1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 'comm --output-delimiter="" --total' now delimits columns in the total
8 line with the NUL character, consistent with NUL column delimiters in
9 the rest of the output. Previously no delimiters were used for the
10 total line in this case.
11 [bug introduced with the --total option in coreutils-8.26]
13 'cp -p' no longer has a security hole when cloning into a dangling
14 symbolic link on macOS 10.12 and later.
15 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
17 'cp -rx / /mnt' no longer complains "cannot create directory /mnt/".
18 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
20 cp, mv, and install avoid allocating too much memory, and possibly
21 triggering "memory exhausted" failures, on file systems like ZFS,
22 which can return varied file system I/O block size values for files.
23 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
25 cp, mv, and install now immediately acknowledge transient errors
26 when creating copy-on-write or cloned reflink files, on supporting
27 file systems like XFS, BTRFS, APFS, etc.
28 Previously they would have tried again with other copy methods
29 which may have resulted in data corruption.
30 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5 and enabled by default in coreutils-9.0]
32 cp, mv, and install now handle ENOENT failures across CIFS file systems,
33 falling back from copy_file_range to a better supported standard copy.
34 [issue introduced in coreutils-9.0]
36 'mv --backup=simple f d/' no longer mistakenly backs up d/f to f~.
37 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
39 rm now fails gracefully when memory is exhausted.
40 Previously it may have aborted with a failed assertion in some cases.
41 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
43 rm -d (--dir) now properly handles unreadable empty directories.
44 E.g., before, this would fail to remove d: mkdir -m0 d; src/rm -d d
45 [bug introduced in v8.19 with the addition of this option]
47 runcon --compute no longer looks up the specified command in the $PATH
48 so that there is no mismatch between the inspected and executed file.
49 [bug introduced when runcon was introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
51 'sort -g' no longer infloops when given multiple NaNs on platforms
52 like x86_64 where 'long double' has padding bits in memory.
53 Although the fix alters sort -g's NaN ordering, that ordering has
54 long been documented to be platform-dependent.
55 [bug introduced 1999-05-02 and only partly fixed in coreutils-8.14]
57 split with -l or -n no longer misbehaves on small piped input, on
58 small GNU/Linux /proc files, or on macOS /dev/null.
59 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
61 stty ispeed and ospeed options no longer accept and silently ignore
62 invalid speed arguments, or give false warnings for valid speeds.
63 Now they're validated against both the general accepted set,
64 and the system supported set of valid speeds.
65 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
67 stty now wraps output appropriately for the terminal width.
68 Previously it may have output 1 character too wide for certain widths.
69 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3]
71 tail --follow=name works again with non seekable files. Previously it
72 exited with an "Illegal seek" error when such a file was replaced.
73 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
75 'wc -c' will again efficiently determine the size of large files
76 on all systems. It no longer redundantly reads data from certain
77 sized files larger than SIZE_MAX.
78 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
80 ** Changes in behavior
82 Programs now support the new Ronna (R), and Quetta (Q) SI prefixes,
83 corresponding to 10^27 and 10^30 respectively,
84 along with their binary counterparts Ri (2^90) and Qi (2^100).
85 In some cases (e.g., 'sort -h') these new prefixes simply work;
86 in others, where they exceed integer width limits, they now elicit
87 the same integer overflow diagnostics as other large prefixes.
89 'cp --reflink=always A B' no longer leaves behind a newly created
90 empty file B merely because copy-on-write clones are not supported.
92 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now exit with nonzero status if they skip their
93 action because the destination exists, and likewise for 'cp -i',
94 'ln -i', and 'mv -i' when the user declines. (POSIX specifies this
95 for 'cp -i' and 'mv -i'.)
97 cp, mv, and install again read in multiples of the reported block size,
98 to support unusual devices that may have this constraint.
99 [behavior inadvertently changed in coreutils-7.2]
101 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' go back to sorting ".0" before ".A",
102 reverting to the behavior in coreutils-9.0 and earlier.
103 This behavior is now documented.
105 printf unicode \uNNNN, \UNNNNNNNN syntax, now supports all valid
106 unicode code points. Previously is was restricted to the C
107 universal character subset, which restricted most points <= 0x9F.
109 runcon now exits with status 125 for internal errors. Previously upon
110 internal errors it would exit with status 1, which was less distinguishable
111 from errors from the invoked command.
