1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
8 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
9 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
13 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
14 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
15 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
17 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
18 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
19 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
21 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
22 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
23 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
25 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc systems.
26 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
28 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
29 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
31 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also line numbers are
32 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
33 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
35 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
36 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
37 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
39 ** Changes in behavior
41 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
42 summary line, accommodating to the --output option where the target
43 field can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df
44 prints 'total' into the target column.
46 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option which was deprecated
47 since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
51 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
52 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
53 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
54 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
55 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
56 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
57 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
58 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
59 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
60 for a patched distribution package.
62 The check in the root-only tests to test whether our dummy user,
63 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, is able to run binaries from the build directory
64 failed. As a result, these tests have been skipped unnecessarily.
65 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
68 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
72 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
74 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
75 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
76 sha384sum and sha512sum.
80 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
81 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
82 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
83 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
84 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
86 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
87 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
89 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
90 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
91 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
92 eventually exits nonzero.
94 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
95 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
96 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
97 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
98 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
100 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
101 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
102 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
104 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
105 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
106 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
108 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
109 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
110 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
112 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
113 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
114 Before, this would infloop:
115 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
116 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
118 ** Changes in behavior
120 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
124 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
125 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
126 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
127 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
128 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
131 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
132 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
133 format-changing options.
135 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
136 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
137 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
138 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
139 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
143 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
144 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
145 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
146 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
147 are run without following the instructions in README.
149 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
150 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
151 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
152 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
153 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
154 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
155 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
158 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
162 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
163 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
164 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
165 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
167 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
168 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
169 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
170 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
172 sort -u could read freed memory.
173 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
174 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
175 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
179 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
180 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
181 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
182 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
185 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
189 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
190 processes will not intersperse their output.
191 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
193 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
194 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
195 date: invalid date '\260'
196 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
198 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
199 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
200 lines output by df, can work reliably.
201 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
203 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
204 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
205 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
207 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
208 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
209 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
210 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
211 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
212 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
214 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
215 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
217 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
218 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
220 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
221 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
222 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
224 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
225 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
226 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
230 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
232 ** Changes in behavior
234 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
235 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
236 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
237 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
238 have any reason to include it here.
242 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
243 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
244 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
246 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
247 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
248 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
251 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
255 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
256 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
257 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
258 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
259 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
260 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
262 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
263 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
264 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
265 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
266 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
267 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
268 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
270 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
271 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
273 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
274 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
278 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
279 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
281 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
283 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
285 ** Changes in behavior
287 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
288 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
289 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
291 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
292 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
295 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
299 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
300 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
301 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
302 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
303 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
304 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
305 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
306 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
308 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
309 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
310 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
311 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
312 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
314 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
315 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
317 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
318 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
320 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
321 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
323 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
324 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
326 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
327 additional static suffix to output file names.
329 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
330 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
331 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
333 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
334 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
338 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
339 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
340 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
342 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
343 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
344 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
345 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
346 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
347 typically still point to one of the hard links.
349 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
350 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
351 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
352 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
353 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
355 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
356 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
357 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
358 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
362 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
363 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
364 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
366 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
367 instead of causing a usage failure.
369 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
372 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
376 realpath: print resolved file names.
380 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
381 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
383 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
384 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
386 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
387 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
388 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
389 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
390 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
391 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
393 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
394 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
395 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
397 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
398 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
399 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
401 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
402 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
403 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
404 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
405 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
407 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
409 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
410 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
412 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
413 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
414 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
416 ** Changes in behavior
418 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
419 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
420 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
421 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
422 usually-short referent instead.
424 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
425 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
426 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
427 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
430 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
434 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
435 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
436 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
438 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
439 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
441 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
442 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
446 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
447 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
449 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
450 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
451 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
452 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
454 ** Changes in behavior
456 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
457 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
458 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
462 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
463 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
464 only .tar.xz files is enough.
467 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
471 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
472 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
473 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
475 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
476 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
478 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
479 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
480 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
481 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
482 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
484 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
485 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
486 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
487 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
488 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
489 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
490 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
491 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
493 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
494 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
496 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
497 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
499 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
500 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
502 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
503 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
504 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
506 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
507 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
508 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
509 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
511 ** Changes in behavior
513 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
514 when -v or -c specified.
