now splits more evenly when the input size is not a
259 multiple of N, by creating N output files whose sizes differ by at
260 most 1 byte. Formerly, it did this only when the input size was
263 'stat -c %s' now prints sizes as unsigned, consistent with 'ls'.
267 cksum now accepts the --base64 (-b) option to print base64-encoded
268 checksums. It also accepts/checks such checksums.
270 cksum now accepts the --raw option to output a raw binary checksum.
271 No file name or other information is output in this mode.
273 cp, mv, and install now accept the --debug option to
274 print details on how a file is being copied.
276 factor now accepts the --exponents (-h) option to print factors
277 in the form p^e, rather than repeating the prime p, e times.
279 ls now supports the --time=modification option, to explicitly
280 select the default mtime timestamp for display and sorting.
282 mv now supports the --no-copy option, which causes it to fail when
283 asked to move a file to a different file system.
285 split now accepts options like '-n SIZE' that exceed machine integer
286 range, when they can be implemented as if they were infinity.
288 split -n now accepts piped input even when not in round-robin mode,
289 by first copying input to a temporary file to determine its size.
291 wc now accepts the --total={auto,never,always,only} option
292 to give explicit control over when the total is output.
296 cp --sparse=auto (the default), mv, and install,
297 will use the copy_file_range syscall now also with sparse files.
298 This may be more efficient, by avoiding user space copies,
299 and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking,
300 for the non sparse portion of such sparse files.
302 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone in more cases.
303 Previously cp would only do this when preserving mode and timestamps.
305 date --debug now diagnoses if multiple --date or --set options are
306 specified, as only the last specified is significant in that case.
308 rm outputs more accurate diagnostics in the presence of errors
309 when removing directories. For example EIO will be faithfully
310 diagnosed, rather than being conflated with ENOTEMPTY.
312 tail --follow=name now works with single non regular files even
313 when their modification time doesn't change when new data is available.
314 Previously tail would not show any new data in this case.
316 tee -p detects when all remaining outputs have become broken pipes, and
317 exits, rather than waiting for more input to induce an exit when written.
319 tee now handles non blocking outputs, which can be seen for example with
320 telnet or mpirun piping through tee to a terminal.
321 Previously tee could truncate data written to such an output and fail,
322 and also potentially output a "Resource temporarily unavailable" error.
325 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.1 (2022-04-15) [stable]
329 chmod -R no longer exits with error status when encountering symlinks.
330 All files would be processed correctly, but the exit status was incorrect.
331 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
333 If 'cp -Z A B' checks B's status and some other process then removes B,
334 cp no longer creates B with a too-generous SELinux security context
335 before adjusting it to the correct value.
336 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
338 'cp --preserve=ownership A B' no longer ignores the umask when creating B.
339 Also, 'cp --preserve-xattr A B' is less likely to temporarily chmod u+w B.
340 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.7]
342 On macOS, 'cp A B' no longer miscopies when A is in an APFS file system
343 and B is in some other file system.
344 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
346 On macOS, fmt no longer corrupts multi-byte characters
347 by misdetecting their component bytes as spaces.
348 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
350 'id xyz' now uses the name 'xyz' to determine groups, instead of xyz's uid.
351 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
353 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' no longer mishandle corner cases like "a..a" vs "a.+"
354 or lines containing NULs. Their behavior now matches the documentation
355 for file names like ".m4" that consist entirely of an extension,
356 and the documentation has been clarified for unusual cases.
357 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
359 On macOS, 'mv A B' no longer fails with "Operation not supported"
360 when A and B are in the same tmpfs file system.
361 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
363 'mv -T --backup=numbered A B/' no longer miscalculates the backup number
364 for B when A is a directory, possibly inflooping.
365 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.3]
367 ** Changes in behavior
369 cat now uses the copy_file_range syscall if available, when doing
370 simple copies between regular files. This may be more efficient, by avoiding
371 user space copies, and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking.
373 chown and chroot now warn about usages like "chown root.root f",
374 which have the nonstandard and long-obsolete "." separator that
375 causes problems on platforms where user names contain ".".
376 Applications should use ":" instead of ".".
378 cksum no longer allows abbreviated algorithm names,
379 so that forward compatibility and robustness is improved.
381 date +'%-N' now suppresses excess trailing digits, instead of always
382 padding them with zeros to 9 digits. It uses clock_getres and
383 clock_gettime to infer the clock resolution.
385 dd conv=fsync now synchronizes output even after a write error,
386 and similarly for dd conv=fdatasync.
388 dd now counts bytes instead of blocks if a block count ends in "B".
389 For example, 'dd count=100KiB' now copies 100 KiB of data, not
390 102,400 blocks of data. The flags count_bytes, skip_bytes and
391 seek_bytes are therefore obsolescent and are no longer documented,
392 though they still work.
394 ls no longer colors files with capabilities by default, as file-based
395 capabilties are very rarely used, and lookup increases processing per file by
396 about 30%. It's best to use getcap [-r] to identify files with capabilities.
398 ls no longer tries to automount files, reverting to the behavior
399 before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
401 stat no longer tries to automount files by default, reverting to the
402 behavior before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
403 Only `stat --cached=never` will continue to automount files.
405 timeout --foreground --kill-after=... will now exit with status 137
406 if the kill signal was sent, which is consistent with the behavior
407 when the --foreground option is not specified. This allows users to
408 distinguish if the command was more forcefully terminated.
412 dd now supports the aliases iseek=N for skip=N, and oseek=N for seek=N,
413 like FreeBSD and other operating systems.
415 dircolors takes a new --print-ls-colors option to display LS_COLORS
416 entries, on separate lines, colored according to the entry color code.
418 dircolors will now also match COLORTERM in addition to TERM environment
419 variables. The default config will apply colors with any COLORTERM set.
423 cp, mv, and install now use openat-like syscalls when copying to a directory.
424 This avoids some race conditions and should be more efficient.
426 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone if source and destination
427 are regular files on the same APFS file system, the destination does
428 not already exist, and cp is preserving mode and timestamps (e.g.,
431 The new 'date' option --resolution outputs the timestamp resolution.
433 With conv=fdatasync or conv=fsync, dd status=progress now reports
434 any extra final progress just before synchronizing output data,
435 since synchronizing can take a long time.
437 printf now supports printing the numeric value of multi-byte characters.
439 sort --debug now diagnoses issues with --field-separator characters
440 that conflict with characters possibly used in numbers.
442 'tail -f file | filter' now exits on Solaris when filter exits.
444 root invoked coreutils, that are built and run in single binary mode,
445 now adjust /proc/$pid/cmdline to be more specific to the utility
446 being run, rather than using the general "coreutils" binary name.
450 AIX builds no longer fail because some library functions are not found.
451 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.32]
454 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.0 (2021-09-24) [stable]
458 chmod -v no longer misreports modes of dangling symlinks.
459 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
461 cp -a --attributes-only now never removes destination files,
462 even if the destination files are hardlinked, or the source
463 is a non regular file.
464 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
466 csplit --suppress-matched now elides the last matched line
467 when a specific number of pattern matches are performed.
468 [bug introduced with the --suppress-matched feature in coreutils-8.22]
470 df no longer outputs duplicate remote mounts in the presence of bind mounts.
471 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
473 df no longer mishandles command-line args that it pre-mounts
474 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.29]
476 du no longer crashes on XFS file systems when the directory hierarchy is
477 heavily changed during the run.
478 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
480 env -S no longer crashes when given unusual whitespace characters
481 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.30]
483 expr no longer mishandles unmatched \(...\) in regular expressions.
484 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
486 ls no longer crashes when printing the SELinux context for unstatable files.
487 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.91]
489 mkdir -m no longer mishandles modes more generous than the umask.
490 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
492 nl now handles single character --section-delimiter arguments,
493 by assuming a second ':' character has been specified, as specified by POSIX.
494 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
496 pr again adjusts tabs in input, to maintain alignment in multi column output.
497 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
499 rm no longer skips an extra file when the removal of an empty directory fails.
500 [bug introduced by the rewrite to use fts in coreutils-8.0]
502 split --number=K/N will again correctly split chunk K of N to stdout.
503 Previously a chunk starting after 128KiB, output the wrong part of the file.
504 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
506 tail -f no longer overruns a stack buffer when given too many files
507 to follow and ulimit -n exceeds 1024.
508 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
510 tr no longer crashes when using --complement with certain
511 invalid combinations of case character classes.
512 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
514 basenc --base64 --decode no longer silently discards decoded characters
515 on (1024*5) buffer boundaries
516 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
518 ** Changes in behavior
520 cp and install now default to copy-on-write (COW) if available.