113 'split -n N' now splits more evenly when the input size is not a
114 multiple of N, by creating N output files whose sizes differ by at
115 most 1 byte. Formerly, it did this only when the input size was
118 'stat -c %s' now prints sizes as unsigned, consistent with 'ls'.
122 cksum now accepts the --base64 (-b) option to print base64-encoded
123 checksums. It also accepts/checks such checksums.
125 cksum now accepts the --raw option to output a raw binary checksum.
126 No file name or other information is output in this mode.
128 cp, mv, and install now accept the --debug option to
129 print details on how a file is being copied.
131 factor now accepts the --exponents (-h) option to print factors
132 in the form p^e, rather than repeating the prime p, e times.
134 ls now supports the --time=modification option, to explicitly
135 select the default mtime timestamp for display and sorting.
137 mv now supports the --no-copy option, which causes it to fail when
138 asked to move a file to a different file system.
140 split now accepts options like '-n SIZE' that exceed machine integer
141 range, when they can be implemented as if they were infinity.
143 wc now accepts the --total={auto,never,always,only} option
144 to give explicit control over when the total is output.
148 cp --sparse=auto (the default), mv, and install,
149 will use the copy_file_range syscall now also with sparse files.
150 This may be more efficient, by avoiding user space copies,
151 and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking,
152 for the non sparse portion of such sparse files.
154 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone in more cases.
155 Previously cp would only do this when preserving mode and timestamps.
157 date --debug now diagnoses if multiple --date or --set options are
158 specified, as only the last specified is significant in that case.
160 rm outputs more accurate diagnostics in the presence of errors
161 when removing directories. For example EIO will be faithfully
162 diagnosed, rather than being conflated with ENOTEMPTY.
164 tail --follow=name now works with single non regular files even
165 when their modification time doesn't change when new data is available.
166 Previously tail would not show any new data in this case.
168 tee -p detects when all remaining outputs have become broken pipes, and
169 exits, rather than waiting for more input to induce an exit when written.
173 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.1 (2022-04-15) [stable]
177 chmod -R no longer exits with error status when encountering symlinks.
178 All files would be processed correctly, but the exit status was incorrect.
179 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
181 If 'cp -Z A B' checks B's status and some other process then removes B,
182 cp no longer creates B with a too-generous SELinux security context
183 before adjusting it to the correct value.
184 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
186 'cp --preserve=ownership A B' no longer ignores the umask when creating B.
187 Also, 'cp --preserve-xattr A B' is less likely to temporarily chmod u+w B.
188 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.7]
190 On macOS, 'cp A B' no longer miscopies when A is in an APFS file system
191 and B is in some other file system.
192 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
194 On macOS, fmt no longer corrupts multi-byte characters
195 by misdetecting their component bytes as spaces.
196 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
198 'id xyz' now uses the name 'xyz' to determine groups, instead of xyz's uid.
199 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
201 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' no longer mishandle corner cases like "a..a" vs "a.+"
202 or lines containing NULs. Their behavior now matches the documentation
203 for file names like ".m4" that consist entirely of an extension,
204 and the documentation has been clarified for unusual cases.
205 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
207 On macOS, 'mv A B' no longer fails with "Operation not supported"
208 when A and B are in the same tmpfs file system.
209 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
211 'mv -T --backup=numbered A B/' no longer miscalculates the backup number
212 for B when A is a directory, possibly inflooping.
213 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.3]
215 ** Changes in behavior
217 cat now uses the copy_file_range syscall if available, when doing
218 simple copies between regular files. This may be more efficient, by avoiding
219 user space copies, and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking.
221 chown and chroot now warn about usages like "chown root.root f",
222 which have the nonstandard and long-obsolete "." separator that
223 causes problems on platforms where user names contain ".".
224 Applications should use ":" instead of ".".
226 cksum no longer allows abbreviated algorithm names,
227 so that forward compatibility and robustness is improved.
229 date +'%-N' now suppresses excess trailing digits, instead of always
230 padding them with zeros to 9 digits. It uses clock_getres and
231 clock_gettime to infer the clock resolution.
233 dd conv=fsync now synchronizes output even after a write error,
234 and similarly for dd conv=fdatasync.
236 dd now counts bytes instead of blocks if a block count ends in "B".
237 For example, 'dd count=100KiB' now copies 100 KiB of data, not
238 102,400 blocks of data. The flags count_bytes, skip_bytes and
239 seek_bytes are therefore obsolescent and are no longer documented,
240 though they still work.
