1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
8 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
11 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
12 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
13 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
15 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
16 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
17 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
18 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
19 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
21 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
22 System V style platforms where this information is available only
23 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
25 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
26 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
28 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
29 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
31 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
32 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
33 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
35 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
36 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
38 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
40 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
41 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
43 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
44 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
46 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
47 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
49 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
50 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
51 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
52 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
54 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
55 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
56 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
58 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
59 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
61 ** Changes in behavior
63 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
65 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
66 values for any argument.
68 stat now outputs nanosecond information for time stamps even if
69 they are out of localtime range.
71 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
72 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
73 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
74 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
78 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
79 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
81 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
83 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
84 written to a terminal.
86 stat and tail now know about "prl_fs" (a parallels file system),
87 "m1fs" (a Plexistor file system), "wslfs" (Windows Subsystem for Linux),
88 and "smb2". stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
89 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", inotify for "m1fs",
90 and attempts inotify for "wslfs".
92 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
93 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
97 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
98 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
100 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
103 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
107 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
108 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
109 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
110 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
112 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
113 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
115 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
116 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
117 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
119 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
120 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
122 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
123 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
124 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
126 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
127 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
129 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
130 that specify an offset for the first field.
131 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
133 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
134 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
138 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
139 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
143 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
144 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
146 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
147 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
148 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
149 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
150 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
152 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
153 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
154 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
156 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
157 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
158 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
160 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
161 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
163 ** Changes in behavior
165 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
166 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
168 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
169 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
171 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
172 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
174 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
175 when outputting to a terminal.
177 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
181 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
182 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
184 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
185 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
187 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
188 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
189 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
191 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
192 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
194 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
195 upon detection of a directory cycle.
196 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
198 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
200 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
201 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
202 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
204 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
205 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
208 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
212 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
213 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
215 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
216 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
218 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
219 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
220 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
222 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
223 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
224 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
225 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
227 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
228 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
229 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
230 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
232 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
233 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
235 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
236 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
238 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
239 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
240 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
242 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
243 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
244 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
246 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
247 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
248 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
250 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
251 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
252 character at the 4GiB position.
253 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
255 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
256 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
258 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
259 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
261 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
262 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
263 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
265 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
266 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
268 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
269 replaced before inotify watches were created.
270 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
272 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
273 [bug introduced in the beginning]
275 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
276 when those files are being created or renamed.
277 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
281 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
282 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
283 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
284 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
286 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
287 on stderr approximately every second.
289 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
290 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
292 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
293 other than the default newline character.
295 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
296 a useful setting with high latency links.
298 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
299 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
301 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
302 and output errors in general.
304 ** Changes in behavior
306 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
307 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
308 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
309 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
311 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
312 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
313 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
314 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
315 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
317 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
318 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
320 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
322 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
323 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
325 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
326 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
330 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
331 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
333 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
334 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
336 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
337 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
339 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
340 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
342 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
344 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
345 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
346 documentation are provided.
349 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
353 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
354 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
356 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
357 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
358 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
359 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
361 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
362 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
363 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
364 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
366 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
367 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
369 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
370 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
372 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
373 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
374 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
375 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
376 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
377 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
391 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
393 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
394 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
395 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
396 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
397 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
398 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
400 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
401 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
402 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
403 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
405 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
406 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
407 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
409 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
410 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
411 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
412 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
414 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
415 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
416 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
418 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
419 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
420 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
422 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
423 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
424 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
425 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
426 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
428 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
429 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
430 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
432 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
433 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
435 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
436 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
437 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
439 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
440 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
442 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
443 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
445 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
446 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
448 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
449 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
451 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
452 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
453 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
455 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
456 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
460 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
461 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
463 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
464 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
465 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
466 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
467 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
468 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
469 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
470 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
471 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
472 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
473 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
474 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
475 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
476 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
477 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
478 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
479 it suitable for embedded system.
481 ** Changes in behavior
483 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
484 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
486 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
487 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
489 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
490 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
491 will result in the delayed output of lines.
493 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
494 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
495 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
499 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
500 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
501 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
503 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
505 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
506 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
507 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
509 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
510 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
511 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
512 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
514 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
515 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
517 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
518 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
519 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
522 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
526 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
527 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
528 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
530 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
531 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
532 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
533 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
535 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
536 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
537 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
539 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
540 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
542 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
544 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
545 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
546 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
548 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
549 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
550 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
552 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
553 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
554 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
555 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
557 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
558 from the source, when copying across file systems.
559 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
561 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
562 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
563 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
565 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
566 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
568 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
569 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
570 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
571 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
573 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
574 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
575 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
577 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
578 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
579 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
583 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
584 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
585 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
587 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
588 used to identify the split points.
590 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
591 command line argument through to the output.
593 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
596 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
597 a NUL instead of a white space character.
599 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
600 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
602 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
604 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
605 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
606 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
608 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
609 unique groups with empty lines.
