1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
8 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
9 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
11 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
12 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
14 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
16 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
17 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
18 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
20 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
21 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
22 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
24 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
25 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
26 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
27 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
29 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
30 from the source, when copying across file systems.
31 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
33 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
34 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
35 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
37 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
38 would immediately exit when such a file is inaccessible during the initial
40 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
44 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
47 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
48 a NUL instead of a white space character.
50 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
51 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with -Z set the SMACK context where available.
53 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
54 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
55 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
57 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
58 unique groups with empty lines.
60 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
61 used to identify the split points.
63 shuf accepts a new option: --repetitions (-r), to allow repetitions
64 of input items in the permuted output.
66 ** Changes in behavior
68 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
69 not just the transfer counts.
71 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
72 as per the documented interface.
76 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, SNFS and UBIFS.
77 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses
78 inotify for files on those file systems, rather than the default (for unknown
79 file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
81 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
82 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
83 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
85 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
86 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
90 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
93 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
97 numfmt: reformat numbers
101 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
102 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
103 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
105 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
106 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
107 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
111 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
112 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
114 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
115 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
116 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
118 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
119 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
120 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
122 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
123 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
124 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
126 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
127 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
128 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
130 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
131 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
132 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
134 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
135 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
137 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
138 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
140 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
141 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
142 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
144 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
145 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
146 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
148 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
149 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
150 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
152 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
153 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
154 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
155 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
157 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
158 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
159 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
161 ** Changes in behavior
163 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
164 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
165 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
166 'total' in the target column.
168 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
169 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
170 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
172 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
173 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
177 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
178 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
180 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
181 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
183 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
187 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
188 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
189 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
190 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
191 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
192 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
193 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
194 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
195 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
196 for a patched distribution package.
198 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
199 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
201 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
202 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
203 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
204 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
207 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
211 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
213 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
214 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
215 sha384sum and sha512sum.
219 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
220 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
221 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
222 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
223 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
225 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
226 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
228 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
229 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
230 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
231 eventually exits nonzero.
233 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
234 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
235 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
236 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
237 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
239 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
240 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
241 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
243 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
244 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
245 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
247 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
248 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
249 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
251 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
252 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
253 Before, this would infloop:
254 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
255 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
257 ** Changes in behavior
259 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
263 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
264 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
265 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
266 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
267 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
270 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
271 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
272 format-changing options.
274 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
275 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
276 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
277 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
278 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
282 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
283 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
284 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
285 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
286 are run without following the instructions in README.
288 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
289 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
290 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
291 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
292 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
293 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
294 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
297 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
301 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
302 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
303 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
304 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
306 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
307 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
308 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
309 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
311 sort -u could read freed memory.
312 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
313 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
314 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
318 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
319 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
320 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
321 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
324 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
328 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
329 processes will not intersperse their output.
330 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
332 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
333 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
334 date: invalid date '\260'
335 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
337 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
338 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
339 lines output by df, can work reliably.
340 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
342 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
343 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
344 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
346 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
347 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
348 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
349 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
350 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
351 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
353 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
354 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
356 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
357 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
359 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
360 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
361 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
363 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
364 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
365 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
369 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
371 ** Changes in behavior
373 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
374 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
375 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
376 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
377 have any reason to include it here.
381 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
382 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
383 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
385 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
386 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
387 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
390 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
394 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
395 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
396 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
397 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
398 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
399 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
401 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
402 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
403 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
404 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
405 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
406 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
407 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
409 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
410 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
412 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
413 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
417 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
418 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
420 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
422 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
424 ** Changes in behavior
426 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
427 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
428 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
430 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
431 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
434 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
438 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
439 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
440 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
441 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
442 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
443 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
444 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
445 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
447 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
448 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
449 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
450 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
451 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
453 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
454 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
456 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
457 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
459 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
460 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
462 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
463 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
465 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
466 additional static suffix to output file names.