242 ls no longer colors files with capabilities by default, as file-based
243 capabilties are very rarely used, and lookup increases processing per file by
244 about 30%. It's best to use getcap [-r] to identify files with capabilities.
246 ls no longer tries to automount files, reverting to the behavior
247 before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
249 stat no longer tries to automount files by default, reverting to the
250 behavior before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
251 Only `stat --cached=never` will continue to automount files.
253 timeout --foreground --kill-after=... will now exit with status 137
254 if the kill signal was sent, which is consistent with the behavior
255 when the --foreground option is not specified. This allows users to
256 distinguish if the command was more forcefully terminated.
260 dd now supports the aliases iseek=N for skip=N, and oseek=N for seek=N,
261 like FreeBSD and other operating systems.
263 dircolors takes a new --print-ls-colors option to display LS_COLORS
264 entries, on separate lines, colored according to the entry color code.
266 dircolors will now also match COLORTERM in addition to TERM environment
267 variables. The default config will apply colors with any COLORTERM set.
271 cp, mv, and install now use openat-like syscalls when copying to a directory.
272 This avoids some race conditions and should be more efficient.
274 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone if source and destination
275 are regular files on the same APFS file system, the destination does
276 not already exist, and cp is preserving mode and timestamps (e.g.,
279 The new 'date' option --resolution outputs the timestamp resolution.
281 With conv=fdatasync or conv=fsync, dd status=progress now reports
282 any extra final progress just before synchronizing output data,
283 since synchronizing can take a long time.
285 printf now supports printing the numeric value of multi-byte characters.
287 sort --debug now diagnoses issues with --field-separator characters
288 that conflict with characters possibly used in numbers.
290 'tail -f file | filter' now exits on Solaris when filter exits.
292 root invoked coreutils, that are built and run in single binary mode,
293 now adjust /proc/$pid/cmdline to be more specific to the utility
294 being run, rather than using the general "coreutils" binary name.
298 AIX builds no longer fail because some library functions are not found.
299 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.32]
302 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.0 (2021-09-24) [stable]
306 chmod -v no longer misreports modes of dangling symlinks.
307 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
309 cp -a --attributes-only now never removes destination files,
310 even if the destination files are hardlinked, or the source
311 is a non regular file.
312 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
314 csplit --suppress-matched now elides the last matched line
315 when a specific number of pattern matches are performed.
316 [bug introduced with the --suppress-matched feature in coreutils-8.22]
318 df no longer outputs duplicate remote mounts in the presence of bind mounts.
319 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
321 df no longer mishandles command-line args that it pre-mounts
322 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.29]
324 du no longer crashes on XFS file systems when the directory hierarchy is
325 heavily changed during the run.
326 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
328 env -S no longer crashes when given unusual whitespace characters
329 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.30]
331 expr no longer mishandles unmatched \(...\) in regular expressions.
332 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
334 ls no longer crashes when printing the SELinux context for unstatable files.
335 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.91]
337 mkdir -m no longer mishandles modes more generous than the umask.
338 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
340 nl now handles single character --section-delimiter arguments,
341 by assuming a second ':' character has been specified, as specified by POSIX.
342 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
344 pr again adjusts tabs in input, to maintain alignment in multi column output.
345 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
347 rm no longer skips an extra file when the removal of an empty directory fails.
348 [bug introduced by the rewrite to use fts in coreutils-8.0]
350 split --number=K/N will again correctly split chunk K of N to stdout.
351 Previously a chunk starting after 128KiB, output the wrong part of the file.
352 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
354 tail -f no longer overruns a stack buffer when given too many files
355 to follow and ulimit -n exceeds 1024.
356 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
358 tr no longer crashes when using --complement with certain
359 invalid combinations of case character classes.
360 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
362 basenc --base64 --decode no longer silently discards decoded characters
363 on (1024*5) buffer boundaries
364 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
366 ** Changes in behavior
368 cp and install now default to copy-on-write (COW) if available.
369 I.e., cp now uses --reflink=auto mode by default.
371 cp, install and mv now use the copy_file_range syscall if available.
372 Also, they use lseek+SEEK_HOLE rather than ioctl+FS_IOC_FIEMAP on sparse
373 files, as lseek is simpler and more portable.