611 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
612 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
614 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
617 ** Changes in behavior
619 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
620 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
621 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
622 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
624 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
625 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
627 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
628 not just the transfer counts.
630 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
632 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
633 as per the documented interface.
637 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
639 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
640 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
641 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
642 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
644 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
645 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
646 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
647 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
649 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
650 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
651 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
653 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
654 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
656 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
657 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
659 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
663 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
666 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
670 numfmt: reformat numbers
674 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
675 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
676 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
678 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
679 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
680 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
682 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
683 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
687 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
688 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
690 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
691 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
692 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
694 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
695 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
696 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
698 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
699 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
700 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
702 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
703 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
704 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
706 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
707 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
708 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
710 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
711 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
713 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
714 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
716 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
717 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
718 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
720 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
721 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
722 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
724 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
725 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
726 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
728 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
729 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
730 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
731 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
733 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
734 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
735 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
737 ** Changes in behavior
739 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
740 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
741 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
742 'total' in the target column.
744 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
745 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
746 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
748 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
749 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
751 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
752 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
756 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
757 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
759 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
760 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
762 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
766 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
767 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
768 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
769 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
770 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
771 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
772 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
773 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
774 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
775 for a patched distribution package.
777 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
778 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
780 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
781 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
782 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
783 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
786 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
790 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
792 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
793 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
794 sha384sum and sha512sum.
798 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
799 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
800 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
801 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
802 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
804 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
805 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
807 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
808 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
809 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
810 eventually exits nonzero.
812 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
813 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
814 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
815 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
816 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
818 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
819 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
820 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
822 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
823 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
824 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
826 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
827 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
828 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
830 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
831 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
832 Before, this would infloop:
833 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
834 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
836 ** Changes in behavior
838 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
842 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
843 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
844 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
845 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
846 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
849 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
850 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
851 format-changing options.
853 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
854 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
855 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
856 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
857 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
861 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
862 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
863 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
864 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
865 are run without following the instructions in README.
867 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
868 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
869 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
870 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
871 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
872 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
873 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
876 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
880 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
881 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
882 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
883 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
885 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
886 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
887 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
888 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
890 sort -u could read freed memory.
891 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
892 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
893 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
897 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
898 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
899 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
900 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
903 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
907 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
908 processes will not intersperse their output.
909 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
911 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
912 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
913 date: invalid date '\260'
914 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
916 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
917 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
918 lines output by df, can work reliably.
919 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
921 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
922 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
923 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
925 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
926 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
927 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
928 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
929 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
930 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
932 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
933 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
935 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
936 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
938 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
939 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
940 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
942 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
943 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
944 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
948 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
950 ** Changes in behavior
952 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
953 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
954 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
955 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
956 have any reason to include it here.
960 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
961 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
962 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
964 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
965 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
966 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
969 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
973 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
974 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
975 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
976 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
977 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
978 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
980 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
981 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
982 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
983 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
984 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
985 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
986 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
988 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
989 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
991 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
992 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
996 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
997 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
999 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
1001 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
1003 ** Changes in behavior
1005 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
1006 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
1007 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
1009 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
1010 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
1013 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
1017 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
1018 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
1019 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
1020 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
1021 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
1022 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
1023 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
1024 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
1026 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
1027 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
1028 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
1029 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
1030 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
1032 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
1033 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
1035 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
1036 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
1038 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
1039 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
1041 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
1042 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
1044 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
1045 additional static suffix to output file names.
1047 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
1048 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
1049 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1051 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
1052 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1056 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
1057 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
1058 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1060 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
1061 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
1062 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
1063 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
1064 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
1065 typically still point to one of the hard links.
1067 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
1068 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
1069 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
1070 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
1071 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
1073 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
1074 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
1075 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
1076 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
1080 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
1081 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
1082 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
1084 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
1085 instead of causing a usage failure.
1087 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
1090 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
1094 realpath: print resolved file names.
1098 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
1099 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1101 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
1102 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
1104 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
1105 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
1106 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
1107 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
1108 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
1109 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
1111 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
1112 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
1113 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
1115 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
1116 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
1117 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
1119 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
1120 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
1121 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
1122 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
1123 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
1125 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
1127 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
1128 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1130 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
1131 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1132 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
1134 ** Changes in behavior
1136 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
1137 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
1138 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
1139 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
1140 usually-short referent instead.
1142 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
1143 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
1144 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
1145 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
1148 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
1152 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
1153 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
1154 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1156 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
1157 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
1159 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
1160 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1164 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
1165 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1167 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
1168 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
1169 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
1170 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
1172 ** Changes in behavior
1174 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
1175 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
1176 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
1180 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
1181 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
1182 only .tar.xz files is enough.