516 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
517 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
521 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
522 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
523 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
524 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
525 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
527 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
528 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
529 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
531 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
532 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
533 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
534 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
535 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
536 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
537 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
539 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
540 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
541 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
545 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
546 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
548 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
551 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
552 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
554 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
555 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
557 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
558 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
560 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
562 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
566 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
567 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
569 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
572 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
576 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
577 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
579 ** Changes in behavior
581 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
582 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
583 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
584 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
585 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
586 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
588 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
589 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
590 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
594 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
597 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
601 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
602 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
603 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
605 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
606 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
607 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
609 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
610 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
611 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
613 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
614 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
616 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
617 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
619 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
620 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
622 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
623 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
627 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
628 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
629 processed portion thereof.
631 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
632 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
634 ** Changes in behavior
636 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
637 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
638 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
640 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
641 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
642 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
644 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
645 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
647 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
648 Use --preserve-context instead.
650 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
653 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
657 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
658 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
659 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
660 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
661 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
663 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
664 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
666 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
667 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
668 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
670 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
671 reject file names invalid for that file system.
673 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
674 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
678 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
679 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
680 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
681 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
682 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
683 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
684 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
685 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
687 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
688 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
689 the same number of fields are output for each line.
691 ** Changes in behavior
693 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
694 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
695 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
698 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
702 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
703 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
704 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
707 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
711 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
712 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
714 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
715 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
717 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
718 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
720 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
721 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
722 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
723 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
725 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
726 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
728 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
729 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
730 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
732 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
734 ** Changes in behavior
736 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
737 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
738 to the number of available processors.
742 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
745 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
749 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
750 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
751 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
752 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
754 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
755 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
756 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
758 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
759 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
761 ** Changes in behavior
763 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
764 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
766 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
767 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
768 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
769 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
770 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
771 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
773 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
774 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
775 the same way as the others.
778 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
782 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
783 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
784 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
786 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
787 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
789 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
790 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
791 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
793 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
794 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
796 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
797 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
799 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
800 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
801 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
803 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
804 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
805 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
806 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
810 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
811 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
813 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
816 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
817 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
819 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
821 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
822 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
823 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
825 ** Changes in behavior
827 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
828 rather than its aliased target.
830 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
831 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
832 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
834 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
835 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
836 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
837 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
838 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
839 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
840 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
841 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
843 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
845 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
847 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
848 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
851 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
852 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
853 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
854 control like taskset for example.
856 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
858 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
859 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
860 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
861 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
862 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
863 includes %C when context information is available.
865 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
866 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
867 rather than a file system attribute.
869 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
870 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
871 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
872 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
874 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
875 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
876 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
878 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
879 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
880 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
883 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
887 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
888 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
890 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
892 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
893 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
895 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
896 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
897 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
898 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
900 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
901 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
902 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
906 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
907 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
909 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
910 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
911 duration after the initial signal was sent.
913 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
914 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
915 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
916 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
917 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
918 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
919 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
920 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
921 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
923 ** Changes in behavior
925 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
926 sequence when it would be a no-op.
928 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
929 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
932 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
936 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
937 of available processors, which may not have been the case
938 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
939 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
943 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
944 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
946 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
947 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
948 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
949 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
951 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
952 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
953 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
956 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
960 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
961 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
962 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
964 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
965 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
966 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
968 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
969 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
971 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
972 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
973 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
974 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
976 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
977 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
978 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
980 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
981 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
982 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
983 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
985 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
986 renamed-aside and then recreated.
987 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
989 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
990 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
991 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
992 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
994 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
995 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
996 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
998 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
999 processes will not intersperse their output.
1000 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1003 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1007 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1008 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1010 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1011 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1013 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1014 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1015 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1016 the presence of the empty string argument.
1017 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1019 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1020 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1021 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1022 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1024 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1025 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1027 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1028 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1029 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1031 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1032 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1033 and with a malicious user on the same system
1034 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1035 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1038 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1042 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1043 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1044 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1046 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1047 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1048 offending directory and all "contents."
1050 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1051 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1052 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1054 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1055 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1056 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1058 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1059 processes will not intersperse their output.
1060 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1061 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1063 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1064 output the name of the file to stdout.