375 On GNU/Linux systems, ls no longer issues an error message on a
376 directory merely because it was removed. This reverts a change
377 that was made in release 8.32.
379 ptx -T no longer attempts to substitute old-fashioned TeX escapes
380 for 8-bit non-ASCII alphabetic characters. TeX indexes should
381 instead use '\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}' or equivalent.
383 stat will use decomposed (major,minor) device numbers in its default format.
384 This is less ambiguous, and more consistent with ls.
386 sum [-r] will output a file name, even if only a single name is passed.
387 This is consistent with sum -s, cksum, and other sum(1) implementations.
391 cksum now supports the -a (--algorithm) option to select any
392 of the existing sum, md5sum, b2sum, sha*sum implementations etc.
393 cksum now subsumes all of these programs, and coreutils
394 will introduce no future standalone checksum utility.
396 cksum -a now supports the 'sm3' argument, to use the SM3 digest algorithm.
398 cksum --check now supports auto detecting the digest type to use,
399 when verifying tagged format checksums.
401 expr and factor now support bignums on all platforms.
403 ls --classify now supports the "always", "auto", or "never" flags,
404 to support only outputting classifier characters if connected to a tty.
406 ls now accepts the --sort=width option, to sort by file name width.
407 This is useful to more compactly organize the default vertical column output.
409 ls now accepts the --zero option, to terminate each output line with
410 NUL instead of newline.
412 nl --line-increment can now take a negative number to decrement the count.
414 stat supports more formats for representing decomposed device numbers.
415 %Hd,%Ld and %Hr,%Lr will output major,minor device numbers and device types
416 respectively. %d corresponds to st_dev and %r to std_rdev.
420 cat --show-ends will now show \r\n as ^M$. Previously the \r was taken
421 literally, thus overwriting the first character in the line with '$'.
423 cksum [-a crc] is now up to 4 times faster by using a slice by 8 algorithm,
424 and at least 8 times faster where pclmul instructions are supported.
425 A new --debug option will indicate if pclmul is being used.
427 md5sum --check now supports checksum files with CRLF line endings.
428 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
430 df now recognizes these file systems as remote:
431 acfs, coda, fhgfs, gpfs, ibrix, ocfs2, and vxfs.
433 rmdir now clarifies the error if a symlink_to_dir/ has not been traversed.
434 This is the case on GNU/Linux systems, where the trailing slash is ignored.
436 stat and tail now know about the "devmem", "exfat", "secretmem", "vboxsf",
437 and "zonefs" file system types. stat -f -c%T now reports the file system
438 type, and tail -f uses polling for "vboxsf" and inotify for the others.
440 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts on macOS.
442 wc is up to 5 times faster when counting only new line characters,
443 where avx2 instructions are supported.
444 A new --debug option will indicate if avx2 is being used.
447 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.32 (2020-03-05) [stable]
451 cp now copies /dev/fd/N correctly on platforms like Solaris where
452 it is a character-special file whose minor device number is N.
453 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
455 dd conv=fdatasync no longer reports a "Bad file descriptor" error
456 when fdatasync is interrupted, and dd now retries interrupted calls
457 to close, fdatasync, fstat and fsync instead of incorrectly
458 reporting an "Interrupted system call" error.
459 [bugs introduced in coreutils-6.0]
461 df now correctly parses the /proc/self/mountinfo file for unusual entries
462 like ones with '\r' in a field value ("mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /foo$'\r'bar"),
463 when the source field is empty ('mount -t tmpfs "" /mnt'), and when the
464 filesystem type contains characters like a blank which need escaping.
465 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.24 with the introduction of reading
466 the /proc/self/mountinfo file]
468 factor again outputs immediately when stdout is a tty but stdin is not.
469 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
471 ln works again on old systems without O_DIRECTORY support (like Solaris 10),
472 and on systems where symlink ("x", ".") fails with errno == EINVAL
473 (like Solaris 10 and Solaris 11).
474 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
476 rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty now works correctly for directories
477 that fail to be removed due to permission issues. Previously the exit status
478 was reversed, failing for non empty and succeeding for empty directories.
479 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
481 'shuf -r -n 0 file' no longer mistakenly reads from standard input.
482 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
484 split no longer reports a "output file suffixes exhausted" error
485 when the specified number of files is evenly divisible by 10, 16, 26,
486 for --numeric, --hex, or default alphabetic suffixes respectively.