1185 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
1189 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
1190 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
1191 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
1193 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
1194 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1196 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
1197 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
1198 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
1199 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
1200 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1202 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
1203 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
1204 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
1205 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
1206 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1207 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
1208 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
1209 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1211 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
1212 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
1214 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
1215 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
1217 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
1218 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1220 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
1221 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
1222 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1224 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
1225 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
1226 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
1227 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1229 ** Changes in behavior
1231 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
1232 when -v or -c specified.
1234 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
1235 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
1239 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
1240 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
1241 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
1242 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
1243 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
1245 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
1246 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
1247 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1249 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
1250 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
1251 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
1252 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
1253 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
1254 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
1255 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
1257 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
1258 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
1259 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
1263 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
1264 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
1266 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
1269 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
1270 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
1272 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
1273 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
1275 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
1276 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
1278 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
1280 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
1284 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
1285 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
1287 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
1290 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
1294 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
1295 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1297 ** Changes in behavior
1299 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
1300 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
1301 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
1302 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
1303 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
1304 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
1305 resolved for 2.6.39.
1306 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
1307 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
1308 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
1312 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
1315 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
1319 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
1320 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
1321 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1323 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
1324 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
1325 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1327 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
1328 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
1329 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1331 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
1332 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1334 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
1335 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1337 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
1338 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1340 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
1341 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1345 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
1346 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
1347 processed portion thereof.
1349 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
1350 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
1352 ** Changes in behavior
1354 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1355 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
1356 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1358 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1359 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
1360 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
1362 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
1363 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
1365 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
1366 Use --preserve-context instead.
1368 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
1371 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
1375 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
1376 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
1377 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
1378 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
1379 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1381 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
1382 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1384 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
1385 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
1386 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
1388 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
1389 reject file names invalid for that file system.
1391 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
1392 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1396 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
1397 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
1398 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
1399 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
1400 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
1401 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
1402 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
1403 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
1405 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
1406 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
1407 the same number of fields are output for each line.
1409 ** Changes in behavior
1411 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
1412 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
1413 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
1416 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
1420 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
1421 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
1422 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1425 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
1429 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
1430 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
1432 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
1433 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
1435 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
1436 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1438 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
1439 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
1440 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
1441 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1443 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
1444 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1446 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
1447 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
1448 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
1450 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
1452 ** Changes in behavior
1454 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
1455 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
1456 to the number of available processors.
1460 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
1463 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
1467 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
1468 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
1469 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
1470 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
1472 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
1473 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
1474 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
1476 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
1477 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1479 ** Changes in behavior
1481 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
1482 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
1484 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
1485 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
1486 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
1487 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
1488 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
1489 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
1491 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
1492 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
1493 the same way as the others.
1495 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
1496 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
1499 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
1503 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
1504 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
1505 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
1507 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
1508 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
1510 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
1511 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
1512 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
1514 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
1515 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
1517 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
1518 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
1520 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
1521 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
1522 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1524 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
1525 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
1526 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
1527 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
1531 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
1532 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
1534 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
1537 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
1538 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
1540 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
1542 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
1543 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
1544 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
1546 ** Changes in behavior
1548 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
1549 rather than its aliased target.
1551 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
1552 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
1553 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
1555 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
1556 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
1557 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
1558 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
1559 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
1560 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
1561 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
1562 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
1564 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
1566 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
1568 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
1569 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
1572 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
1573 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
1574 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
1575 control like taskset for example.
1577 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
1579 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
1580 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
1581 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
1582 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
1583 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
1584 includes %C when context information is available.
1586 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
1587 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
1588 rather than a file system attribute.
1590 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
1591 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
1592 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
1593 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
1595 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
1596 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
1597 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
1599 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
1600 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
1601 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
1604 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
1608 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
1609 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
1611 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
1613 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
1614 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1616 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
1617 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
1618 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
1619 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
1621 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
1622 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
1623 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1627 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
1628 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
1630 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
1631 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
1632 duration after the initial signal was sent.
1634 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
1635 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
1636 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
1637 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
1638 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
1639 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
1640 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
1641 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
1642 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
1644 ** Changes in behavior
1646 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
1647 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1649 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1650 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1653 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1657 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1658 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1659 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1660 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1664 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1665 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1667 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1668 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1669 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1670 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1672 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1673 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1674 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1677 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1681 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1682 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1683 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1685 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1686 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1687 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1689 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1690 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1692 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1693 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1694 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1695 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1697 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1698 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1699 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1701 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1702 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1703 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1704 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1706 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1707 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1708 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1710 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1711 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1712 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1713 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1715 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1716 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1717 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1719 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1720 processes will not intersperse their output.
1721 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1724 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1728 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1729 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1731 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1732 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1734 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1735 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1736 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1737 the presence of the empty string argument.
1738 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1740 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1741 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1742 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1743 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1745 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1746 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1748 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1749 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1750 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1752 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1753 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1754 and with a malicious user on the same system
1755 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1756 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1759 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1763 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1764 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1765 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1767 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1768 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1769 offending directory and all "contents."
