1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
8 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
9 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
11 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
12 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
14 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
16 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
17 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
18 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
20 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
21 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
22 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
24 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
25 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
26 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
27 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
29 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
30 from the source, when copying across file systems.
31 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
33 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
34 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
35 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
37 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
38 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
40 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
41 would immediately exit when such a file is inaccessible during the initial
43 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
47 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
50 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
51 a NUL instead of a white space character.
53 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
54 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with -Z set the SMACK context where available.
56 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
58 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
59 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
60 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
62 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
63 unique groups with empty lines.
65 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
66 used to identify the split points.
68 shuf accepts a new option: --repetitions (-r), to allow repetitions
69 of input items in the permuted output.
71 ** Changes in behavior
73 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
74 not just the transfer counts.
76 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
77 as per the documented interface.
81 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, SNFS and UBIFS.
82 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses
83 inotify for files on those file systems, rather than the default (for unknown
84 file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
86 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
87 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
88 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
90 shred once again uses direct I/O where available, and increases write block
91 size from 12KiB to 64KiB when possible.
92 [Direct I/O regression introduced in coreutils-6.0]
94 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
95 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
99 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
102 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
106 numfmt: reformat numbers
110 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
111 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
112 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
114 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
115 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
116 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
120 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
121 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
123 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
124 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
125 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
127 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
128 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
129 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
131 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
132 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
133 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
135 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
136 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
137 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
139 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
140 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
141 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
143 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
144 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
146 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
147 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
149 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
150 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
151 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
153 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
154 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
155 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
157 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
158 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
159 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
161 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
162 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
163 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
164 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
166 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
167 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
168 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
170 ** Changes in behavior
172 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
173 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
174 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
175 'total' in the target column.
177 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
178 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
179 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
181 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
182 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
186 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
187 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
189 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
190 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
192 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
196 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
197 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
198 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
199 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
200 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
201 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
202 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
203 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
204 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
205 for a patched distribution package.
207 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
208 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
210 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
211 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
212 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
213 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
216 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
220 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
222 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
223 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
224 sha384sum and sha512sum.
228 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
229 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
230 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
231 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
232 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
234 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
235 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
237 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
238 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
239 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
240 eventually exits nonzero.
242 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
243 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
244 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
245 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
246 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
248 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
249 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
250 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
252 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
253 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
254 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
256 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
257 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
258 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
260 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
261 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
262 Before, this would infloop:
263 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
264 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
266 ** Changes in behavior
268 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
272 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
273 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
274 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
275 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
276 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
279 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
280 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
281 format-changing options.
283 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
284 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
285 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
286 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
287 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
291 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
292 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
293 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
294 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
295 are run without following the instructions in README.
297 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
298 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
299 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
300 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
301 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
302 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
303 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
306 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
310 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
311 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
312 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
313 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
315 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
316 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
317 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
318 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
320 sort -u could read freed memory.
321 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
322 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
323 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
327 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
328 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
329 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
330 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
333 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
337 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
338 processes will not intersperse their output.
339 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
341 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
342 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
343 date: invalid date '\260'
344 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
346 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
347 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
348 lines output by df, can work reliably.
349 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
351 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
352 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
353 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
355 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
356 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
357 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
358 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
359 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
360 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
362 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
363 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
365 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
366 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
368 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
369 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
370 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
372 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
373 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
374 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
378 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
380 ** Changes in behavior
382 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
383 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
384 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
385 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
386 have any reason to include it here.
390 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
391 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
392 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
394 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
395 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
396 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
399 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
403 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
404 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
405 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
406 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
407 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
408 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
410 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
411 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
412 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
413 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
414 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
415 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
416 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
418 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
419 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
421 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
422 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
426 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
427 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
429 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
431 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
433 ** Changes in behavior
435 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
436 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
437 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
439 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
440 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
443 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
447 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
448 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
449 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
450 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
451 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
452 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
453 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
454 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
456 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
457 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
458 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
459 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
460 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
462 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
463 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
465 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
466 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
468 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
469 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
471 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
472 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
474 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
475 additional static suffix to output file names.