521 I.e., cp now uses --reflink=auto mode by default.
523 cp, install and mv now use the copy_file_range syscall if available.
524 Also, they use lseek+SEEK_HOLE rather than ioctl+FS_IOC_FIEMAP on sparse
525 files, as lseek is simpler and more portable.
527 On GNU/Linux systems, ls no longer issues an error message on a
528 directory merely because it was removed. This reverts a change
529 that was made in release 8.32.
531 ptx -T no longer attempts to substitute old-fashioned TeX escapes
532 for 8-bit non-ASCII alphabetic characters. TeX indexes should
533 instead use '\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}' or equivalent.
535 stat will use decomposed (major,minor) device numbers in its default format.
536 This is less ambiguous, and more consistent with ls.
538 sum [-r] will output a file name, even if only a single name is passed.
539 This is consistent with sum -s, cksum, and other sum(1) implementations.
543 cksum now supports the -a (--algorithm) option to select any
544 of the existing sum, md5sum, b2sum, sha*sum implementations etc.
545 cksum now subsumes all of these programs, and coreutils
546 will introduce no future standalone checksum utility.
548 cksum -a now supports the 'sm3' argument, to use the SM3 digest algorithm.
550 cksum --check now supports auto detecting the digest type to use,
551 when verifying tagged format checksums.
553 expr and factor now support bignums on all platforms.
555 ls --classify now supports the "always", "auto", or "never" flags,
556 to support only outputting classifier characters if connected to a tty.
558 ls now accepts the --sort=width option, to sort by file name width.
559 This is useful to more compactly organize the default vertical column output.
561 ls now accepts the --zero option, to terminate each output line with
562 NUL instead of newline.
564 nl --line-increment can now take a negative number to decrement the count.
566 stat supports more formats for representing decomposed device numbers.
567 %Hd,%Ld and %Hr,%Lr will output major,minor device numbers and device types
568 respectively. %d corresponds to st_dev and %r to std_rdev.
572 cat --show-ends will now show \r\n as ^M$. Previously the \r was taken
573 literally, thus overwriting the first character in the line with '$'.
575 cksum [-a crc] is now up to 4 times faster by using a slice by 8 algorithm,
576 and at least 8 times faster where pclmul instructions are supported.
577 A new --debug option will indicate if pclmul is being used.
579 md5sum --check now supports checksum files with CRLF line endings.
580 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
582 df now recognizes these file systems as remote:
583 acfs, coda, fhgfs, gpfs, ibrix, ocfs2, and vxfs.
585 rmdir now clarifies the error if a symlink_to_dir/ has not been traversed.
586 This is the case on GNU/Linux systems, where the trailing slash is ignored.
588 stat and tail now know about the "devmem", "exfat", "secretmem", "vboxsf",
589 and "zonefs" file system types. stat -f -c%T now reports the file system
590 type, and tail -f uses polling for "vboxsf" and inotify for the others.
592 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts on macOS.
594 wc is up to 5 times faster when counting only new line characters,
595 where avx2 instructions are supported.
596 A new --debug option will indicate if avx2 is being used.
599 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.32 (2020-03-05) [stable]
603 cp now copies /dev/fd/N correctly on platforms like Solaris where
604 it is a character-special file whose minor device number is N.
605 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
607 dd conv=fdatasync no longer reports a "Bad file descriptor" error
608 when fdatasync is interrupted, and dd now retries interrupted calls
609 to close, fdatasync, fstat and fsync instead of incorrectly
610 reporting an "Interrupted system call" error.
611 [bugs introduced in coreutils-6.0]
613 df now correctly parses the /proc/self/mountinfo file for unusual entries
614 like ones with '\r' in a field value ("mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /foo$'\r'bar"),
615 when the source field is empty ('mount -t tmpfs "" /mnt'), and when the
616 filesystem type contains characters like a blank which need escaping.
617 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.24 with the introduction of reading
618 the /proc/self/mountinfo file]
620 factor again outputs immediately when stdout is a tty but stdin is not.
621 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
623 ln works again on old systems without O_DIRECTORY support (like Solaris 10),
624 and on systems where symlink ("x", ".") fails with errno == EINVAL
625 (like Solaris 10 and Solaris 11).
626 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
628 rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty now works correctly for directories
629 that fail to be removed due to permission issues. Previously the exit status
630 was reversed, failing for non empty and succeeding for empty directories.
631 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
633 'shuf -r -n 0 file' no longer mistakenly reads from standard input.
634 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
636 split no longer reports a "output file suffixes exhausted" error
637 when the specified number of files is evenly divisible by 10, 16, 26,
638 for --numeric, --hex, or default alphabetic suffixes respectively.
639 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
641 seq no longer prints an extra line under certain circumstances (such as
642 'seq -f "%g " 1000000 1000000').
643 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.10]
645 ** Changes in behavior
647 Several programs now check that numbers end properly. For example,
648 'du -d 1x' now reports an error instead of silently ignoring the 'x'.
649 Affected programs and options include du -d, expr's numeric operands
650 on non-GMP builds, install -g and -o, ls's TABSIZE environment
651 variable, mknod b and c, ptx -g and -w, shuf -n, and sort --batch-size
654 date now parses military time zones in accordance with common usage:
655 "A" to "M" are equivalent to UTC+1 to UTC+12
656 "N" to "Y" are equivalent to UTC-1 to UTC-12
657 "Z" is "zulu" time (UTC).
658 For example, 'date -d "09:00B" is now equivalent to 9am in UTC+2 time zone.
659 Previously, military time zones were parsed according to the obsolete
660 rfc822, with their value negated (e.g., "B" was equivalent to UTC-2).
661 [The old behavior was introduced in sh-utils 2.0.15 ca. 1999, predating
664 date now pads nanoseconds on the right, not the left. For example,
665 if the time is currently 1590020079.003388470 seconds after the
666 Epoch, then "date '+%s.%-N'" formerly output "1590020079.3388470",
667 and it now outputs "1590020079.00338847".
669 ls issues an error message on a removed directory, on GNU/Linux systems.
670 Previously no error and no entries were output, and so indistinguishable
671 from an empty directory, with default ls options.
673 uniq no longer uses strcoll() to determine string equivalence,
674 and so will operate more efficiently and consistently.
678 ls now supports the --time=birth option to display and sort by
679 file creation time, where available.
681 od --skip-bytes now can use lseek even if the input is not a regular
682 file, greatly improving performance in some cases.
684 stat(1) supports a new --cached= option, used on systems with statx(2)
685 to control cache coherency of file system attributes,
686 useful on network file systems.
690 stat and ls now use the statx() system call where available, which can
691 operate more efficiently by only retrieving requested attributes.
693 stat and tail now know about the "binderfs", "dma-buf-fs", "erofs",
694 "ppc-cmm-fs", and "z3fold" file systems.
695 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
699 gzip-compressed tarballs are distributed once again
702 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.31 (2019-03-10) [stable]
706 'base64 a b' now correctly diagnoses 'b' as the extra operand, not 'a'.
707 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
709 When B already exists, 'cp -il A B' no longer immediately fails
710 after asking the user whether to proceed.
711 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
713 df no longer corrupts displayed multibyte characters on macOS.
714 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.18]
716 seq no longer outputs inconsistent decimal point characters
717 for the last number, when locales are misconfigured.
718 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
720 shred, sort, and split no longer falsely report ftruncate errors
721 when outputting to less-common file types. For example, the shell
722 command 'sort /dev/null -o /dev/stdout | cat' no longer fails with
723 an "error truncating" diagnostic.
724 [bug was introduced with coreutils-8.18 for sort and split, and
725 (for shared memory objects only) with fileutils-4.1 for shred]
727 sync no longer fails for write-only file arguments.
728 [bug introduced with argument support to sync in coreutils-8.24]
730 'tail -f file | filter' no longer exits immediately on AIX.
731 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
733 'tail -f file | filter' no longer goes into an infinite loop
734 if filter exits and SIGPIPE is ignored.
735 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
737 ** Changes in behavior
739 cksum, dd, hostid, hostname, link, logname, sleep, tsort, unlink,
740 uptime, users, whoami, yes: now always process --help and --version options,
741 regardless of any other arguments present before any optional '--'
742 end-of-options marker.
744 nohup now processes --help and --version as first options even if other
747 'yes a -- b' now outputs 'a b' instead of including the end-of-options
748 marker as before: 'a -- b'.
750 echo now always processes backslash escapes when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
751 environment variable is set.