468 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
469 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
470 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
472 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
473 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
477 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
478 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
479 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
481 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
482 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
483 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
484 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
485 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
486 typically still point to one of the hard links.
488 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
489 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
490 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
491 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
492 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
494 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
495 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
496 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
497 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
501 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
502 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
503 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
505 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
506 instead of causing a usage failure.
508 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
511 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
515 realpath: print resolved file names.
519 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
520 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
522 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
523 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
525 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
526 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
527 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
528 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
529 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
530 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
532 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
533 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
534 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
536 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
537 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
538 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
540 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
541 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
542 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
543 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
544 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
546 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
548 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
549 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
551 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
552 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
553 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
555 ** Changes in behavior
557 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
558 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
559 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
560 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
561 usually-short referent instead.
563 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
564 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
565 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
566 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
569 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
573 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
574 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
575 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
577 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
578 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
580 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
581 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
585 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
586 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
588 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
589 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
590 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
591 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
593 ** Changes in behavior
595 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
596 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
597 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
601 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
602 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
603 only .tar.xz files is enough.
606 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
610 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
611 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
612 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
614 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
615 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
617 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
618 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
619 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
620 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
621 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
623 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
624 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
625 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
626 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
627 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
628 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
629 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
630 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
632 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
633 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
635 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
636 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
638 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
639 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
641 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
642 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
643 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
645 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
646 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
647 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
648 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
650 ** Changes in behavior
652 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
653 when -v or -c specified.
655 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
656 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
660 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
661 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
662 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
663 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
664 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
666 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
667 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
668 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
670 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
671 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
672 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
673 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
674 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
675 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
676 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
678 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
679 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
680 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
684 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
685 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
687 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
690 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
691 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
693 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
694 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
696 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
697 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
699 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
701 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
705 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
706 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
708 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
711 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
715 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
716 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
718 ** Changes in behavior
720 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
721 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
722 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
723 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
724 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
725 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
727 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
728 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
729 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
733 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
736 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
740 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
741 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
742 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
744 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
745 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
746 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
748 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
749 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
750 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
752 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
753 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
755 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
756 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
758 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
759 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
761 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
762 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
766 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
767 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
768 processed portion thereof.
770 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
771 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
773 ** Changes in behavior
775 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
776 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
777 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
779 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
780 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
781 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
783 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
784 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
786 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
787 Use --preserve-context instead.
789 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
792 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
796 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
797 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
798 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
799 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
800 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
802 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
803 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
805 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
806 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
807 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
809 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
810 reject file names invalid for that file system.
812 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
813 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
817 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
818 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
819 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
820 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
821 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
822 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
823 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
824 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
826 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
827 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
828 the same number of fields are output for each line.
830 ** Changes in behavior
832 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
833 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
834 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
837 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
841 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
842 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
843 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
846 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
850 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
851 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
853 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
854 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
856 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
857 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
859 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
860 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
861 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
862 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
864 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
865 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
867 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
868 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
869 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
871 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
873 ** Changes in behavior
875 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
876 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
877 to the number of available processors.
881 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
884 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
888 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
889 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
890 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
891 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
893 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
894 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
895 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
897 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
898 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
900 ** Changes in behavior
902 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
903 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
905 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
906 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
907 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
908 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
909 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
910 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
912 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
913 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
914 the same way as the others.
916 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
917 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
920 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
924 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
925 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
926 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
928 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
929 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
931 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
932 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
933 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
935 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
936 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
938 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
939 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
941 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
942 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
943 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
945 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
946 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
947 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
948 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
952 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
953 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
955 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
958 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
959 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
961 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
963 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
964 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
965 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
967 ** Changes in behavior
969 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
970 rather than its aliased target.
972 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
973 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
974 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
976 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
977 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
978 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
979 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
980 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
981 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
982 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
983 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
985 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
987 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
989 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
990 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
993 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
994 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
995 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
996 control like taskset for example.