1065 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1067 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1068 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1069 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1071 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1072 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1075 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1076 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1077 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1079 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1080 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1081 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1082 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1083 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1084 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1086 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1087 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1088 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1089 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1091 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1092 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1094 ** Changes in behavior
1096 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1097 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1098 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1099 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1100 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1102 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1103 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1104 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1105 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1107 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1109 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1110 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1111 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1112 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1113 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1117 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1121 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1122 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1124 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1125 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1127 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1128 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1129 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1131 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1132 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1135 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1139 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1140 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1141 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1143 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1144 to accommodate leap seconds.
1145 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1147 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1148 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1149 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1151 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1153 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1154 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1155 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1157 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1158 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1159 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1160 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1161 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1165 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1166 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1167 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1168 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1170 ** Changes in behavior
1172 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1173 environment variable is set.
1175 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1176 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1177 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1181 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1182 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1183 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1184 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1186 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1187 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1188 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1189 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1193 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1194 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1195 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1197 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1198 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1199 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1200 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1201 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1202 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1203 another improvement:
1205 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1206 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1209 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1213 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1214 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1215 and libraries tested at configure time.
1216 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1218 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1219 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1221 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1222 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1224 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1225 printing a summary to stderr.
1226 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1228 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1229 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1230 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1232 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1233 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1235 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1236 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1237 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1238 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1240 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1241 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1242 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1243 which is relatively unusual.
1244 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1246 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1247 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1248 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1249 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1250 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1251 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1252 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1256 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1257 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1258 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1259 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1260 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1264 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1265 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1267 ** Changes in behavior
1269 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1270 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1271 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1272 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1273 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1276 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1280 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1281 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1283 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1284 before data copying has started.
1286 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1287 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1289 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1290 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1291 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1292 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1294 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1295 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1296 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1297 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1299 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1304 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1305 for its standard streams.
1307 ** Changes in behavior
1309 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1310 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1311 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1312 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1313 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1314 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1316 ** Deprecated options
1318 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1319 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1323 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1325 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1326 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1327 a btrfs file system.
1329 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1331 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1332 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1334 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1335 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1338 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1342 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1343 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1344 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1345 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1347 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1348 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1349 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1350 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1351 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1356 make check: two tests have been corrected
1360 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1361 inherited from gnulib.
1364 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1368 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1369 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1370 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1371 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1373 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1374 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1376 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1378 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1379 systems without xattr support.
1381 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1382 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1383 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1385 ** Changes in behavior
1387 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1388 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1389 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1390 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1392 ** Improved robustness
1394 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1395 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1396 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1397 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1398 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1399 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1400 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1401 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1402 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1406 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1407 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1409 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1410 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1411 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1412 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1413 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1416 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1420 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1421 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1422 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1426 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1427 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1428 data was read, or on process exit.
1429 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1431 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1432 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1433 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1434 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1436 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1437 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1438 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1439 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1441 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1442 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1444 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1445 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1447 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1448 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1449 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1451 ** Changes in behavior
1453 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1454 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1455 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1457 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1458 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1460 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1461 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1462 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1465 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1469 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1471 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1472 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1473 install: Never copies xattrs
1475 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1476 from overwriting any existing destination file
1478 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1479 mode where this feature is available.
1481 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1482 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1483 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1484 do not modify the destination at all.
1486 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1488 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1492 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1493 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1495 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1497 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1498 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1500 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1501 processing the first file name
1503 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1504 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1505 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1506 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1508 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1509 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1511 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1512 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1515 ** Changes in behavior
1517 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1518 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1520 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1521 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1522 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1524 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1525 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1527 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1529 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1530 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1531 is still marked with a '+'.
1534 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1538 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1539 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1543 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1544 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1545 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1546 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1547 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1548 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1550 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1551 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1553 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1554 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1556 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1558 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1559 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1560 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1562 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1563 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1565 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1566 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1567 used to factor large numbers.
1569 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1572 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1574 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1576 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1577 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1579 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1580 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1581 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1582 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1584 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1585 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1586 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1588 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1589 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1593 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1595 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1596 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1598 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1599 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1601 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1603 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1604 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1608 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1609 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1610 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1612 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1614 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1615 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1616 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1618 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1619 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1620 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1622 ** Changes in behavior
1624 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1625 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1628 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1632 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1633 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1634 'futimens' system calls.
