1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
8 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
9 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
10 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
12 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
13 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
15 ** Changes in behavior
17 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
18 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
20 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
21 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
22 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive. To obtain
23 the nanoseconds portion corresponding to %X, you may now use %:X.
24 I.e., to print the floating point number of seconds using maximum
25 precision, use this format string: %X.%:X. Likewise for %Y, %Z and %W.
27 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
28 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
29 the same way: %W now expands to seconds since the epoch (or 0 when
30 not supported), and %:W expands to the nanoseconds portion, or to
34 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
38 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
39 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
40 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
42 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
43 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
45 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
46 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
47 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
49 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
50 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
52 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
53 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
55 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
56 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
57 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
59 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
60 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
61 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
62 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
66 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
67 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
69 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
72 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
73 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
75 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
77 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
78 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
79 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
81 ** Changes in behavior
83 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
84 rather than its aliased target.
86 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
87 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
88 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
90 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
91 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
92 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
93 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
94 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
95 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
96 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
97 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
99 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
101 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
103 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
104 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
107 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
108 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
109 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
110 control like taskset for example.
112 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
114 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
115 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
116 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
117 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
118 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
119 includes %C when context information is available.
121 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
122 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
123 rather than a file system attribute.
125 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
126 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
127 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
128 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
130 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
131 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
132 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
134 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
135 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
136 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
139 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
143 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
144 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
146 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
148 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
149 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
151 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
152 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
153 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
154 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
156 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
157 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
158 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
162 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
163 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
165 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
166 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
167 duration after the initial signal was sent.
169 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
170 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
171 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
172 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
173 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
174 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
175 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
176 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
177 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
179 ** Changes in behavior
181 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
182 sequence when it would be a no-op.
184 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
185 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
188 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
192 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
193 of available processors, which may not have been the case
194 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
195 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
199 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
200 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
202 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
203 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
204 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
205 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
207 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
208 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
209 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
212 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
216 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
217 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
218 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
220 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
221 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
222 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
224 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
225 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
227 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
228 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
229 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
230 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
232 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
233 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
234 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
236 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
237 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
238 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
239 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
241 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
242 renamed-aside and then recreated.
243 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
245 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
246 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
247 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
248 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
250 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
251 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
252 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
254 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
255 processes will not intersperse their output.
256 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
259 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
263 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
264 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
266 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
267 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
269 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
270 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
271 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
272 the presence of the empty string argument.
273 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
275 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
276 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
277 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
278 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
280 tail without -f no longer access uninitialized memory
281 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
283 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
284 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
285 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
287 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
288 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
289 and with a malicious user on the same system
290 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
291 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
294 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
298 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
299 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
300 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
302 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
303 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
304 offending directory and all "contents."
306 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
307 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
308 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
310 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
311 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
312 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
314 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
315 processes will not intersperse their output.
316 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
317 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
319 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
320 output the name of the file to stdout.
321 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
323 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
324 call fails with errno == EACCES.
325 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
327 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
328 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
331 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
332 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
333 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
335 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
336 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
337 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
338 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
339 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
340 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
342 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
343 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
344 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
345 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
347 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
348 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
350 ** Changes in behavior
352 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
353 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
354 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
355 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
356 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
358 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
359 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
360 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
361 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
363 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
365 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
366 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
367 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
368 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
369 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
373 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
377 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
378 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
380 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
381 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
383 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
384 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
385 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
387 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
388 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
391 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
395 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
396 when the source file doesn't have write access.
397 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
399 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
400 to accommodate leap seconds.
401 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
403 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
404 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
405 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
407 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
409 ls -is is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
410 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
411 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
413 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
414 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
415 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
416 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
417 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
421 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
422 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
423 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceeding name is a
424 directory or a symlink to a directory.
426 ** Changes in behavior
428 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
429 environment variable is set.