1771 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1772 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1773 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1775 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1776 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1777 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1779 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1780 processes will not intersperse their output.
1781 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1782 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1784 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1785 output the name of the file to stdout.
1786 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1788 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1789 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1790 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1792 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1793 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1796 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1797 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1798 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1800 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1801 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1802 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1803 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1804 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1805 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1807 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1808 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1809 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1810 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1812 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1813 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1815 ** Changes in behavior
1817 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1818 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1819 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1820 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1821 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1823 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1824 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1825 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1826 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1828 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1830 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1831 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1832 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1833 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1834 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1838 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1842 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1843 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1845 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1846 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1848 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1849 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1850 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1852 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1853 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1856 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1860 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1861 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1862 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1864 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1865 to accommodate leap seconds.
1866 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1868 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1869 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1870 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1872 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1874 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1875 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1876 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1878 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1879 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1880 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1881 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1882 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1886 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1887 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1888 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1889 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1891 ** Changes in behavior
1893 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1894 environment variable is set.
1896 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1897 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1898 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1902 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1903 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1904 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1905 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1907 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1908 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1909 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1910 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1914 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1915 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1916 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1918 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1919 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1920 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1921 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1922 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1923 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1924 another improvement:
1926 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1927 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1930 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1934 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1935 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1936 and libraries tested at configure time.
1937 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1939 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1940 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1942 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1943 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1945 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1946 printing a summary to stderr.
1947 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1949 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1950 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1951 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1953 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1954 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1956 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1957 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1958 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1959 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1961 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1962 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1963 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1964 which is relatively unusual.
1965 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1967 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1968 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1969 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1970 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1971 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1972 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1973 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1977 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1978 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1979 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1980 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1981 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1985 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1986 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1988 ** Changes in behavior
1990 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1991 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1992 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1993 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1994 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1997 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
2001 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
2002 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
2004 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
2005 before data copying has started.
2007 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
2008 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2010 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
2011 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
2012 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
2013 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2015 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
2016 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
2017 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
2018 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2020 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
2025 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
2026 for its standard streams.
2028 ** Changes in behavior
2030 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
2031 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
2032 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
2033 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
2034 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
2035 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
2037 ** Deprecated options
2039 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
2040 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
2044 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
2046 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
2047 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
2048 a btrfs file system.
2050 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
2052 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
2053 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
2055 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
2056 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
2059 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
2063 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
2064 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
2065 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
2066 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
2068 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
2069 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
2070 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
2071 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
2072 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
2077 make check: two tests have been corrected
2081 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
2082 inherited from gnulib.
2085 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
2089 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
2090 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
2091 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
2092 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
2094 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
2095 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
2097 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
2099 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
2100 systems without xattr support.
2102 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
2103 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
2104 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2106 ** Changes in behavior
2108 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
2109 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
2110 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
2111 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
2113 ** Improved robustness
2115 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
2116 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
2117 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
2118 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
2119 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
2120 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
2121 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
2122 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
2123 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2127 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
2128 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
2130 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
2131 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
2132 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
2133 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2134 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2137 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
2141 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
2142 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
2143 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
2147 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
2148 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
2149 data was read, or on process exit.
2150 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2152 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
2153 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
2154 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
2155 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2157 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
2158 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
2159 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
2160 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2162 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
2163 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
2165 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
2166 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2168 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
2169 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
2170 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
2172 ** Changes in behavior
2174 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
2175 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
2176 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
2178 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
2179 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
2181 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
2182 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
2183 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
2186 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
2190 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
2192 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
2193 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
2194 install: Never copies xattrs
2196 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
2197 from overwriting any existing destination file
2199 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
2200 mode where this feature is available.
2202 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
2203 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
2204 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
2205 do not modify the destination at all.
2207 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
2209 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
2213 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
2214 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
2216 cp uses much less memory in some situations
2218 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
2219 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
2221 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
2222 processing the first file name
2224 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
2225 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
2226 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
2227 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2229 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
2230 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
2232 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
2233 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
2236 ** Changes in behavior
2238 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
2239 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
2241 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
2242 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
2243 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
2245 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
2246 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
2248 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
2250 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
2251 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
2252 is still marked with a '+'.
2255 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
2259 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
2260 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
2264 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
2265 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
2266 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
2267 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
2268 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
2269 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
2271 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2272 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2274 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
2275 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
2277 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
2279 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
2280 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
2281 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
2283 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
2284 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
2286 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
2287 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
2288 used to factor large numbers.
2290 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
2293 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
2295 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
2297 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
2298 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
2300 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
2301 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
2302 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
2303 maximum command-line (argv) length.
2305 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
2306 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
2307 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
2309 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
2310 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
2314 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
2316 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
2317 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
2319 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
2320 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
2322 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
2324 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
2325 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
2329 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
2330 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
2331 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
2333 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
2335 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
2336 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
2337 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
2339 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
2340 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
2341 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
2343 ** Changes in behavior
2345 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
2346 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
2349 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
2353 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
2354 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
2355 'futimens' system calls.