1638 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1640 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1641 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1642 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1644 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1645 with no USERNAME argument.
1647 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1648 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1649 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1651 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1652 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1653 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1654 number of fields for some inputs.
1656 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1657 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1659 ** Changes in behavior
1661 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1662 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1665 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1669 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1671 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1672 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1673 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1674 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1676 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1677 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1679 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1680 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1682 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1683 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1685 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1686 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1687 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1688 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1690 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1691 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1692 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1693 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1694 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1695 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1697 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1698 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1700 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1701 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1702 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1704 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1705 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1707 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1708 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1710 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1711 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1712 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1713 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1715 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1716 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1718 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1719 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1721 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1722 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1723 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1727 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1728 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1730 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1731 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1732 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1733 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1737 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1738 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1740 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1742 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1746 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1747 which have negative errno values.
1751 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1755 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1759 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1760 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1763 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1767 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1768 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1769 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1771 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1772 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1773 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1774 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1778 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1779 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1780 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1781 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1784 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1788 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1790 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1791 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1792 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1795 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1799 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1800 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1802 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1804 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1806 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1808 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1812 ** Changes in behavior
1814 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1815 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1817 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1818 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1820 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1821 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1822 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1826 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1827 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1828 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1829 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1830 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1831 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1832 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1833 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1834 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1835 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1836 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1838 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1839 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1840 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1843 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1846 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1847 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1848 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1850 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1851 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1852 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1855 ** New build options
1857 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1858 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1859 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1860 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1862 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1863 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1864 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1865 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1866 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1867 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1868 of "make check" fail.
1870 ** Remove deprecated options
1872 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1873 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1874 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1875 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1876 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1878 ** Improved robustness
1880 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1881 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1882 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1883 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1884 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1885 loss of the contents of a/f.
1887 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1888 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1892 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1893 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1894 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1896 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1897 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1898 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1899 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1901 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1902 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1903 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1904 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1905 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1906 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1907 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1908 destination is a symlink.
1910 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1912 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1913 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1915 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1916 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1918 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1920 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1921 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1923 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1924 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1926 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1929 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1930 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1932 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1933 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1935 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1936 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1937 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1938 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1940 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1941 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1942 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1944 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1945 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1946 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1948 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1949 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1950 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1951 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1953 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1954 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1955 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1957 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1958 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1960 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1961 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1963 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1965 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1966 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1967 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1969 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1970 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1972 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1973 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1975 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1976 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1978 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1979 [present in the original version]
1982 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1986 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1988 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1989 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1990 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1992 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1993 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1995 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1999 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2000 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2002 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2003 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2005 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2006 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2008 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2009 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2010 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2011 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2012 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2013 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2015 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2016 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2019 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2020 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2022 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2025 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2026 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2027 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2029 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2030 directory is unreadable.
2032 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2033 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2034 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2036 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2037 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2038 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2039 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2040 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2043 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2044 Before it would print nothing.
2046 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2048 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2049 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2050 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2051 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2052 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2053 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2054 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2055 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2057 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2061 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2062 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2063 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2065 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2066 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2067 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2068 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2071 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2075 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2076 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2077 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2078 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2079 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2080 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2081 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2083 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2084 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2085 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2086 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2087 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2088 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2089 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2090 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2092 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2093 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2094 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2097 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2101 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2102 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2104 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2105 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2106 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2108 ** Improved robustness
2110 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2111 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2112 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2115 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2119 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2120 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2121 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2122 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2123 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2125 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2129 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2132 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2136 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2137 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2138 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2139 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2141 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2142 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2144 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2145 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2146 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2149 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2151 ** Improved robustness
2153 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2154 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2156 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2157 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2158 or NFS-mounted partition.
2160 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2161 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2165 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2166 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2167 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2168 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2169 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2170 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2172 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2173 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2175 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2176 or neglect to report file removal.
2178 For the "groups" command:
2180 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2181 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2183 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2185 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2187 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2191 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2192 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2195 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2197 ** Changes in behavior
2199 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2200 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2201 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2202 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2204 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2205 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2206 a final './' or '../' component.
2208 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2209 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2210 this only for pipes.