998 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
1000 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
1001 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
1002 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
1003 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
1004 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
1005 includes %C when context information is available.
1007 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
1008 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
1009 rather than a file system attribute.
1011 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
1012 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
1013 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
1014 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
1016 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
1017 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
1018 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
1020 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
1021 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
1022 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
1025 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
1029 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
1030 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
1032 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
1034 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
1035 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1037 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
1038 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
1039 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
1040 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
1042 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
1043 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
1044 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1048 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
1049 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
1051 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
1052 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
1053 duration after the initial signal was sent.
1055 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
1056 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
1057 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
1058 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
1059 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
1060 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
1061 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
1062 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
1063 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
1065 ** Changes in behavior
1067 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
1068 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1070 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1071 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1074 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1078 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1079 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1080 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1081 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1085 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1086 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1088 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1089 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1090 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1091 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1093 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1094 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1095 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1098 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1102 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1103 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1104 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1106 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1107 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1108 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1110 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1111 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1113 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1114 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1115 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1116 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1118 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1119 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1120 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1122 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1123 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1124 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1125 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1127 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1128 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1129 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1131 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1132 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1133 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1134 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1136 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1137 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1138 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1140 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1141 processes will not intersperse their output.
1142 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1145 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1149 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1150 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1152 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1153 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1155 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1156 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1157 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1158 the presence of the empty string argument.
1159 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1161 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1162 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1163 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1164 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1166 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1167 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1169 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1170 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1171 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1173 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1174 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1175 and with a malicious user on the same system
1176 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1177 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1180 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1184 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1185 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1186 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1188 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1189 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1190 offending directory and all "contents."
1192 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1193 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1194 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1196 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1197 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1198 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1200 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1201 processes will not intersperse their output.
1202 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1203 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1205 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1206 output the name of the file to stdout.
1207 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1209 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1210 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1211 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1213 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1214 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1217 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1218 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1219 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1221 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1222 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1223 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1224 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1225 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1226 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1228 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1229 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1230 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1231 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1233 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1234 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1236 ** Changes in behavior
1238 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1239 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1240 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1241 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1242 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1244 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1245 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1246 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1247 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1249 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1251 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1252 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1253 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1254 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1255 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1259 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1263 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1264 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1266 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1267 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1269 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1270 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1271 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1273 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1274 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1277 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1281 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1282 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1283 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1285 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1286 to accommodate leap seconds.
1287 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1289 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1290 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1291 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1293 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1295 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1296 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1297 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1299 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1300 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1301 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1302 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1303 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1307 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1308 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1309 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1310 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1312 ** Changes in behavior
1314 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1315 environment variable is set.
1317 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1318 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1319 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1323 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1324 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1325 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1326 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1328 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1329 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1330 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1331 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1335 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1336 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1337 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1339 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1340 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1341 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1342 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1343 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1344 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1345 another improvement:
1347 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1348 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1351 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1355 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1356 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1357 and libraries tested at configure time.
1358 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1360 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1361 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1363 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1364 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1366 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1367 printing a summary to stderr.
1368 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1370 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1371 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1372 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1374 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1375 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1377 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1378 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1379 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1380 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1382 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1383 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1384 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1385 which is relatively unusual.
1386 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1388 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1389 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1390 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1391 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1392 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1393 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1394 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1398 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1399 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1400 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1401 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1402 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1406 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1407 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1409 ** Changes in behavior
1411 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1412 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1413 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1414 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1415 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1418 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1422 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1423 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1425 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1426 before data copying has started.
1428 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1429 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1431 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1432 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1433 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1434 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1436 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1437 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1438 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1439 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1441 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1446 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1447 for its standard streams.
1449 ** Changes in behavior
1451 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1452 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1453 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1454 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1455 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1456 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1458 ** Deprecated options
1460 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1461 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1465 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1467 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1468 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1469 a btrfs file system.