2359 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
2361 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
2362 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
2363 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
2365 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
2366 with no USERNAME argument.
2368 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
2369 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
2370 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
2372 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
2373 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
2374 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
2375 number of fields for some inputs.
2377 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
2378 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
2380 ** Changes in behavior
2382 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
2383 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
2386 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
2390 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
2392 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
2393 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
2394 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
2395 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2397 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
2398 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
2400 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
2401 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
2403 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
2404 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
2406 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
2407 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
2408 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2409 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2411 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
2412 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
2413 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
2414 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
2415 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2416 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
2418 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
2419 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
2421 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
2422 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
2423 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2425 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
2426 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2428 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
2429 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2431 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
2432 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
2433 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
2434 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
2436 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
2437 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
2439 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
2440 in more cases when a directory is empty.
2442 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
2443 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
2444 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2448 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2449 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2451 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
2452 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
2453 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
2454 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
2458 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
2459 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
2461 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
2463 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
2467 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
2468 which have negative errno values.
2472 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
2476 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
2480 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
2481 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
2484 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
2488 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
2489 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
2490 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2492 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
2493 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
2494 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
2495 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2499 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
2500 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
2501 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
2502 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
2505 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
2509 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
2511 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
2512 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
2513 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2516 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
2520 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
2521 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
2523 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
2525 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
2527 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
2529 ** Programs no longer installed by default
2533 ** Changes in behavior
2535 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
2536 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
2538 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
2539 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
2541 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
2542 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
2543 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
2547 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
2548 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
2549 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
2550 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
2551 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
2552 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
2553 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
2554 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
2555 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
2556 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
2557 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
2559 The following commands and options now support the standard size
2560 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
2561 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
2564 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
2567 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
2568 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
2569 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
2571 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
2572 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
2573 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
2576 ** New build options
2578 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
2579 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
2580 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
2581 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
2583 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
2584 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
2585 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
2586 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
2587 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
2588 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
2589 of "make check" fail.
2591 ** Remove deprecated options
2593 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2594 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
2595 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2596 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
2597 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
2599 ** Improved robustness
2601 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
2602 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
2603 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
2604 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
2605 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
2606 loss of the contents of a/f.
2608 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
2609 in its 35-colon command-line argument
2613 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
2614 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
2615 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2617 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
2618 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
2619 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
2620 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2622 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
2623 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
2624 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
2625 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
2626 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
2627 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
2628 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
2629 destination is a symlink.
2631 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
2633 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
2634 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
2636 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
2637 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
2639 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
2641 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
2642 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
2644 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
2645 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
2647 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2650 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2651 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2653 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2654 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2656 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2657 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2658 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2659 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2661 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2662 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2663 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2665 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2666 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2667 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2669 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2670 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2671 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2672 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2674 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2675 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2676 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2678 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2679 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2681 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2682 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2684 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2686 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2687 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2688 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2690 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2691 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2693 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2694 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2696 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2697 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2699 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2700 [present in the original version]
2703 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2707 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2709 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2710 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2711 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2713 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2714 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2716 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2720 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2721 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2723 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2724 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2726 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2727 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2729 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2730 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2731 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2732 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2733 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2734 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2736 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2737 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2740 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2741 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2743 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2746 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2747 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2748 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2750 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2751 directory is unreadable.
2753 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2754 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2755 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2757 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2758 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2759 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2760 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2761 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2764 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2765 Before it would print nothing.
2767 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2769 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2770 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2771 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2772 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2773 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2774 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2775 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2776 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2778 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2782 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2783 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2784 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2786 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2787 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2788 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2789 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2792 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2796 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2797 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2798 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2799 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2800 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2801 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2802 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2804 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2805 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2806 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2807 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2808 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2809 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2810 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2811 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2813 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2814 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2815 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2818 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2822 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2823 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2825 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2826 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2827 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2829 ** Improved robustness
2831 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2832 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2833 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2836 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2840 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2841 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2842 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2843 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2844 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2846 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2850 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2853 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2857 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2858 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2859 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2860 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2862 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2863 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2865 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2866 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2867 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2870 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2872 ** Improved robustness
2874 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2875 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2877 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2878 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2879 or NFS-mounted partition.
2881 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2882 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2886 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2887 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2888 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2889 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2890 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2891 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2893 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2894 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2896 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2897 or neglect to report file removal.
2899 For the "groups" command:
2901 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2902 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2904 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2906 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2908 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2912 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2913 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2916 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2918 ** Changes in behavior
2920 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2921 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2922 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2923 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2925 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2926 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2927 a final './' or '../' component.
2929 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2930 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2931 this only for pipes.
2933 ** Infrastructure changes
2935 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2936 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2937 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2938 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2942 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2943 name is "." or "..".
2945 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2946 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2947 dirent.d_type support.