431 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
432 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
433 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
437 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
438 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
439 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
440 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
442 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
443 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
444 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
445 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
449 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
450 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
451 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
453 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
454 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
455 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
456 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
457 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
458 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
461 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
462 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
465 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
469 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
470 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
471 and libraries tested at configure time.
472 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
474 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
475 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
477 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
478 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
480 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
481 printing a summary to stderr.
482 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
484 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
485 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
486 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
488 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
489 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
491 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
492 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
493 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
494 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
496 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
497 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
498 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
499 which is relatively unusual.
500 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
502 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
503 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
504 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
505 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
506 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
507 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
508 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
512 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
513 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
514 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
515 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
516 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
520 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
521 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
523 ** Changes in behavior
525 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
526 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
527 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
528 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
529 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
532 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
536 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
537 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
539 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
540 before data copying has started.
542 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
543 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
545 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
546 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
547 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
548 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
550 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
551 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
552 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
553 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
555 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
560 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
561 for its standard streams.
563 ** Changes in behavior
565 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
566 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
567 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
568 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
569 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
570 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
572 ** Deprecated options
574 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
575 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
579 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
581 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
582 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
585 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
587 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
588 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
590 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
591 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
594 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
598 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
599 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
600 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
601 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
603 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
604 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
605 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
606 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
607 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
612 make check: two tests have been corrected
616 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
617 inherited from gnulib.
620 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
624 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
625 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
626 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
627 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
629 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
630 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
632 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
634 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
635 systems without xattr support.
637 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
638 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
639 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
641 ** Changes in behavior
643 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
644 This is mainly noticable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
645 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
646 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
648 ** Improved robustness
650 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
651 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
652 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
653 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
654 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
655 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
656 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
657 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
658 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
662 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
663 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
665 `id -G $USER` now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
666 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
667 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
668 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
669 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
672 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
676 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
677 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
678 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
682 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
683 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
684 data was read, or on process exit.
685 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
687 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
688 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
689 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
690 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
692 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
693 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
694 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
695 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
697 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
698 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
700 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
701 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
703 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
704 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
705 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
707 ** Changes in behavior
709 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
710 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
711 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
713 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
714 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
716 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
717 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
718 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
721 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
725 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
727 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
728 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
729 install: Never copies xattrs
731 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
732 from overwriting any existing destination file
734 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
735 mode where this feature is available.
737 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
738 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
739 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
740 do not modify the destination at all.
742 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
744 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
748 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
749 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
751 cp uses much less memory in some situations
753 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
754 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
756 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
757 processing the first file name
759 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
760 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
761 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
762 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
764 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
765 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
767 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
768 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
771 ** Changes in behavior
773 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
774 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
776 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
777 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
778 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
780 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
781 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
783 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
785 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
786 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
787 is still marked with a '+'.
790 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
794 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
795 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
799 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
800 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
801 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
802 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
803 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
804 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
806 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
807 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
809 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
810 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
812 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
814 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
815 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
816 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
818 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
819 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
821 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
822 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
823 used to factor large numbers.
825 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
828 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
830 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
832 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
833 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
835 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
836 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
837 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
838 maximum command-line (argv) length.
840 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
841 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
842 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
844 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
845 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
849 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
851 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
852 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
854 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
855 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
857 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
859 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
860 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
864 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
865 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
866 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
868 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
870 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
871 no matter how many files are in a given directory
873 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
874 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
875 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
877 ** Changes in behavior
879 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
880 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
883 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
887 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
889 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
890 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
891 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
893 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
894 with no USERNAME argument.
896 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
897 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
898 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
900 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
901 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
902 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
903 number of fields for some inputs.
905 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
906 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
908 ** Changes in behavior
910 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
911 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
914 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
918 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
920 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
921 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
922 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
923 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
925 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
926 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
928 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
929 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
931 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
932 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
934 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
935 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
936 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
937 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
939 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
940 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
941 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
942 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
943 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
944 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
946 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
947 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
949 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
950 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
951 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
953 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
954 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
956 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
957 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
959 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
960 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
961 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
962 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
964 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
965 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
967 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
968 in more cases when a directory is empty.