753 When possible 'ln A B' now merely links A to B and reports an error
754 if this fails, instead of statting A and B before linking. This
755 uses fewer system calls and avoids some races. The old statting
756 approach is still used in situations where hard links to directories
757 are allowed (e.g., NetBSD when superuser).
759 ls --group-directories-first will also group symlinks to directories.
761 'test -a FILE' is not supported anymore. Long ago, there were concerns about
762 the high probability of humans confusing the -a primary with the -a binary
763 operator, so POSIX changed this to 'test -e FILE'. Scripts using it were
764 already broken and non-portable; the -a unary operator was never documented.
766 wc now treats non breaking space characters as word delimiters
767 unless the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set.
771 id now supports specifying multiple users.
773 'date' now supports the '+' conversion specification flag,
774 introduced in POSIX.1-2017.
776 printf, seq, sleep, tail, and timeout now accept floating point
777 numbers in either the current or the C locale. For example, if the
778 current locale's decimal point is ',', 'sleep 0,1' and 'sleep 0.1'
779 now mean the same thing. Previously, these commands accepted only
780 C-locale syntax with '.' as the decimal point. The new behavior is
781 more compatible with other implementations in non-C locales.
783 test now supports the '-N FILE' unary operator (like e.g. bash) to check
784 whether FILE exists and has been modified since it was last read.
786 env now supports '--default-signal[=SIG]', '--ignore-signal[=SIG]', and
787 '--block-signal[=SIG], to setup signal handling before executing a program.
789 env now supports '--list-signal-handling' to indicate non-default
790 signal handling before executing a program.
794 basenc is added to complement existing base64,base32 commands,
795 and encodes and decodes printable text using various common encodings:
796 base64,base64url,base32,base32hex,base16,base2,z85.
800 ls -l now better aligns abbreviated months containing digits,
801 which is common in Asian locales.
803 stat and tail now know about the "sdcardfs" file system on Android.
804 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
806 stat now prints file creation time when supported by the file system,
807 on GNU Linux systems with glibc >= 2.28 and kernel >= 4.11.
810 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.30 (2018-07-01) [stable]
814 'cp --symlink SRC DST' will again correctly validate DST.
815 If DST is a regular file and SRC is a symlink to DST,
816 then cp will no longer allow that operation to clobber DST.
817 Also with -d, if DST is a symlink, then it can always be replaced,
818 even if it points to SRC on a separate device.
819 [bugs introduced with coreutils-8.27]
821 'cp -n -u' and 'mv -n -u' now consistently ignore the -u option.
822 Previously, this option combination suffered from race conditions
823 that caused -u to sometimes override -n.
824 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
826 'cp -a --no-preserve=mode' now sets appropriate default permissions
827 for non regular files like fifos and character device nodes etc.,
828 and leaves mode bits of existing files unchanged.
829 Previously it would have set executable bits on created special files,
830 and set mode bits for existing files as if they had been created.
831 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.20]
833 'cp --remove-destination file symlink' now removes the symlink
834 even if it can't be traversed.
835 [bug introduced with --remove-destination in fileutils-4.1.1]
837 ls no longer truncates the abbreviated month names that have a
838 display width between 6 and 12 inclusive. Previously this would have
839 output ambiguous months for Arabic or Catalan locales.
841 'ls -aA' is now equivalent to 'ls -A', since -A now overrides -a.
842 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
844 'mv -n A B' no longer suffers from a race condition that can
845 overwrite a simultaneously-created B. This bug fix requires
846 platform support for the renameat2 or renameatx_np syscalls, found
847 in recent Linux and macOS kernels. As a side effect, 'mv -n A A'
848 now silently does nothing if A exists.
849 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
851 ** Changes in behavior
853 'cp --force file symlink' now removes the symlink even if
854 it is self referential.
856 ls --color now matches file extensions case insensitively.
860 cp --reflink now supports --reflink=never to enforce a standard copy.
862 env supports a new -v/--debug option to show verbose information about
863 each processing step.
865 env supports a new -S/--split-string=S option to split a single argument
866 string into multiple arguments. Used to pass multiple arguments in scripts
869 md5sum accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output lines with a
870 NUL instead of a newline character. This also disables file name escaping.
871 This also applies to sha*sum and b2sum.
873 rm --preserve-root now supports the --preserve-root=all option to
874 reject any command line argument that is mounted to a separate file system.
878 cut supports line lengths up to the max file size on 32 bit systems.
879 Previously only offsets up to SIZE_MAX-1 were supported.
881 stat and tail now know about the "exfs" file system, which is a
882 version of XFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type,
883 and tail -f uses inotify.
885 wc avoids redundant processing of ASCII text in multibyte locales,
886 which is especially significant on macOS.
889 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.29 (2017-12-27) [stable]
893 b2sum no longer crashes when processing certain truncated check files.
894 [bug introduced with b2sum coreutils-8.26]
896 dd now ensures the correct cache ranges are specified for the "nocache"
897 and "direct" flags. Previously some pages in the page cache were not
898 invalidated. [bug introduced for "direct" in coreutils-7.5,
899 and with the "nocache" implementation in coreutils-8.11]
901 df no longer hangs when given a fifo argument.
902 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
904 ptx -S no longer infloops for a pattern which returns zero-length matches.
905 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
907 shred --remove will again repeatedly rename files with shortening names
908 to attempt to hide the original length of the file name.
909 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
911 stty no longer crashes when processing settings with -F also specified.
912 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
914 tail --bytes again supports non seekable inputs on all systems.
915 On systems like android it always tried to process as seekable inputs.
916 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
918 timeout will again notice its managed command exiting, even when
919 invoked with blocked CHLD signal, or in a narrow window where
920 this CHLD signal from the exiting child was missed. In each case
921 timeout would have then waited for the time limit to expire.
922 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
926 timeout now supports the --verbose option to diagnose forced termination.
930 dd now supports iflag=direct with arbitrary sized files on all file systems.
932 tail --bytes=NUM will efficiently seek to the end of block devices,
933 rather than reading from the start.
935 Utilities which do not support long options (other than the default --help
936 and --version), e.g. cksum and sleep, now use more consistent error diagnostic
937 for unknown long options.
941 Default man pages are now distributed which are used if perl is
942 not available on the build system, or when cross compiling.
945 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.28 (2017-09-01) [stable]
949 cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
950 Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
951 mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
952 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
954 When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
955 races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances. Since
956 the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
957 later, the races are still present on other platforms.
958 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
960 cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
961 backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
962 E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
963 now fails instead of losing the data.
964 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
966 cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
967 For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix='' are now no-ops.
968 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
970 date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
971 user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
972 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
974 dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
975 consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
976 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
978 df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
979 specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
980 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
982 df no longer interacts with dummy file system types, so for example
983 no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounted via system.automount(5).
984 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
986 `groups inva:lid root` no longer exits immediately upon failure.
987 Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
988 [bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]
990 kill now converts from number to signal name correctly on AIX.
991 Previously it would have always returned the 'EXIT' name.
992 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
994 ls now quotes symlink targets consistently. Previously it may not
995 have quoted the target name if the link name itself didn't need quoting.
996 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
998 split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
999 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1001 md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
1002 ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
1003 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
1005 tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
1006 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1008 tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
1009 Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
1010 or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
1011 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1013 tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
1014 non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
1015 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1017 uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
1018 as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
1019 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1021 expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
1022 number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.
1026 expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
1027 by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
1028 useful for visualizing diff output for example.
1030 ls supports a new --hyperlink[=when] option to output file://
1031 format links to files, supported by some terminals.
1033 split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
1034 lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
1036 env now has a --chdir (-C) option to change the working directory before
1037 executing the subsidiary program.
1039 expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.
1041 ** Changes in behavior
1043 tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped and the reader of
1044 the pipe terminates. That allows `tail -f file | grep -q foo` to return
1045 responsively, but does make `tail -f file | :` exit immediately without
1046 waiting for data. Instead one should now `tail -f file | grep -q .`
1050 mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
1052 stat -f -c %l, used to output the max file name length on a file system,
1053 is now supported on FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
1055 tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
1056 when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
1057 is effective in this case.
1060 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
1064 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
1065 as appropriate for the -a, --preseve=context, or -Z options.
1066 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
1068 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
1069 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
1070 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1072 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
1073 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
1074 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1076 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
1077 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
1078 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1080 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
1081 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
1082 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1084 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
1085 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
1086 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
1087 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
1088 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
1090 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
1091 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
1092 depending on the size of the first file processed.