1471 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1473 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1474 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1476 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1477 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1480 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1484 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1485 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1486 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1487 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1489 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1490 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1491 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1492 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1493 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1498 make check: two tests have been corrected
1502 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1503 inherited from gnulib.
1506 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1510 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1511 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1512 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1513 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1515 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1516 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1518 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1520 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1521 systems without xattr support.
1523 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1524 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1525 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1527 ** Changes in behavior
1529 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1530 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1531 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1532 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1534 ** Improved robustness
1536 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1537 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1538 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1539 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1540 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1541 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1542 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1543 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1544 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1548 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1549 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1551 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1552 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1553 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1554 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1555 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1558 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1562 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1563 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1564 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1568 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1569 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1570 data was read, or on process exit.
1571 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1573 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1574 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1575 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1576 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1578 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1579 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1580 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1581 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1583 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1584 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1586 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1587 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1589 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1590 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1591 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1593 ** Changes in behavior
1595 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1596 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1597 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1599 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1600 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1602 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1603 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1604 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1607 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1611 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1613 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1614 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1615 install: Never copies xattrs
1617 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1618 from overwriting any existing destination file
1620 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1621 mode where this feature is available.
1623 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1624 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1625 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1626 do not modify the destination at all.
1628 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1630 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1634 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1635 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1637 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1639 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1640 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1642 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1643 processing the first file name
1645 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1646 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1647 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1648 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1650 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1651 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1653 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1654 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1657 ** Changes in behavior
1659 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1660 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1662 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1663 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1664 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1666 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1667 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1669 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1671 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1672 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1673 is still marked with a '+'.
1676 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1680 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1681 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1685 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1686 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1687 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1688 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1689 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1690 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1692 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1693 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1695 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1696 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1698 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1700 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1701 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1702 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1704 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1705 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1707 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1708 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1709 used to factor large numbers.
1711 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1714 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1716 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1718 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1719 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1721 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1722 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1723 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1724 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1726 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1727 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1728 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1730 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1731 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1735 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1737 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1738 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1740 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1741 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1743 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1745 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1746 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1750 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1751 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1752 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1754 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1756 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1757 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1758 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1760 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1761 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1762 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1764 ** Changes in behavior
1766 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1767 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1770 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1774 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1775 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1776 'futimens' system calls.
1780 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1782 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1783 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1784 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1786 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1787 with no USERNAME argument.
1789 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1790 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1791 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1793 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1794 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1795 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1796 number of fields for some inputs.
1798 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1799 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1801 ** Changes in behavior
1803 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1804 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1807 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1811 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1813 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1814 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1815 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1816 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1818 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1819 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1821 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1822 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1824 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1825 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1827 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1828 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1829 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1830 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1832 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1833 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1834 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1835 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1836 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1837 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1839 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1840 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1842 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1843 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1844 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1846 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1847 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1849 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1850 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1852 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1853 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1854 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1855 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1857 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1858 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1860 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1861 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1863 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1864 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1865 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1869 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1870 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1872 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1873 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1874 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1875 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1879 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1880 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1882 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1884 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1888 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1889 which have negative errno values.
1893 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1897 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1901 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1902 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1905 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1909 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1910 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1911 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1913 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1914 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1915 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1916 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1920 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1921 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1922 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1923 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1926 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1930 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1932 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1933 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1934 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1937 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1941 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1942 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1944 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1946 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1948 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1950 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1954 ** Changes in behavior
1956 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1957 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1959 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1960 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1962 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1963 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1964 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1968 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1969 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1970 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1971 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1972 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1973 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1974 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1975 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1976 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1977 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1978 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1980 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1981 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1982 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1985 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1988 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1989 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1990 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1992 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1993 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1994 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1997 ** New build options
1999 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
2000 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
2001 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
2002 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
2004 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
2005 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
2006 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
2007 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
2008 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
2009 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
2010 of "make check" fail.