970 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
971 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
972 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
976 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
977 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
979 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
980 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
981 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
982 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
986 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
987 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
989 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
991 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
995 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
996 which have negative errno values.
1000 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1004 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1008 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1009 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1012 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1016 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1017 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1018 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1020 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1021 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1022 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1023 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1027 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1028 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1029 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1030 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1033 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1037 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1039 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1040 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1041 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1044 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1048 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1049 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1051 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1053 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
1055 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
1057 ** Programs no longer installed by default
1061 ** Changes in behavior
1063 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
1064 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
1066 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
1067 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
1069 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
1070 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
1071 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
1075 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
1076 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
1077 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
1078 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
1079 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
1080 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
1081 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
1082 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
1083 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
1084 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
1085 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
1087 The following commands and options now support the standard size
1088 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
1089 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
1092 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
1095 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
1096 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
1097 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1099 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
1100 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
1101 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
1104 ** New build options
1106 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
1107 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
1108 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
1109 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
1111 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
1112 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
1113 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
1114 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
1115 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
1116 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
1117 of "make check" fail.
1119 ** Remove deprecated options
1121 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1122 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
1123 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
1124 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
1125 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
1127 ** Improved robustness
1129 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
1130 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
1131 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
1132 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
1133 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
1134 loss of the contents of a/f.
1136 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
1137 in its 35-colon command-line argument
1141 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
1142 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
1143 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1145 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
1146 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
1147 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
1148 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1150 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
1151 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
1152 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
1153 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
1154 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
1155 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
1156 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
1157 destination is a symlink.
1159 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
1161 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
1162 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
1164 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
1165 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
1167 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
1169 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
1170 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
1172 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
1173 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
1175 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
1178 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
1179 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
1181 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
1182 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1184 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
1185 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
1186 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
1187 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1189 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
1190 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
1191 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1193 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
1194 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
1195 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
1197 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
1198 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
1199 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
1200 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
1202 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
1203 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
1204 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
1206 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
1207 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
1209 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
1210 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
1212 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
1214 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
1215 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
1216 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
1218 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
1219 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
1221 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
1222 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
1224 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
1225 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
1227 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
1228 [present in the original version]
1231 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
1235 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
1237 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
1238 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
1239 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
1241 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
1242 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
1244 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
1248 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
1249 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
1251 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
1252 support but with insufficient /proc support.
1254 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
1255 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
1257 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
1258 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
1259 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
1260 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
1261 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
1262 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
1264 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
1265 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
1268 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
1269 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
1271 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
1274 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
1275 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
1276 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
1278 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
1279 directory is unreadable.
1281 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
1282 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
1283 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
1285 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
1286 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
1287 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
1288 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
1289 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
1292 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
1293 Before it would print nothing.
1295 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
1297 "rm -rf D" would emit an misleading diagnostic when failing to
1298 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
1299 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
1300 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
1301 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
1302 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
1303 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
1304 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
1306 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
1310 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
1311 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
1312 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
1314 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
1315 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
1316 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
1317 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
1320 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
1324 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
1325 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
1326 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
1327 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
1328 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
1329 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
1330 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1332 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
1333 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
1334 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
1335 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
1336 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
1337 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
1338 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
1339 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
1341 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
1342 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
1343 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
1346 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
1350 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
1351 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
1353 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
1354 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
1355 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
1357 ** Improved robustness
1359 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
1360 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
1361 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
1364 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
1368 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
1369 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
1370 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
1371 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
1372 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1374 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
1378 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
1381 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
1385 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
1386 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
1387 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
1388 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
1390 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
1391 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
1393 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
1394 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
1395 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
1398 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
1400 ** Improved robustness
1402 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
1403 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
1405 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
1406 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
1407 or NFS-mounted partition.