1093 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1097 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
1098 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
1099 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
1100 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
1102 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
1103 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
1104 time zone is indeterminate.
1106 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
1107 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
1108 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
1109 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
1111 stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
1112 to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
1113 file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
1115 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
1116 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
1118 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
1119 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
1120 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
1124 expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
1125 after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
1126 specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
1129 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
1133 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
1134 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
1137 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
1138 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
1139 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1141 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
1142 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
1143 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1144 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
1145 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1147 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
1148 System V style platforms where this information is available only
1149 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1151 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
1152 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1154 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
1155 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
1156 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1158 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
1159 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
1160 defaults to a different SELinux context.
1162 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
1163 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1165 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
1166 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
1167 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
1169 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
1170 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1172 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
1173 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
1174 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
1176 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
1178 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
1179 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1181 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
1182 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
1184 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
1185 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1187 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
1188 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1190 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
1191 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
1192 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
1193 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1195 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
1196 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
1197 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1199 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
1200 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
1201 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
1203 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
1204 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
1205 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1207 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
1208 only doing so if --retry is specified.
1209 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1211 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
1212 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1214 ** Changes in behavior
1216 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
1218 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
1219 values for any argument.
1221 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
1222 they are out of localtime range.
1224 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
1225 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
1226 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
1227 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
1231 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
1232 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
1233 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
1235 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
1236 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
1238 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
1239 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
1241 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
1243 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
1244 written to a terminal.
1246 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
1247 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
1249 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
1250 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
1251 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
1252 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
1253 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
1254 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
1255 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
1256 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
1257 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
1258 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
1259 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
1261 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
1262 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
1266 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
1267 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
1271 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
1273 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
1274 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
1276 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
1279 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
1283 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
1284 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
1285 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
1286 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1288 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
1289 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1291 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
1292 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
1293 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
1295 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
1296 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1298 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
1299 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
1300 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1302 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
1303 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1305 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
1306 that specify an offset for the first field.
1307 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
1309 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
1310 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1314 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
1315 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
1319 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
1320 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
1322 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
1323 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
1324 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
1325 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
1326 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
1328 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
1329 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
1330 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1332 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
1333 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
1334 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
1336 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
1337 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
1339 ** Changes in behavior
1341 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
1342 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
1344 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
1345 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
1347 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
1348 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
1350 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
1351 when outputting to a terminal.
1353 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
1357 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
1358 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
1360 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
1361 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
1363 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
1364 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
1365 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1367 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
1368 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
1370 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
1371 upon detection of a directory cycle.
1372 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1374 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
1376 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
1377 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
1378 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
1380 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
1381 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
1384 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
1388 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
1389 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
1391 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
1392 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1394 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
1395 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1396 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
1398 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
1399 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
1400 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
1401 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
1403 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
1404 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
1405 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
1406 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
1408 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
1409 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1411 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
1412 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
1414 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
1415 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
1416 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
1418 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
1419 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
1420 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1422 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
1423 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
1424 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1426 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
1427 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
1428 character at the 4GiB position.
1429 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1431 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
1432 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1434 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
1435 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1437 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
1438 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
1439 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1441 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
1442 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1444 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
1445 replaced before inotify watches were created.
1446 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1448 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
1449 [bug introduced in the beginning]
1451 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
1452 when those files are being created or renamed.
1453 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1457 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
1458 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
1459 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
1460 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
1462 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
1463 on stderr approximately every second.
1465 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
1466 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
1468 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
1469 other than the default newline character.
1471 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
1472 a useful setting with high latency links.
1474 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
1475 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
1477 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
1478 and output errors in general.
1480 ** Changes in behavior
1482 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
1483 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
1484 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
1485 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1487 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
1488 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
1489 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
1490 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
1491 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
1493 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
1494 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
1496 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
1498 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
1499 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
1501 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
1502 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
1506 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
1507 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
1509 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
1510 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
1512 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
1513 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
1515 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1516 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
1518 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
1520 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
1521 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
1522 documentation are provided.
1525 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
1529 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
1530 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1532 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
1533 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
1534 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
1535 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1537 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
1538 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
1539 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
1540 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1542 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
1543 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
1545 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
1546 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
1548 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
1549 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
1550 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
1551 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
1552 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
1553 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
1554 values are in octal.
1567 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1569 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
1570 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
1571 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
1572 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
1573 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
1574 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1576 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
1577 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
1578 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
1579 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1581 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
1582 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1583 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1585 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
1586 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
1587 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
1588 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
1590 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
1591 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
1592 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1594 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
1595 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
1596 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1598 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
1599 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
1600 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
1601 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
1602 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1604 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
1605 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
1606 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1608 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
1609 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
1611 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
1612 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
1613 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1615 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
1616 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1618 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
1619 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1621 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
1622 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
1624 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
1625 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
1627 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
1628 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
1629 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1631 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
1632 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1636 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
1637 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
1639 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
1640 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
1641 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
1642 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
1643 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
1644 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
1645 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
1646 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
1647 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
1648 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
1649 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
1650 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
1651 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
1652 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
1653 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
1654 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
1655 it suitable for embedded system.
1657 ** Changes in behavior
1659 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
1660 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
1662 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
1663 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
1665 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
1666 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
1667 will result in the delayed output of lines.
1669 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
1670 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
1671 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
1675 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
1676 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
1677 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
1679 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
1681 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
1682 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
1683 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
1685 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
1686 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
1687 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
1688 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
1690 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
1691 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
1693 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
1694 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
1695 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1698 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
1702 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
1703 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
1704 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1706 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
1707 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
1708 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
1709 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1711 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
1712 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
1713 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1715 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
1716 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
1718 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1720 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
1721 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
1722 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
1724 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
1725 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
1726 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1728 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
1729 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
1730 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
1731 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1733 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
1734 from the source, when copying across file systems.
1735 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1737 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
1738 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
1739 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1741 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
1742 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1744 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
1745 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
1746 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
1747 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1749 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
1750 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
1751 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1753 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
1754 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
1755 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1759 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
1760 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
1761 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
1763 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
1764 used to identify the split points.
1766 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
1767 command line argument through to the output.
1769 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
1772 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
1773 a NUL instead of a white space character.
1775 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
1776 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
1778 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
1780 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
1781 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
1782 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1784 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
1785 unique groups with empty lines.
1787 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
1788 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
1790 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
1793 ** Changes in behavior
1795 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
1796 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
1797 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
1798 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
1800 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
1801 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
1803 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
1804 not just the transfer counts.
1806 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
1808 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
1809 as per the documented interface.
1813 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
1815 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
1816 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
1817 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
1818 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1820 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
1821 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
1822 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
1823 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1825 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
1826 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
1827 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
1829 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
1830 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
1832 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
1833 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
1835 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
1839 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1842 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
1846 numfmt: reformat numbers
1850 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
1851 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
1852 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
1854 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
1855 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
1856 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
1858 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
1859 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
1863 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
1864 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1866 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
1867 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
1868 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1870 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
1871 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
1872 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1874 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
1875 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
1876 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1878 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
1879 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
1880 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
1882 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
1883 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
1884 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
1886 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
1887 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1889 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
1890 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
1892 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
1893 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
1894 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1896 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
1897 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
1898 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1900 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
1901 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
1902 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1904 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
1905 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
1906 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
1907 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1909 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
1910 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
1911 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1913 ** Changes in behavior
1915 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
1916 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
1917 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
1918 'total' in the target column.
1920 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
1921 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
1922 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
1924 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
1925 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
1927 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
1928 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
1932 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
1933 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1935 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1936 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
1938 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
1942 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
1943 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
1944 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
1945 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
1946 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
1947 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
1948 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
1949 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
1950 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
1951 for a patched distribution package.
1953 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
1954 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1956 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
1957 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
1958 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
1959 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1962 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
1966 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
1968 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
1969 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
1970 sha384sum and sha512sum.
1974 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
1975 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
1976 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
1977 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
1978 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
1980 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
1981 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
1983 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
1984 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
1985 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
1986 eventually exits nonzero.
1988 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
1989 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
1990 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
1991 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
1992 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
1994 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
1995 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
1996 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
1998 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
1999 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
2000 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
2002 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
2003 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
2004 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2006 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
2007 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
2008 Before, this would infloop:
2009 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
2010 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2012 ** Changes in behavior
2014 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
2018 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
2019 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
2020 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
2021 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
2022 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
2025 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
2026 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
2027 format-changing options.
2029 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
2030 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
2031 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
2032 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
2033 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
2037 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
2038 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
2039 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
2040 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
2041 are run without following the instructions in README.