2012 ** Remove deprecated options
2014 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2015 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
2016 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2017 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
2018 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
2020 ** Improved robustness
2022 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
2023 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
2024 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
2025 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
2026 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
2027 loss of the contents of a/f.
2029 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
2030 in its 35-colon command-line argument
2034 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
2035 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
2036 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2038 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
2039 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
2040 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
2041 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2043 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
2044 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
2045 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
2046 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
2047 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
2048 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
2049 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
2050 destination is a symlink.
2052 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
2054 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
2055 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
2057 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
2058 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
2060 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
2062 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
2063 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
2065 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
2066 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
2068 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2071 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2072 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2074 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2075 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2077 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2078 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2079 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2080 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2082 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2083 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2084 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2086 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2087 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2088 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2090 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2091 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2092 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2093 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2095 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2096 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2097 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2099 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2100 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2102 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2103 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2105 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2107 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2108 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2109 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2111 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2112 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2114 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2115 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2117 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2118 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2120 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2121 [present in the original version]
2124 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2128 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2130 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2131 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2132 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2134 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2135 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2137 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2141 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2142 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2144 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2145 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2147 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2148 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2150 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2151 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2152 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2153 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2154 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2155 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2157 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2158 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2161 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2162 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2164 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2167 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2168 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2169 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2171 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2172 directory is unreadable.
2174 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2175 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2176 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2178 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2179 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2180 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2181 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2182 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2185 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2186 Before it would print nothing.
2188 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2190 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2191 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2192 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2193 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2194 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2195 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2196 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2197 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2199 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2203 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2204 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2205 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2207 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2208 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2209 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2210 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2213 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2217 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2218 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2219 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2220 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2221 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2222 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2223 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2225 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2226 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2227 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2228 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2229 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2230 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2231 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2232 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2234 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2235 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2236 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2239 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2243 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2244 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2246 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2247 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2248 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2250 ** Improved robustness
2252 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2253 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2254 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2257 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2261 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2262 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2263 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2264 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2265 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2267 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2271 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2274 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2278 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2279 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2280 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2281 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2283 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2284 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2286 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2287 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2288 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2291 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2293 ** Improved robustness
2295 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2296 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2298 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2299 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2300 or NFS-mounted partition.
2302 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2303 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2307 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2308 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2309 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2310 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2311 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2312 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2314 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2315 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2317 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2318 or neglect to report file removal.
2320 For the "groups" command:
2322 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2323 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2325 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2327 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2329 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2333 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2334 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2337 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2339 ** Changes in behavior
2341 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2342 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2343 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2344 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2346 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2347 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2348 a final './' or '../' component.
2350 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2351 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2352 this only for pipes.
2354 ** Infrastructure changes
2356 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2357 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2358 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2359 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2363 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2364 name is "." or "..".
2366 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2367 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2368 dirent.d_type support.
2370 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2371 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2373 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2374 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2375 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2376 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2379 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2381 ** Changes in behavior
2383 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2387 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2388 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2392 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2393 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2394 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2396 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2397 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2399 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2400 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2402 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2404 ** Improved robustness
2406 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2407 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2408 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2410 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2411 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2414 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2415 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2417 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2418 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2420 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2421 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2423 ** Changes in behavior
2425 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2426 where the two are distinct.
2428 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2429 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2430 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2431 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2432 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2433 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2434 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2435 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2436 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2437 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2438 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2439 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2440 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2441 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2442 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2443 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2444 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2446 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2447 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2448 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2450 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2451 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2452 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2453 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2456 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2457 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2461 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2462 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2463 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2464 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2466 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2467 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2468 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2470 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2471 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2472 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2473 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2474 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2477 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2478 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2480 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2481 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2482 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2483 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2485 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2486 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2487 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2489 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2490 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2491 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2492 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2494 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2495 and sticky) with the -m option.