1409 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
1410 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
1414 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
1415 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
1416 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
1417 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
1418 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
1419 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
1421 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
1422 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
1424 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
1425 or neglect to report file removal.
1427 For the "groups" command:
1429 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
1430 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
1432 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
1434 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
1436 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
1440 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
1441 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
1444 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
1446 ** Changes in behavior
1448 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
1449 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
1450 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
1451 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
1453 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., `rm -fr /'
1454 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
1455 a final `./' or `../' component.
1457 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
1458 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
1459 this only for pipes.
1461 ** Infrastructure changes
1463 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
1464 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
1465 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
1466 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
1470 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
1471 name is "." or "..".
1473 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
1474 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
1475 dirent.d_type support.
1477 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
1478 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
1480 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
1481 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
1482 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
1483 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
1486 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
1488 ** Changes in behavior
1490 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
1494 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
1495 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
1499 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
1500 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
1501 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
1503 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
1504 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1506 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
1507 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1509 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
1511 ** Improved robustness
1513 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
1514 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
1515 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
1517 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
1518 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
1521 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
1522 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
1524 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
1525 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
1527 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
1528 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
1530 ** Changes in behavior
1532 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
1533 where the two are distinct.
1535 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
1536 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
1537 `chmod 755 DIR' and `chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
1538 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
1539 similarly for `mkdir -m 755 DIR' and `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
1540 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
1541 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
1542 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., `mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
1543 `mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
1544 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
1545 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
1546 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
1547 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 `mkdir -m
1548 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but `chmod 777 D' clears it.
1549 Conversely, Solaris 10 `mkdir -m 777 D', `mkdir -m g-s D', and
1550 `chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
1551 something like `chmod g-s D' to clear it.
1553 `cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
1554 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
1555 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
1557 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
1558 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
1559 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
1560 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
1563 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
1564 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
1568 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
1569 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
1570 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
1571 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
1573 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
1574 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
1575 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
1577 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
1578 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
1579 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
1580 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
1581 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
1584 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
1585 e.g., `mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
1587 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
1588 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
1589 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
1590 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
1592 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
1593 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
1594 successful and the output is easier to parse.
1596 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
1597 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
1598 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
1599 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
1601 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
1602 and sticky) with the -m option.
1604 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
1605 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
1606 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
1607 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
1608 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
1610 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
1611 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
1613 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
1617 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
1618 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
1619 You no longer need the `-f%.f' in `seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
1620 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
1622 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
1624 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
1626 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
1627 silently ignoring one of them.
1629 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
1630 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
1631 containing this change was 5.92.
1633 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
1634 automatically newline terminated.
1636 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
1637 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
1638 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
1639 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
1642 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
1643 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1644 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
1647 ** Scheduled for removal
1649 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
1650 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
1652 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
1653 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
1654 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
1655 command to unlink a directory.
1657 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
1658 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
1659 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
1660 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
1664 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
1665 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
1666 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
1667 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
1668 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
1669 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
1673 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
1674 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
1676 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
1678 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
1679 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
1680 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
1682 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
1683 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
1686 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
1687 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
1689 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
1690 list directories before files.
1692 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
1693 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
1694 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
1695 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
1698 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
1700 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and `R' ordering option.
1702 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
1703 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
1704 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
1706 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
1707 list of NUL-terminated file names.
1711 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
1712 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
1713 usually printing nothing.
1715 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
1717 When `cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
1718 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
1719 them with hard-linked directories.
1721 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
1722 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
1723 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
1725 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
1726 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
1727 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
1729 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
1732 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
1733 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
1735 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
1736 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
1738 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
1739 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
1741 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
1742 all command-line arguments.