477 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
478 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
479 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
481 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
482 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
486 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
487 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
488 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
490 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
491 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
492 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
493 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
494 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
495 typically still point to one of the hard links.
497 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
498 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
499 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
500 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
501 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
503 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
504 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
505 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
506 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
510 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
511 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
512 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
514 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
515 instead of causing a usage failure.
517 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
520 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
524 realpath: print resolved file names.
528 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
529 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
531 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
532 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
534 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
535 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
536 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
537 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
538 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
539 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
541 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
542 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
543 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
545 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
546 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
547 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
549 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
550 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
551 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
552 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
553 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
555 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
557 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
558 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
560 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
561 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
562 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
564 ** Changes in behavior
566 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
567 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
568 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
569 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
570 usually-short referent instead.
572 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
573 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
574 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
575 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
578 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
582 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
583 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
584 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
586 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
587 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
589 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
590 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
594 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
595 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
597 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
598 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
599 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
600 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
602 ** Changes in behavior
604 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
605 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
606 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
610 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
611 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
612 only .tar.xz files is enough.
615 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
619 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
620 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
621 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
623 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
624 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
626 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
627 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
628 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
629 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
630 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
632 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
633 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
634 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
635 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
636 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
637 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
638 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
639 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
641 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
642 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
644 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
645 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
647 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
648 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
650 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
651 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
652 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
654 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
655 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
656 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
657 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
659 ** Changes in behavior
661 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
662 when -v or -c specified.
664 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
665 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
669 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
670 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
671 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
672 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
673 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
675 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
676 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
677 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
679 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
680 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
681 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
682 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
683 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
684 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
685 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
687 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
688 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
689 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
693 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
694 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
696 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
699 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
700 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
702 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
703 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
705 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
706 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
708 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
710 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
714 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
715 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
717 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
720 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
724 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
725 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
727 ** Changes in behavior
729 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
730 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
731 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
732 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
733 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
734 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
736 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
737 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
738 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
742 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
745 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
749 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
750 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
751 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
753 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
754 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
755 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
757 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
758 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
759 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
761 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
762 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
764 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
765 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
767 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
768 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
770 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
771 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
775 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
776 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
777 processed portion thereof.
779 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
780 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
782 ** Changes in behavior
784 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
785 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
786 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
788 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
789 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
790 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
792 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
793 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
795 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
796 Use --preserve-context instead.
798 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
801 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
805 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
806 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
807 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
808 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
809 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
811 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
812 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
814 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
815 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
816 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
818 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
819 reject file names invalid for that file system.
821 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
822 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
826 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
827 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
828 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
829 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
830 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
831 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
832 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
833 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
835 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
836 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
837 the same number of fields are output for each line.
839 ** Changes in behavior
841 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
842 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
843 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
846 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
850 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
851 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
852 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
855 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
859 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
860 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
862 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
863 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
865 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
866 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
868 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
869 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
870 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
871 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
873 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
874 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
876 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
877 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
878 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
880 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
882 ** Changes in behavior
884 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
885 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
886 to the number of available processors.
890 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
893 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
897 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
898 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
899 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
900 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
902 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
903 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
904 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
906 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
907 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
909 ** Changes in behavior
911 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
912 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
914 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
915 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
916 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
917 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
918 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
919 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
921 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
922 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
923 the same way as the others.
925 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
926 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
929 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
933 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
934 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
935 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
937 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
938 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
940 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
941 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
942 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
944 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
945 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
947 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
948 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
950 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
951 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
952 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
954 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
955 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
956 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
957 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
961 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
962 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
964 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
967 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
968 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
970 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
972 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
973 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
974 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
976 ** Changes in behavior
978 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
979 rather than its aliased target.