2043 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
2044 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
2045 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
2046 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
2047 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
2048 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
2049 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
2052 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
2056 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
2057 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
2058 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
2059 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2061 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
2062 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
2063 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
2064 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2066 sort -u could read freed memory.
2067 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
2068 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
2069 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2073 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
2074 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
2075 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
2076 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
2079 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
2083 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2084 processes will not intersperse their output.
2085 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2087 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
2088 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
2089 date: invalid date '\260'
2090 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2092 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
2093 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
2094 lines output by df, can work reliably.
2095 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2097 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
2098 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
2099 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
2101 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
2102 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
2103 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
2104 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
2105 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
2106 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2108 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
2109 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
2111 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
2112 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2114 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
2115 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
2116 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
2118 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
2119 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2120 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
2124 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
2126 ** Changes in behavior
2128 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
2129 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
2130 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
2131 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
2132 have any reason to include it here.
2136 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
2137 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
2138 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
2140 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
2141 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
2142 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
2145 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
2149 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
2150 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
2151 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
2152 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
2153 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
2154 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2156 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
2157 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
2158 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
2159 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
2160 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
2161 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
2162 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2164 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
2165 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2167 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
2168 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
2172 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
2173 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
2175 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
2177 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
2179 ** Changes in behavior
2181 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
2182 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
2183 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
2185 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
2186 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
2189 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
2193 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
2194 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
2195 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
2196 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
2197 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
2198 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
2199 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
2200 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
2202 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
2203 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
2204 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
2205 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
2206 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
2208 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
2209 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
2211 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
2212 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
2214 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
2215 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
2217 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
2218 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
2220 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
2221 additional static suffix to output file names.
2223 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
2224 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
2225 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2227 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
2228 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2232 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
2233 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
2234 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
2236 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
2237 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
2238 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
2239 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
2240 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
2241 typically still point to one of the hard links.
2243 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
2244 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
2245 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
2246 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
2247 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
2249 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
2250 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
2251 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
2252 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
2256 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
2257 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
2258 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
2260 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
2261 instead of causing a usage failure.
2263 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
2266 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
2270 realpath: print resolved file names.
2274 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
2275 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2277 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
2278 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
2280 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
2281 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
2282 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
2283 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
2284 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
2285 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
2287 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
2288 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
2289 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
2291 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
2292 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
2293 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
2295 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
2296 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
2297 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
2298 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
2299 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
2301 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
2303 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
2304 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2306 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
2307 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2308 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
2310 ** Changes in behavior
2312 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
2313 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
2314 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
2315 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
2316 usually-short referent instead.
2318 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
2319 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
2320 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
2321 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
2324 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
2328 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
2329 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
2330 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2332 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
2333 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
2335 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
2336 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2340 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
2341 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2343 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
2344 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
2345 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
2346 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
2348 ** Changes in behavior
2350 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
2351 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
2352 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
2356 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
2357 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
2358 only .tar.xz files is enough.
2361 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
2365 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
2366 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
2367 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
2369 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
2370 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2372 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
2373 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
2374 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
2375 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
2376 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2378 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
2379 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
2380 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
2381 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
2382 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
2383 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
2384 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
2385 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
2387 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
2388 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
2390 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
2391 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
2393 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
2394 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2396 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
2397 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
2398 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2400 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
2401 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
2402 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
2403 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2405 ** Changes in behavior
2407 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
2408 when -v or -c specified.
2410 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
2411 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
2415 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
2416 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
2417 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
2418 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
2419 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
2421 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
2422 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
2423 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2425 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
2426 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
2427 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
2428 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
2429 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
2430 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
2431 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
2433 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
2434 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
2435 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
2439 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
2440 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
2442 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
2445 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
2446 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
2448 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
2449 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
2451 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
2452 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
2454 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
2456 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
2460 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
2461 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
2463 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
2466 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
2470 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
2471 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2473 ** Changes in behavior
2475 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
2476 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
2477 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
2478 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
2479 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
2480 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
2481 resolved for 2.6.39.
2482 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
2483 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
2484 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
2488 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
2491 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
2495 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
2496 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
2497 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2499 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
2500 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
2501 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2503 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
2504 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
2505 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2507 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
2508 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2510 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
2511 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2513 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
2514 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2516 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
2517 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2521 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
2522 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
2523 processed portion thereof.
2525 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
2526 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
2528 ** Changes in behavior
2530 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2531 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
2532 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2534 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2535 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
2536 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
2538 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
2539 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
2541 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
2542 Use --preserve-context instead.
2544 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
2547 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
2551 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
2552 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
2553 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
2554 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
2555 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2557 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
2558 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2560 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
2561 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
2562 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
2564 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
2565 reject file names invalid for that file system.
2567 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
2568 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2572 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
2573 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
2574 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
2575 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
2576 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
2577 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
2578 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
2579 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
2581 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
2582 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
2583 the same number of fields are output for each line.
2585 ** Changes in behavior
2587 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
2588 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
2589 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
2592 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
2596 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
2597 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
2598 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2601 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
2605 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
2606 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
2608 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
2609 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
2611 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
2612 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2614 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
2615 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
2616 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
2617 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2619 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
2620 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2622 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
2623 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
2624 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
2626 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
2628 ** Changes in behavior
2630 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
2631 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
2632 to the number of available processors.
2636 split accepts the --number/-n option to generate a specific number of
2637 files, as well as the --elide-empty-files/-e and --unbuffered/-u
2638 options to fine-tune the resulting output.
2641 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
2645 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
2646 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
2647 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
2648 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
2650 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
2651 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
2652 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
2654 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
2655 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2657 ** Changes in behavior
2659 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
2660 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
2662 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
2663 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
2664 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
2665 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
2666 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
2667 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
2669 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
2670 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
2671 the same way as the others.
2673 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
2674 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
2677 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
2681 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
2682 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
2683 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
2685 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
2686 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
2688 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
2689 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
2690 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
2692 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
2693 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
2695 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
2696 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
2698 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
2699 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
2700 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2702 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
2703 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
2704 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
2705 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
2709 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
2710 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
2712 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
2715 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
2716 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
2718 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
2720 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
2721 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
2722 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
2724 ** Changes in behavior
2726 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
2727 rather than its aliased target.
2729 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
2730 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
2731 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
2733 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
2734 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
2735 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
2736 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
2737 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
2738 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
2739 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
2740 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
2742 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
2744 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
2746 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
2747 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
2750 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
2751 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
2752 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
2753 control like taskset for example.
2755 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
2757 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
2758 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
2759 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
2760 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
2761 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
2762 includes %C when context information is available.
2764 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
2765 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
2766 rather than a file system attribute.
2768 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
2769 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
2770 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
2771 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
2773 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
2774 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
2775 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
2777 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
2778 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
2779 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
2782 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
2786 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
2787 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
2789 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
2791 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
2792 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2794 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
2795 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
2796 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
2797 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
2799 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
2800 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
2801 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2805 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
2806 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
2808 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
2809 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
2810 duration after the initial signal was sent.
2812 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
2813 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
2814 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
2815 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
2816 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
2817 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
2818 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
2819 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
2820 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
2822 ** Changes in behavior
2824 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
2825 sequence when it would be a no-op.
2827 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
2828 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
2831 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
2835 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
2836 of available processors, which may not have been the case
2837 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
2838 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2842 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
2843 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
2845 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
2846 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
2847 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
2848 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
2850 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
2851 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
2852 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
2855 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
2859 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
2860 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
2861 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
2863 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
2864 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
2865 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2867 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
2868 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2870 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
2871 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2872 a command of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
2873 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2875 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
2876 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
2877 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2879 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
2880 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
2881 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
2882 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2884 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
2885 renamed-aside and then recreated.
2886 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2888 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
2889 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
2890 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
2891 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2893 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
2894 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
2895 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2897 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
2898 processes will not intersperse their output.
2899 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
2902 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
2906 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
2907 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2909 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
2910 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2912 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
2913 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2914 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
2915 the presence of the empty string argument.
2916 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2918 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2919 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
2920 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
2921 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2923 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
2924 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2926 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2927 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
2928 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2930 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
2931 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
2932 and with a malicious user on the same system
2933 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
2934 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
2937 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
2941 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
2942 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
2943 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2945 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
2946 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
2947 offending directory and all "contents."
2949 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
2950 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
2951 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
2953 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
2954 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
2955 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2957 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2958 processes will not intersperse their output.
2959 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2960 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2962 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
2963 output the name of the file to stdout.