1744 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
1746 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
1748 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
1749 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
1751 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
1753 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
1754 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
1755 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
1756 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
1757 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
1759 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
1760 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
1762 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
1763 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
1764 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
1765 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
1767 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
1769 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
1773 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
1774 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
1776 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
1777 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
1779 md5sum once again defaults to using the ` ' non-binary marker
1780 (rather than the `*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
1782 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
1783 a directory like `nonexistent/.'
1785 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
1786 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
1788 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
1790 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
1791 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
1792 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
1795 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
1797 ** Build-related bug fixes
1799 installing .mo files would fail
1802 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
1806 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
1808 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
1811 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
1815 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
1816 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
1820 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
1822 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
1823 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
1825 ** Deprecated options
1827 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
1828 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use `-k' instead.
1830 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
1834 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
1836 ** Bring back support for `head -NUM', `tail -NUM', etc. even when
1837 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
1838 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
1839 conforming to older POSIX versions.
1841 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
1844 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
1850 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
1855 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
1857 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
1859 date -I TIMESPEC (use `date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
1860 od -w WIDTH (use `od -wWIDTH' instead)
1861 pr -S STRING (use `pr -SSTRING' instead)
1863 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
1864 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
1865 problematic usages. These include:
1867 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
1868 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
1869 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
1870 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
1871 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
1872 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
1873 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
1874 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
1875 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
1877 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
1878 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
1880 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
1881 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
1882 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
1883 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
1885 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
1886 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
1887 between binary and text files.
1889 The following programs now always use text input/output:
1893 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
1897 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
1898 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
1900 head tac tail tee tr
1901 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
1903 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
1904 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
1906 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
1907 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
1908 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
1910 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
1912 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
1914 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
1915 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
1916 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
1920 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
1922 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
1923 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
1925 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
1926 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
1927 blocks until F contains N blocks.
1931 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
1932 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
1936 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
1937 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
1938 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
1942 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
1943 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
1947 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
1949 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
1951 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
1955 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
1956 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
1957 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
1959 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
1960 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
1961 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
1962 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
1963 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
1965 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
1969 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
1970 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
1971 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
1973 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
1975 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
1976 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
1977 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
1978 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
1980 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
1982 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
1983 rather than silently wrapping around.
1985 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
1986 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
1988 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
1989 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
1991 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the `.'-relative
1992 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
1993 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
1994 file /tmp/a/b/file".
1996 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
1998 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2000 ** Improved robustness
2002 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2003 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2004 no matter how large the result.
2006 ** Improved portability
2008 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2009 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2011 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2013 `rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2014 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2015 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2017 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2018 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2022 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2023 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2025 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2027 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2028 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2029 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2030 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2032 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2033 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2035 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2036 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2037 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2039 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2041 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2042 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2044 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2045 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2047 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2049 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2050 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2052 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2053 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
2055 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
2056 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
2057 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
2059 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
2061 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
2063 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
2067 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
2069 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
2070 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
2071 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
2073 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
2074 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
2076 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
2077 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
2078 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
2080 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
2081 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
2083 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
2084 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
2085 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
2086 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
2088 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
2089 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
2091 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
2092 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
2093 the file system does not support it.
2095 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
2097 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
2098 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
2100 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
2102 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
2103 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
2105 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
2106 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
2107 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
2108 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
2110 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
2111 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
2114 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
2115 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
2116 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
2117 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
2119 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
2120 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
2121 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
2122 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
2124 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
2125 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
2127 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
2129 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
2130 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
2131 reporting incorrect results.
2135 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
2136 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
2138 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
2141 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
2143 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
2144 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
2146 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
2147 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
2149 `pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to `pr -N' when also using
2152 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
2153 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
2154 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
2155 the file name does not look like a page range.
2157 printf has several changes:
2159 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
2160 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
2162 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
2163 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
2164 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
2166 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
2167 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
2170 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
2171 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
2173 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
2174 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
2176 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
2178 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
2179 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
2181 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
2183 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
2185 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
2186 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
2187 when first encountering the directory.
2191 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
2192 output; POSIX requires this.