2949 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2950 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2952 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2953 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2954 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2955 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2958 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2960 ** Changes in behavior
2962 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2966 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2967 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2971 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2972 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2973 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2975 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2976 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2978 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2979 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2981 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2983 ** Improved robustness
2985 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2986 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2987 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2989 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2990 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2993 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2994 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2996 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2997 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2999 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
3000 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
3002 ** Changes in behavior
3004 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
3005 where the two are distinct.
3007 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
3008 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
3009 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
3010 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
3011 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
3012 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
3013 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
3014 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
3015 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
3016 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
3017 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
3018 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
3019 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
3020 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
3021 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
3022 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
3023 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
3025 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
3026 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
3027 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
3029 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
3030 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
3031 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
3032 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
3035 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
3036 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
3040 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
3041 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
3042 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
3043 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
3045 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
3046 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
3047 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
3049 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
3050 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
3051 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
3052 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
3053 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
3056 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
3057 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
3059 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
3060 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
3061 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
3062 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
3064 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
3065 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
3066 successful and the output is easier to parse.
3068 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
3069 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
3070 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
3071 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
3073 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
3074 and sticky) with the -m option.
3076 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
3077 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
3078 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
3079 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
3080 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
3082 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
3083 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
3085 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
3089 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
3090 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
3091 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
3092 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
3094 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
3096 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
3098 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
3099 silently ignoring one of them.
3101 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
3102 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
3103 containing this change was 5.92.
3105 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
3106 automatically newline terminated.
3108 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
3109 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
3110 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
3111 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
3114 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
3115 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3116 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
3119 ** Scheduled for removal
3121 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
3122 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
3124 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
3125 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
3126 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
3127 command to unlink a directory.
3129 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
3130 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
3131 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
3132 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
3136 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
3137 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
3138 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
3139 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
3140 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
3141 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
3145 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
3146 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
3148 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
3150 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
3151 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
3152 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
3154 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
3155 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
3158 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
3159 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
3161 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
3162 list directories before files.
3164 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
3165 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
3166 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
3167 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
3170 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
3172 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
3174 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
3175 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
3176 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
3178 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3179 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3183 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
3184 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
3185 usually printing nothing.
3187 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
3189 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
3190 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
3191 them with hard-linked directories.
3193 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
3194 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
3195 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
3197 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
3198 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
3199 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
3201 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
3204 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
3205 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
3207 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
3208 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
3210 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
3211 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
3213 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
3214 all command-line arguments.
3216 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
3218 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
3220 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
3221 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
3223 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
3225 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
3226 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
3227 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
3228 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
3229 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
3231 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
3232 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
3234 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
3235 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
3236 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
3237 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
3239 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
3241 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
3245 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
3246 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
3248 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
3249 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
3251 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
3252 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
3254 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
3255 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
3257 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
3258 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
3260 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
3262 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
3263 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
3264 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
3267 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
3269 ** Build-related bug fixes
3271 installing .mo files would fail
3274 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
3278 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
3280 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
3283 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
3287 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
3288 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
3292 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
3294 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
3295 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
3297 ** Deprecated options
3299 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
3300 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
3302 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
3306 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
3308 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
3309 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
3310 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
3311 conforming to older POSIX versions.
3313 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
3316 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
3322 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
3327 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
3329 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
3331 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
3332 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
3333 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
3335 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
3336 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
3337 problematic usages. These include:
3339 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
3340 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
3341 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
3342 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
3343 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
3344 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
3345 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
3346 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
3347 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
3349 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
3350 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
3352 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
3353 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
3354 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
3355 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
3357 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
3358 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
3359 between binary and text files.
3361 The following programs now always use text input/output:
3365 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
3369 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
3370 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
3372 head tac tail tee tr
3373 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
3375 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
3376 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
3378 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
3379 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
3380 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
3382 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
3384 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
3386 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
3387 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
3388 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
3392 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
3394 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
3395 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3397 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
3398 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
3399 blocks until F contains N blocks.
3403 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
3404 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
3408 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
3409 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
3410 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
3414 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
3415 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
3419 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
3421 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
3423 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
3427 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
3428 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
3429 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
3431 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
3432 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
3433 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
3434 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
3435 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
3437 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
3441 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
3442 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
3443 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
3445 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
3447 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
3448 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
3449 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
3450 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
3452 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
3454 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
3455 rather than silently wrapping around.
3457 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
3458 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
3460 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
3461 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
3463 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
3464 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
3465 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
3466 file /tmp/a/b/file".
3468 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
3470 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
3472 ** Improved robustness
3474 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
3475 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
3476 no matter how large the result.
3478 ** Improved portability
3480 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
3481 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
3483 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
3485 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
3486 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
3487 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
3489 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
3490 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
3494 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
3495 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
3497 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
3499 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
3500 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
3501 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
3502 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
3504 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
3505 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
3507 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
3508 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
3509 categories if not specified by dircolors.