2212 ** Infrastructure changes
2214 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2215 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2216 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2217 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2221 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2222 name is "." or "..".
2224 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2225 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2226 dirent.d_type support.
2228 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2229 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2231 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2232 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2233 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2234 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2237 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2239 ** Changes in behavior
2241 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2245 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2246 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2250 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2251 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2252 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2254 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2255 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2257 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2258 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2260 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2262 ** Improved robustness
2264 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2265 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2266 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2268 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2269 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2272 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2273 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2275 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2276 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2278 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2279 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2281 ** Changes in behavior
2283 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2284 where the two are distinct.
2286 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2287 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2288 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2289 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2290 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2291 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2292 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2293 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2294 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2295 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2296 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2297 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2298 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2299 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2300 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2301 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2302 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2304 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2305 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2306 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2308 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2309 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2310 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2311 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2314 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2315 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2319 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2320 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2321 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2322 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2324 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2325 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2326 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2328 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2329 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2330 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2331 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2332 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2335 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2336 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2338 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2339 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2340 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2341 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2343 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2344 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2345 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2347 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2348 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2349 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2350 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2352 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2353 and sticky) with the -m option.
2355 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2356 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2357 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2358 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2359 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2361 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2362 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2364 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2368 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2369 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2370 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2371 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2373 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2375 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2377 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2378 silently ignoring one of them.
2380 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2381 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2382 containing this change was 5.92.
2384 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2385 automatically newline terminated.
2387 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2388 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2389 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2390 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2393 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2394 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2395 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2398 ** Scheduled for removal
2400 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2401 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2403 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2404 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2405 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2406 command to unlink a directory.
2408 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2409 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2410 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2411 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2415 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2416 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2417 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2418 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2419 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2420 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2424 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2425 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2427 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2429 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2430 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2431 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2433 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2434 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2437 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2438 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2440 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2441 list directories before files.
2443 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2444 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2445 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2446 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2449 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2451 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2453 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2454 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2455 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2457 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2458 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2462 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2463 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2464 usually printing nothing.
2466 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2468 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2469 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2470 them with hard-linked directories.
2472 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2473 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2474 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2476 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2477 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2478 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2480 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2483 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2484 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2486 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2487 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2489 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2490 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2492 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2493 all command-line arguments.
2495 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2497 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2499 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2500 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2502 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2504 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2505 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2506 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2507 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2508 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2510 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2511 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2513 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2514 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2515 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2516 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2518 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2520 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2524 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2525 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2527 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2528 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2530 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2531 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2533 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2534 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2536 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2537 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2539 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2541 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2542 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2543 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2546 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2548 ** Build-related bug fixes
2550 installing .mo files would fail
2553 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2557 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2559 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2562 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2566 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2567 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2571 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2573 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2574 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2576 ** Deprecated options
2578 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2579 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2581 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2585 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2587 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2588 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2589 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2590 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2592 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2595 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2601 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2606 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2608 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2610 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2611 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2612 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2614 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2615 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2616 problematic usages. These include:
2618 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2619 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2620 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2621 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2622 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2623 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2624 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2625 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2626 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2628 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2629 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2631 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2632 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2633 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2634 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2636 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2637 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2638 between binary and text files.
2640 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2644 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2648 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2649 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2651 head tac tail tee tr
2652 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2654 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2655 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2657 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2658 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2659 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2661 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2663 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2665 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2666 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2667 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2671 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2673 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2674 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2676 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2677 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2678 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2682 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2683 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2687 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2688 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2689 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2693 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2694 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2698 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2700 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2702 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2706 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2707 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2708 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2710 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2711 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2712 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2713 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2714 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2716 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2720 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2721 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2722 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2724 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2726 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2727 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2728 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2729 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2731 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2733 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2734 rather than silently wrapping around.
2736 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2737 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2739 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2740 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2742 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2743 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2744 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2745 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2747 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2749 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2751 ** Improved robustness
2753 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2754 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2755 no matter how large the result.