2194 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
2195 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
2197 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
2199 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
2200 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
2202 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
2203 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
2205 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
2206 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
2207 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
2208 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
2209 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
2210 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
2211 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
2213 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
2214 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
2215 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
2217 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
2218 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
2220 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
2222 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
2224 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
2225 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
2226 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
2227 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
2229 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
2233 For efficiency, `sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
2234 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
2235 some relatively-contrived examples like `cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
2236 are no longer safe, as `sort' might start writing F before `cat' is
2237 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless `-m' is used.
2239 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
2240 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
2241 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
2243 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
2244 is longer than PATH_MAX.
2246 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
2247 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
2249 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
2250 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
2251 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
2252 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
2253 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
2255 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
2256 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
2258 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
2259 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
2261 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
2263 nocreat do not create the output file
2264 excl fail if the output file already exists
2265 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
2266 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
2268 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
2270 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
2271 direct use direct I/O for data
2272 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
2273 sync likewise, but also for metadata
2274 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
2275 nofollow do not follow symlinks
2276 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
2278 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
2280 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
2281 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append `\n' to the format
2284 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
2285 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
2286 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
2287 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
2288 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
2289 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
2291 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2292 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2294 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
2297 Dates like `January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
2299 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
2301 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
2302 prefixed by `@'. For example, `@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
2304 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
2305 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
2306 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
2308 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
2309 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
2310 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
2312 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
2314 `date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
2315 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
2317 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
2318 for compatibility with bash.
2320 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
2322 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
2323 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
2324 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
2325 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
2327 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
2328 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
2330 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
2331 ls supports TABSIZE.
2332 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
2333 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
2334 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
2336 The usual `--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
2339 `od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
2341 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
2342 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
2343 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
2344 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
2345 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
2346 an offset, not as a file name.
2348 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
2349 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
2351 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
2352 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
2354 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
2355 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
2357 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
2358 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
2359 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
2361 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
2362 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
2364 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
2365 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
2369 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
2371 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
2373 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
2377 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
2378 or more arguments between partitions.
2380 `cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
2381 holes in the destination.
2383 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
2384 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
2385 this change, if you ran `ssh localhost', then `nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
2386 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
2387 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
2388 terminates immediately.
2390 `expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
2392 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
2394 The `|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
2395 arguments are null or zero. E.g., `expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
2396 not the empty string.
2398 The `|' and `&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
2399 `expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
2403 `chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
2404 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
2405 containing `.' that happens to equal `user.group'.
2408 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
2415 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
2419 `cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
2420 declare stat and lstat as `static inline' functions.
2422 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
2423 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
2425 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
2426 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
2427 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
2430 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
2434 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
2435 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
2437 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
2438 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
2440 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
2441 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
2442 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
2444 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
2446 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
2449 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
2451 ** Configuration option
2453 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
2454 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
2458 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
2459 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
2463 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
2464 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
2465 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
2468 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
2469 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
2470 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
2471 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
2472 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
2473 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2474 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
2477 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
2481 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
2482 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
2483 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
2485 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
2486 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
2488 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
2490 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
2491 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
2492 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
2493 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
2495 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
2497 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
2498 not just the ones that reference directories
2500 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
2501 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
2503 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
2504 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
2505 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
2507 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
2508 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
2509 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
2510 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
2511 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
2512 ragged when a datum was too wide.
2514 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
2519 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
2520 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
2522 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
2524 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
2526 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
2528 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
2529 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
2531 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
2532 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
2534 dd `unblock' and `sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
2536 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
2540 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
2542 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
2544 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
2545 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
2546 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
2547 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
2548 resolution is the best we can do right now.
2550 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
2551 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
2553 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
2554 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
2556 `sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
2557 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
2559 who -l now means `who --login', not `who --lookup', per POSIX.