3511 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
3513 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
3514 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
3516 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
3517 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
3519 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
3521 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
3522 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
3524 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
3525 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
3527 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
3528 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
3529 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
3531 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
3533 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
3535 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
3539 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
3541 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
3542 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
3543 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
3545 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
3546 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
3548 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
3549 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
3550 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
3552 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
3553 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
3555 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
3556 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
3557 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
3558 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
3560 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
3561 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
3563 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
3564 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
3565 the file system does not support it.
3567 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
3569 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
3570 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
3572 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
3574 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
3575 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
3577 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
3578 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
3579 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
3580 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
3582 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
3583 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
3586 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
3587 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
3588 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
3589 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
3591 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
3592 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
3593 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
3594 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
3596 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
3597 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
3599 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
3601 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
3602 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
3603 reporting incorrect results.
3607 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
3608 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
3610 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
3613 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
3615 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
3616 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
3618 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
3619 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
3621 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
3624 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
3625 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
3626 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
3627 the file name does not look like a page range.
3629 printf has several changes:
3631 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
3632 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
3634 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
3635 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
3636 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
3638 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
3639 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
3642 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
3643 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
3645 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
3646 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
3648 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3650 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3651 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3653 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3655 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3657 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3658 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3659 when first encountering the directory.
3663 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3664 output; POSIX requires this.
3666 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3667 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3669 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3671 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3672 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3674 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3675 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3677 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3678 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3679 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3680 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3681 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3682 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3683 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3685 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3686 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3687 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3689 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3690 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3692 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3694 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3696 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3697 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3698 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3699 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3701 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3705 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3706 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3707 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3708 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3709 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3711 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3712 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3713 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3715 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3716 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3718 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3719 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3721 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3722 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
3723 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
3724 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3725 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
3727 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3728 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3730 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3731 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3733 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3735 nocreat do not create the output file
3736 excl fail if the output file already exists
3737 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3738 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3740 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3742 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3743 direct use direct I/O for data
3744 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3745 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3746 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3747 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3748 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3750 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3752 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3753 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3756 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3757 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3758 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3759 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3760 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3761 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3763 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3764 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3766 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3769 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3771 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3773 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3774 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3776 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3777 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3778 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3780 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3781 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3782 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3784 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3786 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3787 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3789 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3790 for compatibility with bash.
3792 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3794 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3795 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3796 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3797 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3799 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3800 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3802 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3803 ls supports TABSIZE.
3804 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3805 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3806 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3808 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3811 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3813 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3814 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3815 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3816 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3817 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3818 an offset, not as a file name.
3820 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3821 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3823 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3824 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3826 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3827 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3829 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3830 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3831 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3833 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3834 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3836 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3837 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3841 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3843 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3845 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3849 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3850 or more arguments between partitions.
3852 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3853 holes in the destination.
3855 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3856 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3857 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3858 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3859 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3860 terminates immediately.
3862 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3864 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3866 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3867 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3868 not the empty string.
3870 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3871 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3875 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3876 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3877 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3880 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3887 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3891 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3892 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3894 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3895 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3897 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3898 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3899 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3902 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3906 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3907 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3909 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3910 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3912 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3913 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3914 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3916 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3918 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3921 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3923 ** Configuration option
3925 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3926 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3930 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3931 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3935 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3936 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3937 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3940 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3941 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3942 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3943 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3944 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3945 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3946 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3949 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3953 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3954 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3955 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3957 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3958 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3960 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3962 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3963 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3964 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3965 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3967 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3969 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3970 not just the ones that reference directories
3972 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3973 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3975 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3976 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3977 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3979 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3980 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3981 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3982 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3983 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3984 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3986 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3991 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3992 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3994 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3996 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3998 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
4000 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
4001 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
4003 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
4004 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
4006 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
4008 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
4012 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
4014 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
4016 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
4017 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
4018 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
4019 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
4020 resolution is the best we can do right now.
4022 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
4023 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
4025 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
4026 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
4028 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
4029 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
4031 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
4032 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
4033 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
4037 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
4038 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
4039 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
4040 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
4041 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
4042 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
4043 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
4044 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
4045 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
4046 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
4047 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
4048 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
4049 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
4050 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
4052 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
4054 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
4055 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
4057 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
4059 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
4061 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
4062 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
4064 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
4066 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
4067 without a trailing newline.
4069 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
4070 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
4072 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
4075 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
4079 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
4081 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
4083 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
4084 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
4085 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
4086 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
4088 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
4090 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
4091 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
4092 be printed without leading spaces.
4094 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
4095 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
4100 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
4101 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
4102 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
4104 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
4106 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
4107 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
4109 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
4110 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
4112 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
4113 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
4115 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
4117 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
4119 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
4121 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
4122 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
4124 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
4126 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
4128 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
4129 byte offsets are specified.