2757 ** Improved portability
2759 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2760 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2762 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2764 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2765 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2766 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2768 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2769 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2773 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2774 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2776 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2778 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2779 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2780 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2781 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2783 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2784 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2786 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2787 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2788 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2790 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2792 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2793 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2795 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2796 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2798 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2800 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2801 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2803 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2804 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2806 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2807 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2808 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2810 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2812 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2814 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2818 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2820 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2821 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2822 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2824 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2825 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2827 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2828 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2829 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2831 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2832 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2834 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2835 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2836 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2837 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2839 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2840 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2842 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2843 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2844 the file system does not support it.
2846 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2848 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2849 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2851 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2853 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2854 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2856 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2857 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2858 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2859 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2861 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2862 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2865 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2866 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2867 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2868 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2870 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2871 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2872 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2873 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2875 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2876 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2878 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2880 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2881 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2882 reporting incorrect results.
2886 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2887 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2889 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2892 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2894 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2895 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2897 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2898 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2900 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
2903 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2904 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2905 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2906 the file name does not look like a page range.
2908 printf has several changes:
2910 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2911 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2913 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2914 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2915 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2917 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2918 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2921 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2922 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2924 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2925 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2927 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2929 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2930 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2932 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2934 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2936 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2937 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2938 when first encountering the directory.
2942 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2943 output; POSIX requires this.
2945 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2946 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2948 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2950 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2951 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2953 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2954 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2956 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2957 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2958 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2959 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2960 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2961 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2962 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2964 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2965 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2966 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2968 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2969 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2971 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2973 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2975 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2976 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2977 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2978 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2980 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2984 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2985 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2986 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2987 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
2988 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
2990 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2991 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2992 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2994 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2995 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2997 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2998 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3000 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3001 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
3002 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
3003 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3004 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
3006 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3007 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3009 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3010 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3012 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3014 nocreat do not create the output file
3015 excl fail if the output file already exists
3016 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3017 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3019 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3021 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3022 direct use direct I/O for data
3023 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3024 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3025 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3026 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3027 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3029 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3031 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3032 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3035 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3036 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3037 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3038 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3039 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3040 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3042 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3043 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3045 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3048 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3050 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3052 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3053 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3055 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3056 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3057 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3059 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3060 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3061 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3063 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3065 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3066 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3068 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3069 for compatibility with bash.
3071 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3073 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3074 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3075 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3076 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3078 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3079 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3081 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3082 ls supports TABSIZE.
3083 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3084 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3085 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3087 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3090 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3092 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3093 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3094 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3095 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3096 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3097 an offset, not as a file name.
3099 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3100 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3102 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3103 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3105 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3106 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3108 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3109 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3110 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3112 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3113 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3115 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3116 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3120 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3122 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3124 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3128 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3129 or more arguments between partitions.
3131 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3132 holes in the destination.
3134 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3135 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3136 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3137 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3138 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3139 terminates immediately.
3141 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3143 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3145 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3146 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3147 not the empty string.
3149 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3150 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3154 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3155 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3156 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3159 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3166 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3170 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3171 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3173 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3174 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3176 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3177 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3178 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3181 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3185 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3186 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3188 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3189 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3191 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3192 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3193 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3195 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3197 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3200 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3202 ** Configuration option
3204 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3205 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3209 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3210 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3214 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3215 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3216 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3219 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3220 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3221 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3222 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3223 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3224 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3225 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3228 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3232 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3233 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3234 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3236 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3237 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3239 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3241 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3242 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3243 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3244 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3246 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3248 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3249 not just the ones that reference directories
3251 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3252 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3254 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3255 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3256 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3258 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3259 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3260 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3261 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3262 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3263 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3265 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3270 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3271 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3273 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3275 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3277 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3279 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3280 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3282 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3283 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3285 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3287 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3291 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3293 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3295 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3296 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3297 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3298 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3299 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3301 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3302 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3304 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3305 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3307 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3308 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3310 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3311 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3312 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3316 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3317 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3318 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3319 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3320 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3321 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3322 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3323 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3324 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3325 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3326 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3327 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3328 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3329 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3331 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3333 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3334 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3336 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3338 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3340 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3341 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3343 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3345 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3346 without a trailing newline.
3348 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3349 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3351 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3354 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3358 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3360 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3362 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3363 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3364 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3365 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3367 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3369 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3370 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3371 be printed without leading spaces.