981 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
982 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
983 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
985 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
986 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
987 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
988 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
989 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
990 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
991 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
992 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
994 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
996 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
998 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
999 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
1002 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
1003 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
1004 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
1005 control like taskset for example.
1007 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
1009 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
1010 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
1011 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
1012 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
1013 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
1014 includes %C when context information is available.
1016 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
1017 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
1018 rather than a file system attribute.
1020 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
1021 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
1022 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
1023 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
1025 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
1026 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
1027 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
1029 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
1030 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
1031 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
1034 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
1038 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
1039 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
1041 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
1043 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
1044 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1046 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
1047 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
1048 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
1049 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
1051 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
1052 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
1053 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1057 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
1058 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
1060 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
1061 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
1062 duration after the initial signal was sent.
1064 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
1065 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
1066 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
1067 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
1068 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
1069 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
1070 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
1071 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
1072 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
1074 ** Changes in behavior
1076 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
1077 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1079 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1080 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1083 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1087 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1088 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1089 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1090 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1094 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1095 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1097 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1098 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1099 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1100 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1102 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1103 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1104 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1107 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1111 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1112 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1113 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1115 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1116 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1117 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1119 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1120 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1122 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1123 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1124 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1125 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1127 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1128 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1129 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1131 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1132 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1133 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1134 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1136 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1137 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1138 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1140 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1141 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1142 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1143 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1145 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1146 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1147 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1149 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1150 processes will not intersperse their output.
1151 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1154 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1158 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1159 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1161 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1162 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1164 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1165 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1166 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1167 the presence of the empty string argument.
1168 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1170 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1171 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1172 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1173 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1175 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1176 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1178 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1179 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1180 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1182 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1183 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1184 and with a malicious user on the same system
1185 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1186 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1189 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1193 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1194 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1195 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1197 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1198 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1199 offending directory and all "contents."
1201 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1202 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1203 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1205 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1206 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1207 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1209 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1210 processes will not intersperse their output.
1211 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1212 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1214 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1215 output the name of the file to stdout.
1216 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1218 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1219 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1220 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1222 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1223 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1226 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1227 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1228 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1230 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1231 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1232 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1233 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1234 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1235 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1237 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1238 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1239 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1240 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1242 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1243 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1245 ** Changes in behavior
1247 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1248 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1249 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1250 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1251 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1253 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1254 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1255 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1256 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1258 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1260 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1261 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1262 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1263 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1264 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1268 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1272 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1273 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1275 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1276 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1278 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1279 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1280 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1282 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1283 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1286 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1290 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1291 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1292 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1294 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1295 to accommodate leap seconds.
1296 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1298 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1299 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1300 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1302 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1304 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1305 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1306 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1308 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1309 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1310 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1311 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1312 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1316 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1317 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1318 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1319 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1321 ** Changes in behavior
1323 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1324 environment variable is set.
1326 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1327 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1328 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1332 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1333 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1334 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1335 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1337 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1338 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1339 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1340 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1344 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1345 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1346 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1348 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1349 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1350 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1351 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1352 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1353 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1354 another improvement:
1356 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1357 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1360 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1364 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1365 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1366 and libraries tested at configure time.
1367 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1369 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1370 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1372 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1373 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1375 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1376 printing a summary to stderr.
1377 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1379 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1380 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1381 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1383 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1384 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1386 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1387 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1388 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1389 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1391 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1392 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1393 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1394 which is relatively unusual.
1395 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1397 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1398 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1399 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1400 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1401 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1402 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1403 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1407 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1408 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1409 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1410 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1411 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1415 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1416 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1418 ** Changes in behavior
1420 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1421 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1422 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1423 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1424 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1427 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1431 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1432 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1434 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1435 before data copying has started.
1437 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1438 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1440 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1441 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1442 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1443 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1445 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1446 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1447 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1448 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1450 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1455 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1456 for its standard streams.