2560 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
2561 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
2565 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via `mv B b' when `B' is
2566 the same directory entry as `b' no longer destroys the directory entry
2567 referenced by both `b' and `B'. Note that this would happen only on
2568 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
2569 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
2570 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
2571 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
2572 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
2573 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
2574 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
2575 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
2576 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
2577 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
2578 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
2580 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in `%'
2582 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
2583 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
2585 `split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
2587 `df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
2589 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
2590 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
2592 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
2594 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
2595 without a trailing newline.
2597 `tail -n0 -f FILE' and `tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
2598 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
2600 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
2603 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
2607 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
2609 `test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
2611 `test -t', `test --help', and `test --version' now silently exit
2612 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
2613 `test -t 1'. To get help and version info for `test', use
2614 `[ --help' and `[ --version'.
2616 `test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
2618 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
2619 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
2620 be printed without leading spaces.
2622 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
2623 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
2628 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
2629 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
2630 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
2632 `[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
2634 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
2635 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
2637 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
2638 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
2640 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
2641 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
2643 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
2645 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
2647 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
2649 `sort --version' and `sort --help' fail, as they should
2650 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
2652 `su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
2654 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2656 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
2657 byte offsets are specified.
2660 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
2663 - new program: `[' (much like `test')
2666 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
2667 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
2668 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
2669 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
2670 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
2671 - chown: `.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
2672 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
2673 on such a system, then it still accepts `.', by default. If chown
2674 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
2675 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
2676 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
2677 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
2678 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
2679 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
2680 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
2681 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
2682 directory where M has write access.
2683 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
2684 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
2685 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
2688 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
2689 - `du /' once again prints the `/' on the last line
2690 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
2691 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
2692 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
2693 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted `file truncated' warning.
2694 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
2695 - df and `readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
2696 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
2697 - `env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
2698 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
2699 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
2700 - mv now removes `a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
2701 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
2702 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
2703 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
2704 - date's `-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
2705 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
2706 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like `-72x'
2707 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
2708 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
2709 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
2710 appeared one additional time.
2712 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
2713 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
2714 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
2715 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
2718 - `kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than `?') on systems
2719 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
2720 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
2721 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
2722 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
2723 Before `rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
2724 if there were more than 338.
2726 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
2727 - false --help now exits nonzero
2730 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
2731 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
2732 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
2733 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
2736 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
2737 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of `0'
2738 * seq now accepts ` ' and `'' as valid format flag characters
2739 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
2740 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
2743 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
2744 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
2745 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
2746 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to `infinite' recursion
2747 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
2748 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
2749 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2752 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
2753 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
2754 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
2755 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
2756 * `df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
2757 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
2759 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2760 under certain unusual conditions
2761 * mv and `cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
2762 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
2765 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
2766 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
2767 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
2768 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
2769 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
2770 * df now always displays under `Filesystem', the device file name
2771 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
2772 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
2773 `df /dev/hda' would list `/dev/hda' as the `Filesystem', rather than say
2774 /dev/hda3 (the device on which `/' is mounted), as it does now.
2775 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
2776 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
2777 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
2778 `test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
2779 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
2780 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
2783 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
2784 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
2787 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
2788 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
2789 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
2790 involving hard-linked directories
2791 * `who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
2792 * df now displays a mount point (usually `/') for non-mounted
2793 character-special and block files
2796 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
2797 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
2798 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
2799 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
2800 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
2801 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
2802 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
2803 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
2804 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
2806 * ls dangling-symlink now prints `dangling-symlink'.
2807 Before, it would fail with `no such file or directory'.
2808 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
2809 attributes of `symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
2810 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
2811 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
2812 specified on the command line.
2813 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
2814 Before, `shred --zero file' would produce `shred: missing file argument',
2815 and worse, `shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
2816 the first file untouched.
2817 * readlink: new program
2818 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
2819 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
2820 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
2821 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
2822 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
2823 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
2826 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
2827 * `ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
2828 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
2829 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
2830 * `du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
2831 * `du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
2832 * In the unlikely event that running `du /' resulted in `stat ("/", ...)'