3373 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3374 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3379 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3380 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3381 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3383 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3385 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3386 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3388 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3389 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3391 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3392 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3394 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3396 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3398 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3400 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3401 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3403 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3405 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3407 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3408 byte offsets are specified.
3411 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3414 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3417 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3418 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3419 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3420 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3421 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3422 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3423 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3424 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3425 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3426 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3427 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3428 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3429 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3430 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3431 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3432 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3433 directory where M has write access.
3434 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3435 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3436 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3439 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3440 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3441 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3442 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3443 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3444 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3445 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3446 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3447 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3448 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3449 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3450 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3451 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3452 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3453 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3454 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3455 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3456 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3457 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3458 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3459 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3460 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3461 appeared one additional time.
3463 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3464 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3465 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3466 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3469 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3470 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3471 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3472 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3473 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3474 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3475 if there were more than 338.
3477 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3478 - false --help now exits nonzero
3481 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3482 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3483 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3484 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3487 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3488 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3489 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3490 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3491 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3494 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3495 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3496 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3497 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3498 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3499 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3500 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3503 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3504 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3505 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3506 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3507 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3508 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3510 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3511 under certain unusual conditions
3512 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3513 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3516 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3517 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3518 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3519 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3520 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3521 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3522 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3523 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3524 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3525 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3526 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3527 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3528 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3529 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3530 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3531 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3534 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3535 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3538 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3539 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3540 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3541 involving hard-linked directories
3542 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3543 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3544 character-special and block files
3547 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3548 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3549 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3550 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3551 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3552 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3553 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3554 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3555 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3557 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3558 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3559 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3560 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3561 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3562 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3563 specified on the command line.
3564 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3565 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3566 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3567 the first file untouched.
3568 * readlink: new program
3569 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3570 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3571 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3572 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3573 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3574 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3577 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3578 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3579 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3580 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3581 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3582 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3583 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3584 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3585 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3586 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3587 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3588 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3590 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3591 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3592 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3594 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3595 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3596 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3597 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3598 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3599 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3600 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3601 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3604 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3605 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3608 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3609 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3610 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3611 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3612 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3613 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3614 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3617 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3618 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3620 ========================================================================
3621 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3622 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3625 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3627 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3628 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3629 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3630 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3631 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3632 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3633 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3634 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3635 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3636 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3637 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3638 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3640 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3641 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3642 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3643 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3645 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3648 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3650 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3651 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3652 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3653 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3654 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3655 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3656 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3659 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3660 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3661 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3662 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3663 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3664 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3665 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3666 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3667 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3668 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3669 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3670 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3671 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3672 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3673 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3674 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3676 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3677 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3679 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3680 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3681 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3682 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3683 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3684 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3686 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3687 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3688 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3689 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3690 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3691 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3692 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3694 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3695 the source files in the following example:
3696 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3697 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3698 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3699 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3700 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3701 links between source files with --preserve=links
3702 * cp accepts new options:
3703 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3704 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3705 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3706 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3707 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3708 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3709 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3710 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3711 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3713 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3714 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3715 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3716 even though it's older than dest.
3717 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3718 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3719 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3720 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3721 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3723 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3724 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3725 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3726 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3727 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3728 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3729 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3731 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3732 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3733 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3735 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3736 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3737 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3738 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3739 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3740 This is the default.
3742 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3743 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3744 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3745 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3746 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3748 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3751 ========================================================================
3752 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3753 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3756 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3757 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3759 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3760 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3761 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3762 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3763 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3765 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3766 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3767 that specifies a non-directory
3770 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3771 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3772 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3773 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3774 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3775 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3776 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3777 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3778 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3779 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3780 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3781 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3782 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3783 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3784 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3785 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3786 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3787 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3788 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3789 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3790 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3791 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3792 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3793 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3795 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3796 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3797 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3799 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3801 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3802 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3804 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3805 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3806 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3807 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3808 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3810 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3811 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3812 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3813 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3814 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3816 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3818 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3819 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3820 * still more portability fixes
3821 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3822 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3824 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3826 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3828 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3830 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3831 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3832 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3833 there is any time remaining
3834 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3836 ========================================================================
3837 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3838 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3840 This package began as the union of the following:
3841 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3843 ========================================================================
3845 Copyright (C) 2001-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3847 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3848 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3849 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3850 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3851 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
3852 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.