2497 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2498 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2499 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2500 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2501 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2503 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2504 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2506 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2510 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2511 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2512 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2513 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2515 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2517 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2519 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2520 silently ignoring one of them.
2522 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2523 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2524 containing this change was 5.92.
2526 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2527 automatically newline terminated.
2529 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2530 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2531 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2532 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2535 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2536 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2537 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2540 ** Scheduled for removal
2542 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2543 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2545 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2546 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2547 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2548 command to unlink a directory.
2550 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2551 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2552 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2553 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2557 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2558 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2559 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2560 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2561 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2562 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2566 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2567 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2569 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2571 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2572 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2573 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2575 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2576 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2579 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2580 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2582 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2583 list directories before files.
2585 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2586 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2587 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2588 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2591 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2593 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2595 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2596 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2597 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2599 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2600 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2604 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2605 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2606 usually printing nothing.
2608 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2610 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2611 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2612 them with hard-linked directories.
2614 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2615 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2616 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2618 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2619 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2620 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2622 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2625 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2626 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2628 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2629 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2631 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2632 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2634 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2635 all command-line arguments.
2637 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2639 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2641 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2642 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2644 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2646 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2647 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2648 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2649 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2650 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2652 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2653 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2655 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2656 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2657 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2658 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2660 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2662 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2666 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2667 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2669 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2670 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2672 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2673 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2675 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2676 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2678 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2679 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2681 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2683 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2684 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2685 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2688 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2690 ** Build-related bug fixes
2692 installing .mo files would fail
2695 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2699 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2701 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2704 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2708 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2709 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2713 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2715 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2716 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2718 ** Deprecated options
2720 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2721 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2723 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2727 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2729 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2730 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2731 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2732 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2734 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2737 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2743 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2748 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2750 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2752 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2753 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2754 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2756 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2757 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2758 problematic usages. These include:
2760 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2761 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2762 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2763 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2764 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2765 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2766 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2767 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2768 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2770 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2771 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2773 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2774 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2775 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2776 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2778 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2779 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2780 between binary and text files.
2782 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2786 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2790 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2791 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2793 head tac tail tee tr
2794 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2796 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2797 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2799 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2800 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2801 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2803 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2805 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2807 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2808 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2809 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2813 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2815 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2816 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2818 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2819 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2820 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2824 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2825 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2829 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2830 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2831 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2835 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2836 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2840 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2842 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2844 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2848 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2849 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2850 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2852 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2853 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2854 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2855 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2856 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2858 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2862 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2863 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2864 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2866 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2868 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2869 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2870 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2871 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2873 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2875 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2876 rather than silently wrapping around.
2878 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2879 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2881 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2882 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2884 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2885 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2886 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2887 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2889 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2891 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2893 ** Improved robustness
2895 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2896 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2897 no matter how large the result.
2899 ** Improved portability
2901 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2902 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2904 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2906 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2907 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2908 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2910 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2911 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2915 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2916 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2918 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2920 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2921 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2922 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2923 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2925 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2926 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2928 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2929 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2930 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2932 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2934 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2935 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2937 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2938 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2940 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2942 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2943 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2945 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2946 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2948 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2949 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2950 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2952 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2954 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2956 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2960 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2962 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2963 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2964 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2966 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2967 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2969 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2970 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2971 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2973 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2974 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2976 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2977 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2978 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2979 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2981 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2982 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2984 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2985 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2986 the file system does not support it.
2988 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2990 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2991 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2993 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2995 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2996 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2998 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2999 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
3000 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
3001 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
3003 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
3004 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
3007 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
3008 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
3009 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
3010 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
3012 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
3013 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
3014 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
3015 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
3017 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
3018 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
3020 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
3022 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
3023 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
3024 reporting incorrect results.
3028 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
3029 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
3031 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
3034 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
3036 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
3037 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
3039 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
3040 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
3042 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
3045 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
3046 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
3047 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
3048 the file name does not look like a page range.