4132 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
4135 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
4138 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
4139 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
4140 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
4141 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
4142 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
4143 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
4144 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
4145 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
4146 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
4147 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
4148 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
4149 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
4150 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
4151 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
4152 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
4153 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
4154 directory where M has write access.
4155 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
4156 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
4157 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
4160 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
4161 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
4162 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
4163 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
4164 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
4165 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
4166 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
4167 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
4168 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
4169 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
4170 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
4171 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
4172 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
4173 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
4174 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
4175 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
4176 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
4177 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
4178 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
4179 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
4180 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
4181 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
4182 appeared one additional time.
4184 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
4185 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
4186 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
4187 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
4190 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
4191 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
4192 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
4193 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
4194 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
4195 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
4196 if there were more than 338.
4198 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
4199 - false --help now exits nonzero
4202 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
4203 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
4204 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
4205 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
4208 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
4209 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
4210 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
4211 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
4212 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
4215 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
4216 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
4217 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
4218 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
4219 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
4220 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
4221 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
4224 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
4225 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
4226 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
4227 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
4228 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
4229 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
4231 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4232 under certain unusual conditions
4233 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
4234 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
4237 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
4238 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
4239 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
4240 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
4241 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
4242 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
4243 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
4244 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
4245 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
4246 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
4247 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
4248 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
4249 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
4250 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
4251 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
4252 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
4255 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
4256 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
4259 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
4260 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
4261 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
4262 involving hard-linked directories
4263 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
4264 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
4265 character-special and block files
4268 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
4269 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
4270 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
4271 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
4272 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
4273 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
4274 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
4275 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
4276 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
4278 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
4279 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
4280 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
4281 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
4282 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
4283 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
4284 specified on the command line.
4285 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
4286 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
4287 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
4288 the first file untouched.
4289 * readlink: new program
4290 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
4291 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
4292 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
4293 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
4294 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
4295 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
4298 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
4299 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
4300 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
4301 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
4302 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
4303 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
4304 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
4305 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
4306 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
4307 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
4308 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
4309 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
4311 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
4312 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
4313 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
4315 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
4316 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
4317 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
4318 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
4319 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
4320 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
4321 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
4322 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
4325 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
4326 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
4329 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
4330 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
4331 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
4332 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
4333 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
4334 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
4335 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
4338 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
4339 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
4341 ========================================================================
4342 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
4343 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4346 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
4348 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4349 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
4350 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
4351 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
4352 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
4353 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
4354 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
4355 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
4356 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
4357 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
4358 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
4359 The old options will continue to work for a while.
4361 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
4362 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
4363 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
4364 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
4366 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
4369 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
4371 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
4372 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
4373 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
4374 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
4375 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
4376 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
4377 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
4380 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
4381 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
4382 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
4383 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
4384 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
4385 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
4386 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
4387 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
4388 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
4389 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
4390 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
4391 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
4392 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
4393 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
4394 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
4395 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
4397 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
4398 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
4400 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
4401 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
4402 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
4403 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
4404 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
4405 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
4407 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
4408 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
4409 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
4410 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
4411 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
4412 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
4413 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
4415 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
4416 the source files in the following example:
4417 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
4418 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
4419 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
4420 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
4421 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
4422 links between source files with --preserve=links
4423 * cp accepts new options:
4424 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
4425 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
4426 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
4427 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
4428 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
4429 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
4430 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
4431 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
4432 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
4434 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
4435 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
4436 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
4437 even though it's older than dest.
4438 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
4439 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
4440 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
4441 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
4442 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
4444 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
4445 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
4446 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
4447 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
4448 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
4449 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
4450 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
4452 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
4453 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
4454 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
4456 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
4457 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
4458 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
4459 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
4460 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
4461 This is the default.
4463 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
4464 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
4465 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
4466 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
4467 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
4469 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
4472 ========================================================================
4473 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
4474 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4477 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
4478 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
4480 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4481 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
4482 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
4483 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
4484 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
4486 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
4487 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
4488 that specifies a non-directory
4491 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
4492 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
4493 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
4494 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
4495 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4496 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
4497 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
4498 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4499 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
4500 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
4501 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
4502 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
4503 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
4504 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
4505 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
4506 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
4507 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
4508 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
4509 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
4510 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
4511 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
4512 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
4513 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
4514 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
4516 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
4517 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
4518 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
4520 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
4522 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
4523 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
4525 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
4526 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
4527 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
4528 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
4529 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
4531 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
4532 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
4533 required support; from Bruno Haible.
4534 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
4535 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
4537 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
4539 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
4540 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
4541 * still more portability fixes
4542 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
4543 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4545 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
4547 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
4549 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
4551 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
4552 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
4553 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
4554 there is any time remaining
4555 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
4557 ========================================================================
4558 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4559 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
4561 This package began as the union of the following:
4562 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
4564 ========================================================================
4566 Copyright (C) 2001-2016 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4568 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
4569 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
4570 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
4571 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
4572 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
4573 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.