487 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
489 seq no longer prints an extra line under certain circumstances (such as
490 'seq -f "%g " 1000000 1000000').
491 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.10]
493 ** Changes in behavior
495 Several programs now check that numbers end properly. For example,
496 'du -d 1x' now reports an error instead of silently ignoring the 'x'.
497 Affected programs and options include du -d, expr's numeric operands
498 on non-GMP builds, install -g and -o, ls's TABSIZE environment
499 variable, mknod b and c, ptx -g and -w, shuf -n, and sort --batch-size
502 date now parses military time zones in accordance with common usage:
503 "A" to "M" are equivalent to UTC+1 to UTC+12
504 "N" to "Y" are equivalent to UTC-1 to UTC-12
505 "Z" is "zulu" time (UTC).
506 For example, 'date -d "09:00B" is now equivalent to 9am in UTC+2 time zone.
507 Previously, military time zones were parsed according to the obsolete
508 rfc822, with their value negated (e.g., "B" was equivalent to UTC-2).
509 [The old behavior was introduced in sh-utils 2.0.15 ca. 1999, predating
512 date now pads nanoseconds on the right, not the left. For example,
513 if the time is currently 1590020079.003388470 seconds after the
514 Epoch, then "date '+%s.%-N'" formerly output "1590020079.3388470",
515 and it now outputs "1590020079.00338847".
517 ls issues an error message on a removed directory, on GNU/Linux systems.
518 Previously no error and no entries were output, and so indistinguishable
519 from an empty directory, with default ls options.
521 uniq no longer uses strcoll() to determine string equivalence,
522 and so will operate more efficiently and consistently.
526 ls now supports the --time=birth option to display and sort by
527 file creation time, where available.
529 od --skip-bytes now can use lseek even if the input is not a regular
530 file, greatly improving performance in some cases.
532 stat(1) supports a new --cached= option, used on systems with statx(2)
533 to control cache coherency of file system attributes,
534 useful on network file systems.
538 stat and ls now use the statx() system call where available, which can
539 operate more efficiently by only retrieving requested attributes.
541 stat and tail now know about the "binderfs", "dma-buf-fs", "erofs",
542 "ppc-cmm-fs", and "z3fold" file systems.
543 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
547 gzip-compressed tarballs are distributed once again
550 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.31 (2019-03-10) [stable]
554 'base64 a b' now correctly diagnoses 'b' as the extra operand, not 'a'.
555 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
557 When B already exists, 'cp -il A B' no longer immediately fails
558 after asking the user whether to proceed.
559 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
561 df no longer corrupts displayed multibyte characters on macOS.
562 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.18]
564 seq no longer outputs inconsistent decimal point characters
565 for the last number, when locales are misconfigured.
566 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
568 shred, sort, and split no longer falsely report ftruncate errors
569 when outputting to less-common file types. For example, the shell
570 command 'sort /dev/null -o /dev/stdout | cat' no longer fails with
571 an "error truncating" diagnostic.
572 [bug was introduced with coreutils-8.18 for sort and split, and
573 (for shared memory objects only) with fileutils-4.1 for shred]
575 sync no longer fails for write-only file arguments.
576 [bug introduced with argument support to sync in coreutils-8.24]
578 'tail -f file | filter' no longer exits immediately on AIX.
579 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
581 'tail -f file | filter' no longer goes into an infinite loop
582 if filter exits and SIGPIPE is ignored.
583 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
585 ** Changes in behavior
587 cksum, dd, hostid, hostname, link, logname, sleep, tsort, unlink,
588 uptime, users, whoami, yes: now always process --help and --version options,
589 regardless of any other arguments present before any optional '--'
590 end-of-options marker.
592 nohup now processes --help and --version as first options even if other
595 'yes a -- b' now outputs 'a b' instead of including the end-of-options
596 marker as before: 'a -- b'.
598 echo now always processes backslash escapes when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
599 environment variable is set.
601 When possible 'ln A B' now merely links A to B and reports an error
602 if this fails, instead of statting A and B before linking. This
603 uses fewer system calls and avoids some races. The old statting
604 approach is still used in situations where hard links to directories
605 are allowed (e.g., NetBSD when superuser).
607 ls --group-directories-first will also group symlinks to directories.