1458 ** Changes in behavior
1460 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1461 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1462 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1463 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1464 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1465 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1467 ** Deprecated options
1469 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1470 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1474 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1476 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1477 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1478 a btrfs file system.
1480 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1482 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1483 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1485 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1486 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1489 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1493 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1494 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1495 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1496 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1498 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1499 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1500 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1501 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1502 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1507 make check: two tests have been corrected
1511 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1512 inherited from gnulib.
1515 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1519 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1520 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1521 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1522 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1524 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1525 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1527 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1529 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1530 systems without xattr support.
1532 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1533 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1534 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1536 ** Changes in behavior
1538 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1539 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1540 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1541 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1543 ** Improved robustness
1545 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1546 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1547 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1548 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1549 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1550 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1551 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1552 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1553 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1557 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1558 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1560 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1561 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1562 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1563 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1564 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1567 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1571 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1572 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1573 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1577 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1578 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1579 data was read, or on process exit.
1580 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1582 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1583 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1584 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1585 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1587 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1588 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1589 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1590 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1592 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1593 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1595 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1596 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1598 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1599 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1600 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1602 ** Changes in behavior
1604 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1605 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1606 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1608 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1609 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1611 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1612 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1613 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1616 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1620 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1622 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1623 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1624 install: Never copies xattrs
1626 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1627 from overwriting any existing destination file
1629 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1630 mode where this feature is available.
1632 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1633 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1634 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1635 do not modify the destination at all.
1637 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1639 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1643 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1644 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1646 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1648 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1649 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1651 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1652 processing the first file name
1654 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1655 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1656 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1657 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1659 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1660 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1662 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1663 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1666 ** Changes in behavior
1668 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1669 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1671 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1672 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1673 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1675 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1676 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1678 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1680 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1681 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1682 is still marked with a '+'.
1685 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1689 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1690 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1694 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1695 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1696 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1697 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1698 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1699 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1701 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1702 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1704 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1705 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1707 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1709 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1710 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1711 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1713 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1714 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1716 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1717 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1718 used to factor large numbers.
1720 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1723 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1725 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1727 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1728 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1730 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1731 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1732 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1733 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1735 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1736 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1737 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1739 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1740 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1744 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1746 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1747 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1749 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1750 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1752 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1754 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1755 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1759 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1760 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1761 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1763 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1765 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1766 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1767 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1769 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1770 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1771 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1773 ** Changes in behavior
1775 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1776 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1779 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1783 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1784 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1785 'futimens' system calls.
1789 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1791 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1792 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1793 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1795 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1796 with no USERNAME argument.
1798 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1799 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1800 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1802 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1803 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1804 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1805 number of fields for some inputs.
1807 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1808 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1810 ** Changes in behavior
1812 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1813 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1816 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1820 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1822 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1823 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1824 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1825 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1827 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1828 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1830 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1831 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1833 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1834 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1836 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1837 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1838 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1839 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1841 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1842 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1843 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1844 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1845 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1846 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1848 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1849 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1851 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1852 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1853 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1855 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1856 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1858 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1859 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1861 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1862 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1863 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1864 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1866 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1867 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1869 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1870 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1872 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1873 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1874 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1878 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1879 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1881 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1882 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1883 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1884 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1888 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1889 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1891 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1893 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1897 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1898 which have negative errno values.
1902 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1906 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1910 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1911 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1914 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1918 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1919 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1920 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1922 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1923 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1924 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1925 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1929 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1930 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1931 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1932 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1935 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1939 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1941 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1942 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1943 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1946 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1950 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1951 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1953 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1955 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1957 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1959 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1963 ** Changes in behavior
1965 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1966 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1968 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1969 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1971 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1972 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1973 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1977 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1978 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1979 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1980 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1981 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1982 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1983 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1984 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1985 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1986 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1987 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1989 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1990 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1991 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1994 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1997 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1998 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1999 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
2001 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
2002 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
2003 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
2006 ** New build options
2008 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
2009 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
2010 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
2011 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
2013 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
2014 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
2015 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
2016 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
2017 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
2018 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
2019 of "make check" fail.