3050 printf has several changes:
3052 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
3053 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
3055 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
3056 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
3057 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
3059 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
3060 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
3063 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
3064 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
3066 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
3067 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
3069 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3071 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3072 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3074 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3076 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3078 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3079 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3080 when first encountering the directory.
3084 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3085 output; POSIX requires this.
3087 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3088 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3090 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3092 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3093 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3095 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3096 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3098 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3099 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3100 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3101 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3102 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3103 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3104 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3106 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3107 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3108 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3110 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3111 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3113 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3115 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3117 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3118 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3119 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3120 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3122 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3126 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3127 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3128 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3129 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3130 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3132 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3133 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3134 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3136 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3137 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3139 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3140 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3142 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3143 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
3144 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
3145 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3146 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
3148 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3149 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3151 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3152 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3154 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3156 nocreat do not create the output file
3157 excl fail if the output file already exists
3158 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3159 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3161 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3163 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3164 direct use direct I/O for data
3165 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3166 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3167 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3168 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3169 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3171 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3173 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3174 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3177 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3178 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3179 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3180 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3181 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3182 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3184 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3185 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3187 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3190 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3192 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3194 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3195 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3197 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3198 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3199 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3201 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3202 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3203 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3205 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3207 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3208 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3210 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3211 for compatibility with bash.
3213 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3215 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3216 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3217 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3218 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3220 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3221 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3223 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3224 ls supports TABSIZE.
3225 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3226 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3227 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3229 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3232 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3234 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3235 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3236 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3237 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3238 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3239 an offset, not as a file name.
3241 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3242 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3244 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3245 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3247 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3248 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3250 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3251 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3252 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3254 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3255 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3257 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3258 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3262 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3264 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3266 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3270 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3271 or more arguments between partitions.
3273 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3274 holes in the destination.
3276 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3277 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3278 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3279 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3280 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3281 terminates immediately.
3283 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3285 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3287 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3288 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3289 not the empty string.
3291 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3292 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3296 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3297 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3298 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3301 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3308 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3312 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3313 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3315 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3316 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3318 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3319 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3320 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3323 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3327 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3328 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3330 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3331 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3333 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3334 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3335 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3337 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3339 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3342 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3344 ** Configuration option
3346 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3347 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3351 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3352 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3356 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3357 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3358 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3361 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3362 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3363 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3364 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3365 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3366 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3367 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3370 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3374 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3375 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3376 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3378 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3379 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3381 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3383 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3384 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3385 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3386 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3388 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3390 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3391 not just the ones that reference directories
3393 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3394 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3396 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3397 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3398 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3400 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3401 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3402 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3403 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3404 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3405 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3407 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3412 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3413 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3415 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3417 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3419 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3421 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3422 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3424 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3425 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3427 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3429 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3433 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3435 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3437 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3438 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3439 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3440 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3441 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3443 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3444 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3446 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3447 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3449 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3450 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3452 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3453 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3454 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3458 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3459 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3460 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3461 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3462 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3463 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3464 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3465 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3466 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3467 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3468 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3469 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3470 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3471 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3473 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3475 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3476 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3478 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3480 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3482 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3483 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3485 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3487 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3488 without a trailing newline.
3490 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3491 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3493 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3496 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3500 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3502 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3504 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3505 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3506 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3507 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3509 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3511 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3512 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3513 be printed without leading spaces.
3515 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3516 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3521 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3522 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3523 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3525 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3527 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3528 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3530 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3531 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3533 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3534 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3536 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3538 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3540 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3542 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3543 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3545 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3547 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3549 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3550 byte offsets are specified.
3553 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3556 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3559 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3560 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3561 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3562 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3563 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3564 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3565 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3566 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3567 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3568 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3569 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3570 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3571 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3572 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3573 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3574 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3575 directory where M has write access.