2964 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2966 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
2967 call fails with errno == EACCES.
2968 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2970 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
2971 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
2974 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
2975 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
2976 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
2978 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
2979 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
2980 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
2981 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
2982 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
2983 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2985 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
2986 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
2987 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
2988 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
2990 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
2991 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
2993 ** Changes in behavior
2995 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
2996 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
2997 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
2998 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
2999 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
3001 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
3002 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
3003 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
3004 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
3006 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
3008 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
3009 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
3010 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
3011 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
3012 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
3016 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
3020 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
3021 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
3023 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
3024 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
3026 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
3027 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
3028 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
3030 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
3031 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
3034 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
3038 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
3039 when the source file doesn't have write access.
3040 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3042 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
3043 to accommodate leap seconds.
3044 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3046 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
3047 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
3048 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3050 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
3052 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
3053 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
3054 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
3056 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
3057 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
3058 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
3059 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
3060 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
3064 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
3065 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
3066 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
3067 directory or a symlink to a directory.
3069 ** Changes in behavior
3071 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
3072 environment variable is set.
3074 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
3075 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
3076 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
3080 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
3081 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
3082 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
3083 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
3085 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
3086 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
3087 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
3088 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
3092 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
3093 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
3094 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
3096 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
3097 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
3098 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
3099 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
3100 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
3101 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
3102 another improvement:
3104 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
3105 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
3108 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
3112 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
3113 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
3114 and libraries tested at configure time.
3115 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3117 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
3118 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3120 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
3121 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3123 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
3124 printing a summary to stderr.
3125 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3127 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
3128 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
3129 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
3131 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
3132 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
3134 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
3135 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
3136 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
3137 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3139 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
3140 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
3141 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
3142 which is relatively unusual.
3143 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3145 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
3146 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
3147 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
3148 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
3149 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
3150 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
3151 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3155 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
3156 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
3157 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
3158 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
3159 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
3163 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
3164 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
3166 ** Changes in behavior
3168 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3169 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3170 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
3171 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
3172 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
3175 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
3179 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
3180 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
3182 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
3183 before data copying has started.
3185 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
3186 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3188 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
3189 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
3190 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
3191 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3193 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
3194 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
3195 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
3196 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
3198 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
3203 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
3204 for its standard streams.
3206 ** Changes in behavior
3208 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
3209 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
3210 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
3211 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
3212 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
3213 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
3215 ** Deprecated options
3217 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
3218 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
3222 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
3224 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
3225 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
3226 a btrfs file system.
3228 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
3230 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
3231 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
3233 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
3234 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
3237 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
3241 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
3242 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
3243 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
3244 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
3246 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
3247 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
3248 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
3249 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
3250 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
3255 make check: two tests have been corrected
3259 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
3260 inherited from gnulib.
3263 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
3267 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
3268 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
3269 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
3270 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
3272 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
3273 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
3275 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
3277 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
3278 systems without xattr support.
3280 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
3281 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
3282 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
3284 ** Changes in behavior
3286 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
3287 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
3288 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
3289 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
3291 ** Improved robustness
3293 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
3294 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
3295 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
3296 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
3297 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
3298 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
3299 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
3300 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
3301 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3305 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
3306 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
3308 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
3309 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
3310 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
3311 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3312 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3315 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
3319 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
3320 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
3321 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
3325 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
3326 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
3327 data was read, or on process exit.
3328 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3330 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
3331 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
3332 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
3333 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3335 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
3336 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
3337 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
3338 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3340 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
3341 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
3343 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
3344 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3346 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
3347 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
3348 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
3350 ** Changes in behavior
3352 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
3353 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
3354 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
3356 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
3357 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
3359 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
3360 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
3361 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
3364 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
3368 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
3370 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
3371 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
3372 install: Never copies xattrs
3374 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
3375 from overwriting any existing destination file
3377 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
3378 mode where this feature is available.
3380 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
3381 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
3382 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
3383 do not modify the destination at all.
3385 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
3387 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
3391 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
3392 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
3394 cp uses much less memory in some situations
3396 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
3397 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
3399 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
3400 processing the first file name
3402 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
3403 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
3404 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
3405 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3407 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
3408 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
3410 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
3411 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
3414 ** Changes in behavior
3416 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
3417 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
3419 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
3420 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
3421 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
3423 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
3424 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
3426 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
3428 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
3429 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
3430 is still marked with a '+'.
3433 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
3437 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
3438 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
3442 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
3443 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
3444 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
3445 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
3446 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
3447 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
3449 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3450 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3452 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
3453 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
3455 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
3457 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
3458 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
3459 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
3461 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
3462 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
3464 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
3465 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
3466 used to factor large numbers.
3468 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
3471 ls now colors names of files with capabilities if libcap is available.
3473 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
3475 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
3476 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
3478 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
3479 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
3480 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
3481 maximum command-line (argv) length.
3483 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
3484 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
3485 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
3487 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
3488 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
3492 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
3494 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
3495 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
3497 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
3498 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
3500 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
3502 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
3503 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
3507 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
3508 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
3509 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
3511 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
3513 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
3514 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
3515 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
3517 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
3518 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
3519 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
3521 ** Changes in behavior
3523 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
3524 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
3527 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
3531 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
3532 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
3533 'futimens' system calls.
3537 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
3539 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
3540 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
3541 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
3543 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
3544 with no USERNAME argument.
3546 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
3547 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
3548 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
3550 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
3551 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
3552 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
3553 number of fields for some inputs.
3555 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
3556 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
3558 ** Changes in behavior
3560 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
3561 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
3564 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
3568 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
3570 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
3571 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
3572 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
3573 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3575 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
3576 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
3578 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
3579 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
3581 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
3582 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
3584 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
3585 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
3586 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3587 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3589 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
3590 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
3591 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
3592 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
3593 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3594 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
3596 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
3597 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
3599 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
3600 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
3601 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
3603 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
3604 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3606 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
3607 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3609 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
3610 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
3611 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
3612 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
3614 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
3615 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
3617 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
3618 in more cases when a directory is empty.
3620 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
3621 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
3622 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3626 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3627 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3629 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
3630 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
3631 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
3632 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
3636 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
3637 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
3639 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
3641 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
3645 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
3646 which have negative errno values.
3650 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
3654 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
3658 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
3659 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
3662 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
3666 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
3667 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
3668 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3670 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
3671 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
3672 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
3673 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3677 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
3678 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
3679 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
3680 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
3683 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
3687 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
3689 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
3690 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
3691 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
3694 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
3698 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
3699 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
3701 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
3703 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
3705 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
3707 ** Programs no longer installed by default
3711 ** Changes in behavior
3713 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
3714 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
3716 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
3717 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
3719 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
3720 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
3721 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
3725 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
3726 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
3727 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
3728 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
3729 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
3730 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
3731 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
3732 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
3733 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
3734 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
3735 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
3737 The following commands and options now support the standard size
3738 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
3739 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
3742 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
3745 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
3746 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
3747 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
3749 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
3750 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
3751 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
3754 ** New build options
3756 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
3757 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
3758 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
3759 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
3761 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
3762 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
3763 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
3764 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
3765 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
3766 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
3767 of "make check" fail.
3769 ** Remove deprecated options
3771 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3772 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
3773 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3774 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
3775 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
3777 ** Improved robustness
3779 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
3780 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
3781 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
3782 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
3783 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
3784 loss of the contents of a/f.
3786 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
3787 in its 35-colon command-line argument
3791 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
3792 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
3793 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3795 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
3796 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
3797 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
3798 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3800 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
3801 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
3802 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
3803 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
3804 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
3805 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
3806 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
3807 destination is a symlink.
3809 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
3811 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
3812 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
3814 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
3815 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
3817 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
3819 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
3820 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
3822 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
3823 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
3825 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
3828 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
3829 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
3831 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
3832 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
3834 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
3835 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
3836 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
3837 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3839 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
3840 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
3841 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3843 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
3844 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
3845 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
3847 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
3848 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
3849 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
3850 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
3852 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
3853 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
3854 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
3856 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
3857 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
3859 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
3860 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
3862 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
3864 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
3865 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
3866 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
3868 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
3869 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
3871 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
3872 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
3874 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
3875 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
3877 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
3878 [present in the original version]
3881 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
3885 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
3887 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
3888 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
3889 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
3891 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
3892 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
3894 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
3898 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
3899 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
3901 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
3902 support but with insufficient /proc support.
3904 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
3905 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
3907 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
3908 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
3909 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
3910 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
3911 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
3912 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
3914 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
3915 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
3918 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
3919 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
3921 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
3924 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
3925 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
3926 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
3928 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
3929 directory is unreadable.