2021 ** Remove deprecated options
2023 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2024 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
2025 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2026 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
2027 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
2029 ** Improved robustness
2031 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
2032 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
2033 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
2034 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
2035 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
2036 loss of the contents of a/f.
2038 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
2039 in its 35-colon command-line argument
2043 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
2044 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
2045 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2047 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
2048 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
2049 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
2050 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2052 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
2053 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
2054 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
2055 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
2056 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
2057 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
2058 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
2059 destination is a symlink.
2061 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
2063 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
2064 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
2066 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
2067 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
2069 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
2071 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
2072 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
2074 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
2075 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
2077 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2080 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2081 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2083 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2084 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2086 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2087 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2088 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2089 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2091 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2092 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2093 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2095 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2096 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2097 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2099 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2100 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2101 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2102 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2104 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2105 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2106 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2108 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2109 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2111 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2112 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2114 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2116 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2117 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2118 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2120 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2121 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2123 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2124 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2126 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2127 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2129 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2130 [present in the original version]
2133 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2137 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2139 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2140 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2141 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2143 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2144 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2146 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2150 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2151 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2153 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2154 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2156 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2157 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2159 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2160 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2161 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2162 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2163 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2164 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2166 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2167 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2170 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2171 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2173 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2176 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2177 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2178 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2180 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2181 directory is unreadable.
2183 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2184 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2185 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2187 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2188 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2189 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2190 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2191 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2194 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2195 Before it would print nothing.
2197 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2199 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2200 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2201 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2202 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2203 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2204 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2205 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2206 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2208 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2212 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2213 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2214 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2216 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2217 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2218 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2219 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2222 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2226 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2227 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2228 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2229 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2230 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2231 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2232 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2234 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2235 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2236 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2237 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2238 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2239 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2240 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2241 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2243 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2244 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2245 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2248 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2252 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2253 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2255 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2256 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2257 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2259 ** Improved robustness
2261 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2262 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2263 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2266 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2270 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2271 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2272 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2273 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2274 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2276 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2280 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2283 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2287 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2288 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2289 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2290 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2292 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2293 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2295 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2296 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2297 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2300 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2302 ** Improved robustness
2304 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2305 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2307 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2308 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2309 or NFS-mounted partition.
2311 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2312 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2316 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2317 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2318 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2319 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2320 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2321 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2323 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2324 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2326 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2327 or neglect to report file removal.
2329 For the "groups" command:
2331 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2332 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2334 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2336 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2338 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2342 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2343 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2346 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2348 ** Changes in behavior
2350 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2351 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2352 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2353 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2355 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2356 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2357 a final './' or '../' component.
2359 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2360 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2361 this only for pipes.
2363 ** Infrastructure changes
2365 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2366 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2367 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2368 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2372 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2373 name is "." or "..".
2375 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2376 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2377 dirent.d_type support.
2379 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2380 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2382 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2383 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2384 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2385 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2388 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2390 ** Changes in behavior
2392 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2396 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2397 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2401 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2402 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2403 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2405 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2406 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2408 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2409 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2411 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2413 ** Improved robustness
2415 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2416 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2417 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2419 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2420 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2423 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2424 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2426 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2427 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2429 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2430 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2432 ** Changes in behavior
2434 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2435 where the two are distinct.
2437 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2438 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2439 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2440 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2441 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2442 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2443 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2444 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2445 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2446 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2447 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2448 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2449 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2450 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2451 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2452 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2453 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2455 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2456 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2457 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2459 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2460 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2461 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2462 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2465 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2466 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2470 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2471 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2472 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2473 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2475 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2476 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2477 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2479 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2480 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2481 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2482 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2483 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2486 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2487 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2489 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2490 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2491 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2492 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2494 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2495 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2496 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2498 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2499 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2500 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2501 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2503 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2504 and sticky) with the -m option.