3576 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3577 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3578 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3581 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3582 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3583 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3584 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3585 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3586 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3587 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3588 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3589 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3590 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3591 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3592 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3593 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3594 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3595 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3596 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3597 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3598 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3599 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3600 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3601 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3602 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3603 appeared one additional time.
3605 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3606 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3607 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3608 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3611 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3612 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3613 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3614 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3615 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3616 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3617 if there were more than 338.
3619 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3620 - false --help now exits nonzero
3623 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3624 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3625 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3626 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3629 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3630 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3631 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3632 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3633 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3636 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3637 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3638 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3639 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3640 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3641 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3642 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3645 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3646 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3647 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3648 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3649 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3650 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3652 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3653 under certain unusual conditions
3654 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3655 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3658 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3659 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3660 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3661 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3662 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3663 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3664 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3665 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3666 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3667 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3668 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3669 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3670 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3671 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3672 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3673 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3676 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3677 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3680 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3681 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3682 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3683 involving hard-linked directories
3684 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3685 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3686 character-special and block files
3689 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3690 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3691 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3692 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3693 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3694 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3695 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3696 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3697 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3699 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3700 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3701 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3702 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3703 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3704 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3705 specified on the command line.
3706 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3707 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3708 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3709 the first file untouched.
3710 * readlink: new program
3711 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3712 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3713 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3714 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3715 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3716 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3719 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3720 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3721 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3722 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3723 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3724 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3725 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3726 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3727 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3728 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3729 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3730 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3732 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3733 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3734 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3736 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3737 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3738 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3739 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3740 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3741 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3742 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3743 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3746 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3747 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3750 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3751 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3752 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3753 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3754 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3755 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3756 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3759 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3760 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3762 ========================================================================
3763 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3764 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3767 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3769 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3770 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3771 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3772 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3773 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3774 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3775 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3776 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3777 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3778 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3779 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3780 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3782 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3783 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3784 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3785 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3787 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3790 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3792 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3793 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3794 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3795 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3796 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3797 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3798 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3801 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3802 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3803 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3804 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3805 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3806 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3807 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3808 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3809 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3810 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3811 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3812 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3813 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3814 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3815 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3816 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3818 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3819 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3821 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3822 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3823 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3824 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3825 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3826 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3828 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3829 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3830 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3831 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3832 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3833 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3834 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3836 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3837 the source files in the following example:
3838 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3839 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3840 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3841 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3842 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3843 links between source files with --preserve=links
3844 * cp accepts new options:
3845 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3846 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3847 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3848 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3849 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3850 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3851 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3852 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3853 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3855 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3856 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3857 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3858 even though it's older than dest.
3859 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3860 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3861 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3862 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3863 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3865 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3866 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3867 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3868 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3869 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3870 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3871 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3873 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3874 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3875 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3877 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3878 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3879 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3880 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3881 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3882 This is the default.
3884 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3885 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3886 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3887 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3888 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3890 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3893 ========================================================================
3894 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3895 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3898 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3899 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3901 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3902 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3903 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3904 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3905 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3907 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3908 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3909 that specifies a non-directory
3912 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3913 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3914 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3915 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3916 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3917 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3918 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3919 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3920 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3921 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3922 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3923 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3924 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3925 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3926 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3927 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3928 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3929 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3930 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3931 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3932 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3933 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3934 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3935 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3937 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3938 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3939 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3941 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3943 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3944 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3946 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3947 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3948 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3949 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3950 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3952 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3953 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3954 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3955 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3956 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3958 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3960 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3961 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3962 * still more portability fixes
3963 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3964 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3966 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3968 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3970 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3972 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3973 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3974 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3975 there is any time remaining
3976 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3978 ========================================================================
3979 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3980 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3982 This package began as the union of the following:
3983 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3985 ========================================================================
3987 Copyright (C) 2001-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3989 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3990 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3991 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3992 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3993 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3994 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.