3931 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
3932 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
3933 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
3935 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
3936 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
3937 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
3938 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
3939 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
3942 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
3943 Before it would print nothing.
3945 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
3947 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
3948 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
3949 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
3950 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
3951 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
3952 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
3953 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
3954 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
3956 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
3960 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
3961 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
3962 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
3964 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
3965 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
3966 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
3967 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
3970 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
3974 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
3975 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
3976 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
3977 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
3978 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
3979 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
3980 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3982 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
3983 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
3984 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
3985 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
3986 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
3987 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
3988 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
3989 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3991 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
3992 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
3993 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
3996 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
4000 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
4001 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
4003 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
4004 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
4005 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
4007 ** Improved robustness
4009 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
4010 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
4011 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
4014 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
4018 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
4019 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
4020 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
4021 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
4022 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
4024 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
4028 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
4031 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
4035 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
4036 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
4037 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
4038 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
4040 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
4041 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
4043 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
4044 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
4045 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
4048 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
4050 ** Improved robustness
4052 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
4053 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
4055 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
4056 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
4057 or NFS-mounted partition.
4059 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
4060 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
4064 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
4065 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
4066 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
4067 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
4068 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
4069 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
4071 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
4072 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
4074 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
4075 or neglect to report file removal.
4077 For the "groups" command:
4079 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
4080 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
4082 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
4084 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
4086 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
4090 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
4091 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
4094 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
4096 ** Changes in behavior
4098 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
4099 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
4100 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
4101 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
4103 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
4104 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
4105 a final './' or '../' component.
4107 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
4108 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
4109 this only for pipes.
4111 ** Infrastructure changes
4113 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
4114 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
4115 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
4116 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
4120 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
4121 name is "." or "..".
4123 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
4124 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
4125 dirent.d_type support.
4127 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
4128 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
4130 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
4131 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
4132 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
4133 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
4136 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
4138 ** Changes in behavior
4140 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
4144 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
4145 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
4149 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
4150 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
4151 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
4153 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
4154 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4156 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
4157 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4159 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
4161 ** Improved robustness
4163 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
4164 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
4165 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
4167 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
4168 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
4171 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
4172 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
4174 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
4175 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
4177 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
4178 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
4180 ** Changes in behavior
4182 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
4183 where the two are distinct.
4185 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
4186 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
4187 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
4188 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
4189 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
4190 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
4191 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
4192 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
4193 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
4194 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
4195 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
4196 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
4197 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
4198 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
4199 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
4200 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
4201 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
4203 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
4204 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
4205 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
4207 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
4208 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
4209 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
4210 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
4213 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
4214 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
4218 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
4219 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
4220 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
4221 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
4223 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
4224 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
4225 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
4227 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
4228 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
4229 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
4230 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
4231 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
4234 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
4235 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
4237 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
4238 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
4239 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
4240 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
4242 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
4243 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
4244 successful and the output is easier to parse.
4246 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
4247 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
4248 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
4249 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
4251 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
4252 and sticky) with the -m option.
4254 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
4255 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
4256 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
4257 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
4258 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
4260 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
4261 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
4263 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
4267 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
4268 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
4269 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
4270 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
4272 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
4274 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
4276 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
4277 silently ignoring one of them.
4279 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
4280 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
4281 containing this change was 5.92.
4283 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
4284 automatically newline terminated.
4286 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
4287 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
4288 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
4289 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
4292 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
4293 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4294 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
4297 ** Scheduled for removal
4299 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
4300 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
4302 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
4303 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
4304 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
4305 command to unlink a directory.
4307 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
4308 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
4309 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
4310 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
4314 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
4315 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
4316 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
4317 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
4318 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
4319 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
4323 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
4324 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
4326 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
4328 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
4329 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
4330 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
4332 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
4333 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
4336 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
4337 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
4339 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
4340 list directories before files.
4342 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
4343 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
4344 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
4345 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
4348 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
4350 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
4352 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
4353 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
4354 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
4356 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4357 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4361 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
4362 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
4363 usually printing nothing.
4365 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
4367 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
4368 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
4369 them with hard-linked directories.
4371 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
4372 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
4373 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
4375 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
4376 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
4377 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
4379 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
4382 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
4383 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
4385 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
4386 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
4388 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
4389 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
4391 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
4392 all command-line arguments.
4394 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
4396 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
4398 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
4399 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
4401 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
4403 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
4404 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
4405 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
4406 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
4407 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
4409 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
4410 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
4412 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
4413 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
4414 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
4415 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
4417 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
4419 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
4423 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
4424 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
4426 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
4427 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
4429 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
4430 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
4432 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
4433 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
4435 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
4436 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
4438 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
4440 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
4441 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
4442 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
4445 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
4447 ** Build-related bug fixes
4449 installing .mo files would fail
4452 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
4456 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
4458 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
4461 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
4465 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
4466 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
4470 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
4472 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
4473 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
4475 ** Deprecated options
4477 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
4478 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
4480 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
4484 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
4486 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
4487 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
4488 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
4489 conforming to older POSIX versions.
4491 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
4494 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
4500 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
4505 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
4507 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
4509 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
4510 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
4511 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
4513 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
4514 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
4515 problematic usages. These include:
4517 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
4518 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
4519 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
4520 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
4521 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
4522 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
4523 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
4524 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
4525 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
4527 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
4528 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
4530 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
4531 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
4532 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
4533 Meeting <https://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
4535 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
4536 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
4537 between binary and text files.
4539 The following programs now always use text input/output:
4543 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
4547 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
4548 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
4550 head tac tail tee tr
4551 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
4553 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
4554 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
4556 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
4557 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
4558 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
4560 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
4562 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
4564 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
4565 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
4566 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
4570 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
4572 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
4573 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4575 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
4576 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
4577 blocks until F contains N blocks.
4581 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
4582 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
4586 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
4587 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
4588 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
4592 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
4593 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
4597 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
4599 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
4601 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
4605 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
4606 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
4607 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
4609 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
4610 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
4611 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6232>.
4612 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
4613 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6233>.
4615 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
4619 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
4620 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
4621 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
4623 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
4625 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
4626 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
4627 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
4628 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
4630 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
4632 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
4633 rather than silently wrapping around.
4635 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
4636 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
4638 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
4639 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
4641 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
4642 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
4643 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
4644 file /tmp/a/b/file".
4646 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
4648 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
4650 ** Improved robustness
4652 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
4653 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
4654 no matter how large the result.
4656 ** Improved portability
4658 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
4659 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
4661 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
4663 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
4664 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
4665 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
4667 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
4668 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
4672 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
4673 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
4675 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
4677 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
4678 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
4679 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
4680 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
4682 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
4683 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
4685 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
4686 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
4687 categories if not specified by dircolors.
4689 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
4691 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
4692 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
4694 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
4695 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
4697 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
4699 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
4700 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
4702 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
4703 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
4705 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
4706 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
4707 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
4709 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
4711 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
4713 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
4717 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
4719 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
4720 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
4721 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
4723 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
4724 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
4726 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
4727 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
4728 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
4730 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
4731 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
4733 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
4734 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
4735 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
4736 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
4738 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
4739 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
4741 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
4742 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
4743 the file system does not support it.
4745 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
4747 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
4748 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
4750 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
4752 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
4753 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
4755 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
4756 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
4757 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
4758 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
4760 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
4761 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
4764 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
4765 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
4766 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
4767 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
4769 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
4770 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
4771 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
4772 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
4774 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
4775 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
4777 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
4779 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
4780 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
4781 reporting incorrect results.
4785 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
4786 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
4788 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
4791 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
4793 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
4794 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
4796 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
4797 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
4799 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
4802 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
4803 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
4804 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
4805 the file name does not look like a page range.
4807 printf has several changes:
4809 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
4810 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
4812 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
4813 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
4814 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
4816 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
4817 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
4820 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
4821 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
4823 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
4824 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
4826 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
4828 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
4829 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
4831 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
4833 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
4835 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
4836 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
4837 when first encountering the directory.
4841 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
4842 output; POSIX requires this.
4844 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
4845 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
4847 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
4849 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
4850 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
4852 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
4853 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
4855 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
4856 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
4857 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
4858 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
4859 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
4860 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
4861 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
4863 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
4864 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
4865 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
4867 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
4868 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
4870 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
4872 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
4874 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
4875 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
4876 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
4877 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
4879 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
4883 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
4884 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
4885 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
4886 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
4887 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
4889 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
4890 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
4891 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
4893 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
4894 is longer than PATH_MAX.