2506 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2507 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2508 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2509 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2510 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2512 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2513 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2515 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2519 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2520 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2521 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2522 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2524 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2526 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2528 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2529 silently ignoring one of them.
2531 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2532 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2533 containing this change was 5.92.
2535 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2536 automatically newline terminated.
2538 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2539 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2540 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2541 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2544 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2545 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2546 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2549 ** Scheduled for removal
2551 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2552 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2554 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2555 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2556 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2557 command to unlink a directory.
2559 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2560 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2561 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2562 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2566 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2567 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2568 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2569 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2570 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2571 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2575 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2576 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2578 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2580 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2581 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2582 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2584 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2585 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2588 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2589 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2591 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2592 list directories before files.
2594 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2595 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2596 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2597 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2600 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2602 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2604 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2605 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2606 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2608 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2609 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2613 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2614 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2615 usually printing nothing.
2617 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2619 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2620 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2621 them with hard-linked directories.
2623 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2624 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2625 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2627 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2628 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2629 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2631 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2634 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2635 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2637 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2638 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2640 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2641 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2643 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2644 all command-line arguments.
2646 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2648 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2650 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2651 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2653 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2655 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2656 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2657 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2658 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2659 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2661 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2662 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2664 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2665 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2666 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2667 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2669 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2671 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2675 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2676 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2678 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2679 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2681 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2682 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2684 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2685 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2687 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2688 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2690 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2692 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2693 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2694 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2697 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2699 ** Build-related bug fixes
2701 installing .mo files would fail
2704 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2708 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2710 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2713 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2717 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2718 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2722 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2724 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2725 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2727 ** Deprecated options
2729 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2730 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2732 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2736 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2738 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2739 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2740 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2741 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2743 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2746 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2752 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2757 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2759 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2761 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2762 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2763 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2765 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2766 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2767 problematic usages. These include:
2769 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2770 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2771 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2772 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2773 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2774 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2775 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2776 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2777 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2779 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2780 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2782 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2783 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2784 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2785 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2787 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2788 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2789 between binary and text files.
2791 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2795 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2799 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2800 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2802 head tac tail tee tr
2803 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2805 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2806 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2808 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2809 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2810 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2812 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2814 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2816 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2817 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2818 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2822 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2824 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2825 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2827 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2828 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2829 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2833 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2834 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2838 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2839 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2840 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2844 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2845 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2849 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2851 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2853 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2857 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2858 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2859 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2861 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2862 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2863 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2864 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2865 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2867 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2871 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2872 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2873 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2875 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2877 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2878 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2879 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2880 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2882 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2884 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2885 rather than silently wrapping around.
2887 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2888 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2890 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2891 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2893 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2894 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2895 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2896 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2898 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2900 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2902 ** Improved robustness
2904 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2905 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2906 no matter how large the result.
2908 ** Improved portability
2910 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2911 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2913 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2915 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2916 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2917 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2919 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2920 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2924 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2925 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2927 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2929 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2930 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2931 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2932 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2934 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2935 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2937 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2938 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2939 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2941 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2943 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2944 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2946 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2947 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2949 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2951 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2952 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2954 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2955 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2957 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2958 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2959 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2961 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2963 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2965 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2969 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2971 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2972 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2973 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2975 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2976 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2978 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2979 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2980 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2982 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2983 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2985 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2986 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2987 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2988 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2990 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2991 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2993 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2994 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2995 the file system does not support it.
2997 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2999 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
3000 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
3002 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
3004 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
3005 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
3007 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
3008 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
3009 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
3010 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
3012 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
3013 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
3016 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
3017 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
3018 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
3019 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
3021 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
3022 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
3023 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
3024 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
3026 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
3027 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
3029 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
3031 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
3032 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
3033 reporting incorrect results.