609 'test -a FILE' is not supported anymore. Long ago, there were concerns about
610 the high probability of humans confusing the -a primary with the -a binary
611 operator, so POSIX changed this to 'test -e FILE'. Scripts using it were
612 already broken and non-portable; the -a unary operator was never documented.
614 wc now treats non breaking space characters as word delimiters
615 unless the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set.
619 id now supports specifying multiple users.
621 'date' now supports the '+' conversion specification flag,
622 introduced in POSIX.1-2017.
624 printf, seq, sleep, tail, and timeout now accept floating point
625 numbers in either the current or the C locale. For example, if the
626 current locale's decimal point is ',', 'sleep 0,1' and 'sleep 0.1'
627 now mean the same thing. Previously, these commands accepted only
628 C-locale syntax with '.' as the decimal point. The new behavior is
629 more compatible with other implementations in non-C locales.
631 test now supports the '-N FILE' unary operator (like e.g. bash) to check
632 whether FILE exists and has been modified since it was last read.
634 env now supports '--default-signal[=SIG]', '--ignore-signal[=SIG]', and
635 '--block-signal[=SIG], to setup signal handling before executing a program.
637 env now supports '--list-signal-handling' to indicate non-default
638 signal handling before executing a program.
642 basenc is added to complement existing base64,base32 commands,
643 and encodes and decodes printable text using various common encodings:
644 base64,base64url,base32,base32hex,base16,base2,z85.
648 ls -l now better aligns abbreviated months containing digits,
649 which is common in Asian locales.
651 stat and tail now know about the "sdcardfs" file system on Android.
652 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
654 stat now prints file creation time when supported by the file system,
655 on GNU Linux systems with glibc >= 2.28 and kernel >= 4.11.
658 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.30 (2018-07-01) [stable]
662 'cp --symlink SRC DST' will again correctly validate DST.
663 If DST is a regular file and SRC is a symlink to DST,
664 then cp will no longer allow that operation to clobber DST.
665 Also with -d, if DST is a symlink, then it can always be replaced,
666 even if it points to SRC on a separate device.
667 [bugs introduced with coreutils-8.27]
669 'cp -n -u' and 'mv -n -u' now consistently ignore the -u option.
670 Previously, this option combination suffered from race conditions
671 that caused -u to sometimes override -n.
672 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
674 'cp -a --no-preserve=mode' now sets appropriate default permissions
675 for non regular files like fifos and character device nodes etc.,
676 and leaves mode bits of existing files unchanged.
677 Previously it would have set executable bits on created special files,
678 and set mode bits for existing files as if they had been created.
679 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.20]
681 'cp --remove-destination file symlink' now removes the symlink
682 even if it can't be traversed.
683 [bug introduced with --remove-destination in fileutils-4.1.1]
685 ls no longer truncates the abbreviated month names that have a
686 display width between 6 and 12 inclusive. Previously this would have
687 output ambiguous months for Arabic or Catalan locales.
689 'ls -aA' is now equivalent to 'ls -A', since -A now overrides -a.
690 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
692 'mv -n A B' no longer suffers from a race condition that can
693 overwrite a simultaneously-created B. This bug fix requires
694 platform support for the renameat2 or renameatx_np syscalls, found
695 in recent Linux and macOS kernels. As a side effect, 'mv -n A A'
696 now silently does nothing if A exists.
697 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
699 ** Changes in behavior
701 'cp --force file symlink' now removes the symlink even if
702 it is self referential.
704 ls --color now matches file extensions case insensitively.
708 cp --reflink now supports --reflink=never to enforce a standard copy.
710 env supports a new -v/--debug option to show verbose information about
711 each processing step.
713 env supports a new -S/--split-string=S option to split a single argument
714 string into multiple arguments. Used to pass multiple arguments in scripts
717 md5sum accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output lines with a
718 NUL instead of a newline character. This also disables file name escaping.
719 This also applies to sha*sum and b2sum.
721 rm --preserve-root now supports the --preserve-root=all option to
722 reject any command line argument that is mounted to a separate file system.
726 cut supports line lengths up to the max file size on 32 bit systems.
727 Previously only offsets up to SIZE_MAX-1 were supported.
729 stat and tail now know about the "exfs" file system, which is a
730 version of XFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type,
731 and tail -f uses inotify.
733 wc avoids redundant processing of ASCII text in multibyte locales,
734 which is especially significant on macOS.
737 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.29 (2017-12-27) [stable]
741 b2sum no longer crashes when processing certain truncated check files.