2833 failing, du would give a diagnostic about `' (empty string) rather than `/'.
2834 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
2835 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
2836 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
2837 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
2839 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
2840 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
2841 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
2843 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
2844 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
2845 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
2846 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
2847 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
2848 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
2849 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
2850 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this `yes|nl -s%n'
2853 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
2854 * `ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
2857 * `rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
2858 * `tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
2859 * `mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
2860 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
2861 * printf now honors the `--' command line delimiter
2862 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
2863 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
2866 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
2867 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
2869 ========================================================================
2870 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
2871 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
2874 * `rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
2876 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
2877 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
2878 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
2879 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
2880 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
2881 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
2882 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
2883 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 thru 4.1.9.
2884 * `rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
2885 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
2886 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
2887 The old options will continue to work for a while.
2889 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
2890 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
2891 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
2892 * `touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
2894 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
2897 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
2899 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
2900 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
2901 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
2902 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
2903 * The obsolete usage `touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
2904 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
2905 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
2908 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
2909 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
2910 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
2911 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
2912 A missing `B' (e.g. `1M') has the same meaning as before.
2913 A trailing `B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
2914 The nonstandard `D' suffix (e.g. `1MD') is now obsolescent.
2915 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
2916 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
2917 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
2918 * You can omit an integer `1' before a block size suffix,
2919 e.g. `df -BG' is equivalent to `df -B 1G' and to `df --block-size=1G'.
2920 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
2921 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
2922 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
2923 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
2925 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
2926 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
2928 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
2929 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
2930 * dd once again uses `lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
2931 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
2932 resort to emulating `skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
2933 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
2935 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
2936 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
2937 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
2938 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
2939 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
2940 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., `chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
2941 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
2943 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
2944 the source files in the following example:
2945 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
2946 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
2947 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
2948 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
2949 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
2950 links between source files with --preserve=links
2951 * cp accepts new options:
2952 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
2953 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
2954 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
2955 to `--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
2956 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
2957 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
2958 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
2959 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off `-i'.
2960 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
2962 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
2963 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
2964 * mv: fix the bug whereby `mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
2965 even though it's older than dest.
2966 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
2967 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
2968 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
2969 * `ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
2970 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
2972 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
2973 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
2974 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
2975 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
2976 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
2977 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
2978 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
2980 - The `full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
2981 `2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
2982 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
2984 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
2985 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
2986 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
2987 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
2988 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
2989 This is the default.
2991 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
2992 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
2993 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
2994 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
2995 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
2997 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3000 ========================================================================
3001 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3002 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3005 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3006 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3008 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3009 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3010 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3011 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3012 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3014 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3015 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3016 that specifies a non-directory
3019 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3020 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3021 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3022 the long option `--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3023 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3024 - `date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use `date --iso-8601'.
3025 - `nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use `nice -n NUM'.
3026 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3027 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3028 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3029 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3030 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3031 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3032 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3033 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3034 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3035 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3036 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3037 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3038 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3039 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3040 This problem arose only with relative date strings like `last monday'.
3041 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3042 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3044 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3045 * `date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3046 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3048 * `date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3050 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3051 `write error' when invoked with the --version option
3053 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
3054 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
3055 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
3056 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the `C' locale
3057 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
3059 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
3060 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
3061 required support; from Bruno Haible.
3062 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
3063 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
3065 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
3067 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
3068 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
3069 * still more portability fixes
3070 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
3071 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3073 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
3075 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
3077 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
3079 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
3080 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
3081 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
3082 there is any time remaining
3083 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
3085 ========================================================================
3086 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
3087 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
3089 This package began as the union of the following:
3090 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
3092 ========================================================================
3094 Copyright (C) 2001-2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3096 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
3097 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
3098 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
3099 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
3100 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
3101 Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.