4896 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
4897 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
4899 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
4900 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
4901 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
4902 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
4903 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
4905 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
4906 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
4908 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
4909 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
4911 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
4913 nocreat do not create the output file
4914 excl fail if the output file already exists
4915 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
4916 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
4918 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
4920 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
4921 direct use direct I/O for data
4922 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
4923 sync likewise, but also for metadata
4924 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
4925 nofollow do not follow symlinks
4926 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
4928 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
4930 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
4931 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
4934 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
4935 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
4936 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
4937 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
4938 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
4939 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
4941 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4942 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4944 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
4947 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
4949 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
4951 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
4952 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
4954 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
4955 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
4956 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
4958 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
4959 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
4960 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
4962 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
4964 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
4965 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
4967 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
4968 for compatibility with bash.
4970 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
4972 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
4973 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
4974 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
4975 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
4977 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
4978 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
4980 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
4981 ls supports TABSIZE.
4982 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
4983 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
4984 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
4986 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
4989 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
4991 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
4992 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
4993 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
4994 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
4995 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
4996 an offset, not as a file name.
4998 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
4999 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
5001 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
5002 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
5004 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
5005 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
5007 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
5008 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
5009 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
5011 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
5012 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
5014 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
5015 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
5019 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
5021 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
5023 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
5027 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
5028 or more arguments between partitions.
5030 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
5031 holes in the destination.
5033 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
5034 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
5035 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
5036 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
5037 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
5038 terminates immediately.
5040 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
5042 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
5044 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
5045 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
5046 not the empty string.
5048 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
5049 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
5053 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
5054 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
5055 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
5058 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
5065 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
5069 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
5070 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
5072 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
5073 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
5075 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
5076 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
5077 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
5080 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
5084 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
5085 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
5087 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
5088 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
5090 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
5091 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
5092 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
5094 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
5096 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
5099 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
5101 ** Configuration option
5103 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
5104 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
5108 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
5109 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
5113 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
5114 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
5115 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
5118 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
5119 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
5120 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
5121 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
5122 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
5123 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5124 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5127 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
5131 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
5132 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
5133 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
5135 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
5136 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
5138 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
5140 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
5141 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
5142 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
5143 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
5145 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
5147 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
5148 not just the ones that reference directories
5150 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
5151 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
5153 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
5154 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
5155 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
5157 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
5158 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
5159 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
5160 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
5161 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
5162 ragged when a datum was too wide.
5164 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
5169 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
5170 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
5172 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
5174 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
5176 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
5178 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
5179 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
5181 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
5182 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
5184 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
5186 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
5190 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
5192 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
5194 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
5195 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
5196 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
5197 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
5198 resolution is the best we can do right now.
5200 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
5201 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
5203 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
5204 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
5206 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
5207 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
5209 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
5210 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
5211 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
5215 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
5216 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
5217 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
5218 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
5219 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
5220 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
5221 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
5222 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
5223 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
5224 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
5225 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
5226 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
5227 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
5228 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
5230 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
5232 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
5233 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
5235 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
5237 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
5239 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
5240 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
5242 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
5244 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
5245 without a trailing newline.
5247 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
5248 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
5250 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
5253 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
5257 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
5259 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
5261 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
5262 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
5263 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
5264 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
5266 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
5268 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
5269 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
5270 be printed without leading spaces.
5272 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
5273 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
5278 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
5279 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
5280 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
5282 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
5284 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
5285 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
5287 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
5288 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
5290 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
5291 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
5293 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
5295 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
5297 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
5299 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
5300 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
5302 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
5304 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5306 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
5307 byte offsets are specified.
5310 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
5313 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
5316 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
5317 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
5318 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
5319 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
5320 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
5321 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
5322 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
5323 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
5324 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
5325 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5326 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
5327 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
5328 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
5329 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
5330 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
5331 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
5332 directory where M has write access.
5333 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
5334 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
5335 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
5338 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
5339 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
5340 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
5341 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
5342 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
5343 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
5344 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
5345 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
5346 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
5347 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
5348 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
5349 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
5350 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
5351 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
5352 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
5353 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
5354 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
5355 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
5356 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
5357 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
5358 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
5359 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
5360 appeared one additional time.
5362 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5363 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
5364 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
5365 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
5368 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
5369 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
5370 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
5371 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
5372 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
5373 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
5374 if there were more than 338.
5376 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
5377 - false --help now exits nonzero
5380 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
5381 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
5382 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
5383 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
5386 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
5387 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
5388 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
5389 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
5390 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
5393 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
5394 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
5395 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
5396 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
5397 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
5398 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
5399 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5402 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
5403 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
5404 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
5405 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
5406 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
5407 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
5409 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5410 under certain unusual conditions
5411 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
5412 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
5415 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5416 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
5417 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
5418 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
5419 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
5420 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
5421 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
5422 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
5423 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
5424 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
5425 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
5426 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
5427 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
5428 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
5429 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
5430 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
5433 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
5434 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
5437 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
5438 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
5439 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
5440 involving hard-linked directories
5441 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
5442 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
5443 character-special and block files
5446 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
5447 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
5448 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
5449 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
5450 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
5451 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
5452 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
5453 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
5454 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
5456 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
5457 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
5458 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
5459 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
5460 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
5461 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
5462 specified on the command line.
5463 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
5464 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
5465 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
5466 the first file untouched.
5467 * readlink: new program
5468 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
5469 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
5470 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
5471 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
5472 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
5473 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
5476 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
5477 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
5478 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
5479 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
5480 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
5481 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
5482 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
5483 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
5484 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
5485 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
5486 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
5487 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
5489 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
5490 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
5491 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
5493 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
5494 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
5495 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
5496 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
5497 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
5498 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
5499 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
5500 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
5503 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
5504 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
5507 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
5508 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
5509 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
5510 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
5511 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
5512 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
5513 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
5516 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
5517 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
5519 ========================================================================
5520 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
5521 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5524 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
5526 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5527 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
5528 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
5529 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
5530 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
5531 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
5532 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
5533 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
5534 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
5535 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
5536 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
5537 The old options will continue to work for a while.
5539 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
5540 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
5541 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
5542 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
5544 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
5547 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
5549 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
5550 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
5551 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
5552 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
5553 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
5554 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
5555 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
5558 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
5559 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
5560 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
5561 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
5562 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
5563 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
5564 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
5565 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
5566 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
5567 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
5568 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
5569 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
5570 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
5571 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
5572 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
5573 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
5575 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
5576 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
5578 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
5579 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
5580 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
5581 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
5582 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
5583 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
5585 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
5586 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
5587 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
5588 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
5589 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
5590 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
5591 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
5593 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
5594 the source files in the following example:
5595 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
5596 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
5597 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
5598 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
5599 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
5600 links between source files with --preserve=links
5601 * cp accepts new options:
5602 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
5603 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
5604 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
5605 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
5606 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
5607 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
5608 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
5609 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
5610 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
5612 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
5613 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
5614 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
5615 even though it's older than dest.
5616 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
5617 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
5618 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
5619 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
5620 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
5622 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
5623 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
5624 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
5625 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
5626 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
5627 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
5628 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
5630 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
5631 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
5632 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
5634 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
5635 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
5636 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
5637 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
5638 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
5639 This is the default.
5641 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
5642 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
5643 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
5644 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
5645 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
5647 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
5650 ========================================================================
5651 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
5652 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5655 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
5656 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
5658 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5659 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
5660 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
5661 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
5662 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
5664 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
5665 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
5666 that specifies a non-directory
5669 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
5670 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
5671 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
5672 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
5673 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5674 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
5675 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
5676 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5677 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
5678 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
5679 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
5680 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
5681 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
5682 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
5683 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
5684 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
5685 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
5686 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
5687 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
5688 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
5689 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
5690 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
5691 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
5692 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
5694 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
5695 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
5696 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
5698 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
5700 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
5701 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
5703 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
5704 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
5705 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
5706 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
5707 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
5709 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
5710 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
5711 required support; from Bruno Haible.
5712 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
5713 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
5715 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
5717 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
5718 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
5719 * still more portability fixes
5720 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
5721 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5723 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
5725 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
5727 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
5729 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
5730 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
5731 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
5732 there is any time remaining
5733 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
5735 ========================================================================
5736 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5737 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
5739 This package began as the union of the following:
5740 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
5742 ========================================================================
5744 Copyright (C) 2001-2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5746 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
5747 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
5748 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
5749 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
5750 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
5751 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.