3037 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
3038 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
3040 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
3043 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
3045 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
3046 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
3048 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
3049 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
3051 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
3054 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
3055 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
3056 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
3057 the file name does not look like a page range.
3059 printf has several changes:
3061 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
3062 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
3064 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
3065 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
3066 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
3068 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
3069 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
3072 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
3073 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
3075 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
3076 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
3078 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3080 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3081 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3083 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3085 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3087 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3088 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3089 when first encountering the directory.
3093 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3094 output; POSIX requires this.
3096 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3097 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3099 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3101 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3102 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3104 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3105 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3107 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3108 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3109 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3110 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3111 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3112 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3113 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3115 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3116 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3117 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3119 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3120 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3122 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3124 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3126 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3127 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3128 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3129 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3131 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3135 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3136 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3137 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3138 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3139 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3141 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3142 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3143 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3145 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3146 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3148 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3149 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3151 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3152 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
3153 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
3154 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3155 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
3157 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3158 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3160 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3161 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3163 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3165 nocreat do not create the output file
3166 excl fail if the output file already exists
3167 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3168 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3170 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3172 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3173 direct use direct I/O for data
3174 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3175 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3176 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3177 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3178 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3180 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3182 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3183 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3186 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3187 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3188 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3189 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3190 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3191 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3193 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3194 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3196 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3199 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3201 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3203 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3204 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3206 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3207 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3208 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3210 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3211 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3212 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3214 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3216 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3217 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3219 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3220 for compatibility with bash.
3222 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3224 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3225 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3226 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3227 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3229 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3230 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3232 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3233 ls supports TABSIZE.
3234 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3235 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3236 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3238 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3241 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3243 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3244 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3245 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3246 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3247 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3248 an offset, not as a file name.
3250 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3251 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3253 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3254 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3256 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3257 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3259 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3260 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3261 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3263 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3264 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3266 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3267 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3271 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3273 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3275 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3279 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3280 or more arguments between partitions.
3282 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3283 holes in the destination.
3285 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3286 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3287 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3288 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3289 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3290 terminates immediately.
3292 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3294 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3296 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3297 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3298 not the empty string.
3300 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3301 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3305 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3306 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3307 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3310 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3317 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3321 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3322 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3324 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3325 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3327 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3328 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3329 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3332 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3336 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3337 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3339 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3340 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3342 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3343 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3344 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3346 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3348 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3351 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3353 ** Configuration option
3355 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3356 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3360 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3361 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3365 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3366 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3367 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3370 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3371 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3372 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3373 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3374 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3375 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3376 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3379 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3383 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3384 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3385 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3387 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3388 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3390 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3392 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3393 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3394 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3395 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3397 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3399 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3400 not just the ones that reference directories
3402 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3403 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3405 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3406 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3407 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3409 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3410 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3411 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3412 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3413 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3414 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3416 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3421 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3422 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3424 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3426 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3428 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3430 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3431 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3433 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3434 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3436 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3438 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3442 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3444 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3446 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3447 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3448 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3449 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3450 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3452 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3453 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3455 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3456 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3458 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3459 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3461 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3462 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3463 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3467 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3468 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3469 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3470 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3471 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3472 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3473 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3474 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3475 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3476 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3477 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3478 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3479 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3480 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3482 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3484 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3485 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3487 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3489 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3491 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3492 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3494 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3496 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3497 without a trailing newline.
3499 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3500 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3502 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3505 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3509 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3511 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3513 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3514 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3515 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3516 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3518 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3520 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3521 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3522 be printed without leading spaces.
3524 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3525 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3530 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3531 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3532 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3534 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3536 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3537 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3539 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3540 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3542 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3543 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3545 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3547 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3549 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3551 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3552 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3554 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3556 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3558 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3559 byte offsets are specified.
3562 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3565 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3568 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3569 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3570 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3571 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3572 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3573 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3574 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3575 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3576 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3577 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3578 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3579 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3580 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3581 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3582 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3583 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3584 directory where M has write access.
3585 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3586 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3587 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3590 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3591 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3592 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3593 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3594 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3595 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3596 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3597 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3598 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3599 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3600 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3601 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3602 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3603 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3604 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3605 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3606 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3607 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3608 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3609 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3610 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3611 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3612 appeared one additional time.
3614 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3615 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3616 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3617 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3620 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3621 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3622 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3623 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3624 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3625 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3626 if there were more than 338.
3628 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3629 - false --help now exits nonzero
3632 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3633 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3634 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3635 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3638 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3639 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3640 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3641 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3642 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3645 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3646 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3647 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3648 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3649 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3650 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3651 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3654 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3655 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3656 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3657 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3658 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3659 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3661 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3662 under certain unusual conditions
3663 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3664 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3667 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3668 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3669 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3670 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3671 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3672 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3673 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3674 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3675 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3676 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3677 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3678 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3679 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3680 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3681 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3682 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3685 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3686 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3689 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3690 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3691 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3692 involving hard-linked directories
3693 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3694 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3695 character-special and block files
3698 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3699 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3700 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3701 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3702 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3703 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3704 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3705 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3706 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3708 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3709 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3710 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3711 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3712 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3713 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3714 specified on the command line.
3715 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3716 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3717 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3718 the first file untouched.
3719 * readlink: new program
3720 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3721 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3722 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3723 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3724 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3725 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3728 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3729 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3730 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3731 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3732 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3733 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3734 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3735 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3736 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3737 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3738 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3739 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3741 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3742 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3743 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3745 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3746 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3747 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3748 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3749 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3750 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3751 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3752 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3755 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3756 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3759 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3760 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3761 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3762 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3763 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3764 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3765 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3768 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3769 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3771 ========================================================================
3772 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3773 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3776 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3778 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3779 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3780 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3781 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3782 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3783 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3784 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3785 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3786 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3787 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3788 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3789 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3791 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3792 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3793 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3794 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3796 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3799 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3801 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3802 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3803 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3804 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3805 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3806 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3807 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3810 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3811 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3812 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3813 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3814 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3815 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3816 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3817 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3818 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3819 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3820 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3821 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3822 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3823 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3824 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3825 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3827 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3828 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3830 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3831 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3832 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3833 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3834 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3835 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3837 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3838 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3839 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3840 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3841 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3842 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3843 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3845 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3846 the source files in the following example:
3847 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3848 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3849 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3850 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3851 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3852 links between source files with --preserve=links
3853 * cp accepts new options:
3854 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3855 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3856 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3857 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3858 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3859 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3860 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3861 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3862 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3864 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3865 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3866 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3867 even though it's older than dest.
3868 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3869 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3870 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3871 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3872 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3874 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3875 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3876 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3877 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3878 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3879 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3880 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3882 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3883 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3884 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3886 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3887 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3888 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3889 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3890 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3891 This is the default.
3893 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3894 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3895 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3896 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3897 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3899 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3902 ========================================================================
3903 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3904 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3907 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3908 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3910 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3911 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3912 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3913 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3914 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3916 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3917 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3918 that specifies a non-directory
3921 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3922 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3923 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3924 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3925 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3926 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3927 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3928 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3929 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3930 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3931 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3932 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3933 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3934 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3935 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3936 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3937 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3938 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3939 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3940 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3941 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3942 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3943 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3944 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3946 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3947 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3948 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3950 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3952 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3953 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3955 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3956 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3957 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3958 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
3959 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3961 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3962 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3963 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3964 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3965 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3967 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3969 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3970 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3971 * still more portability fixes
3972 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3973 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3975 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3977 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3979 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3981 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3982 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3983 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3984 there is any time remaining
3985 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3987 ========================================================================
3988 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3989 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3991 This package began as the union of the following:
3992 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3994 ========================================================================
3996 Copyright (C) 2001-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3998 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3999 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
4000 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
4001 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
4002 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
4003 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.