742 [bug introduced with b2sum coreutils-8.26]
744 dd now ensures the correct cache ranges are specified for the "nocache"
745 and "direct" flags. Previously some pages in the page cache were not
746 invalidated. [bug introduced for "direct" in coreutils-7.5,
747 and with the "nocache" implementation in coreutils-8.11]
749 df no longer hangs when given a fifo argument.
750 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
752 ptx -S no longer infloops for a pattern which returns zero-length matches.
753 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
755 shred --remove will again repeatedly rename files with shortening names
756 to attempt to hide the original length of the file name.
757 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
759 stty no longer crashes when processing settings with -F also specified.
760 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
762 tail --bytes again supports non seekable inputs on all systems.
763 On systems like android it always tried to process as seekable inputs.
764 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
766 timeout will again notice its managed command exiting, even when
767 invoked with blocked CHLD signal, or in a narrow window where
768 this CHLD signal from the exiting child was missed. In each case
769 timeout would have then waited for the time limit to expire.
770 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
774 timeout now supports the --verbose option to diagnose forced termination.
778 dd now supports iflag=direct with arbitrary sized files on all file systems.
780 tail --bytes=NUM will efficiently seek to the end of block devices,
781 rather than reading from the start.
783 Utilities which do not support long options (other than the default --help
784 and --version), e.g. cksum and sleep, now use more consistent error diagnostic
785 for unknown long options.
789 Default man pages are now distributed which are used if perl is
790 not available on the build system, or when cross compiling.
793 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.28 (2017-09-01) [stable]
797 cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
798 Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
799 mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
800 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
802 When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
803 races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances. Since
804 the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
805 later, the races are still present on other platforms.
806 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
808 cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
809 backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
810 E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
811 now fails instead of losing the data.
812 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
814 cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
815 For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix='' are now no-ops.
816 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
818 date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
819 user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
820 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
822 dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
823 consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
824 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
826 df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
827 specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
828 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
830 df no longer interacts with dummy file system types, so for example
831 no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounted via system.automount(5).
832 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
834 `groups inva:lid root` no longer exits immediately upon failure.
835 Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
836 [bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]
838 kill now converts from number to signal name correctly on AIX.
839 Previously it would have always returned the 'EXIT' name.
840 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
842 ls now quotes symlink targets consistently. Previously it may not
843 have quoted the target name if the link name itself didn't need quoting.
844 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
846 split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
847 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
849 md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
850 ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
851 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
853 tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
854 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
856 tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
857 Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
858 or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
859 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
861 tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
862 non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
863 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
865 uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
866 as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
867 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
869 expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
870 number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.
874 expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
875 by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
876 useful for visualizing diff output for example.
878 ls supports a new --hyperlink[=when] option to output file://
879 format links to files, supported by some terminals.
881 split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
882 lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
884 env now has a --chdir (-C) option to change the working directory before
885 executing the subsidiary program.
887 expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.
889 ** Changes in behavior
891 tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped and the reader of
892 the pipe terminates. That allows `tail -f file | grep -q foo` to return
893 responsively, but does make `tail -f file | :` exit immediately without
894 waiting for data. Instead one should now `tail -f file | grep -q .`
898 mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
900 stat -f -c %l, used to output the max file name length on a file system,
901 is now supported on FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
903 tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
904 when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
905 is effective in this case.
908 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
912 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
913 as appropriate for the -a, --preseve=context, or -Z options.
914 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
916 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
917 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
918 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
920 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
921 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
922 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
924 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
925 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
926 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
928 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
929 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
930 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
932 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
933 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
934 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
935 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
936 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
938 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
939 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
940 depending on the size of the first file processed.
941 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
945 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
946 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
947 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
948 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
950 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
951 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
952 time zone is indeterminate.
954 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
955 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
956 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
957 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
959 stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
960 to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
961 file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
963 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
964 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
966 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
967 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
968 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
972 expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
973 after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
974 specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
977 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
981 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
982 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
985 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
986 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
987 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
989 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
990 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
991 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
992 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
993 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
995 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
996 System V style platforms where this information is available only
997 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
999 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
1000 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1002 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
1003 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
1004 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1006 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
1007 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
1008 defaults to a different SELinux context.
1010 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
1011 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1013 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
1014 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
1015 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
1017 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
1018 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1020 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
1021 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
1022 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
1024 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
1026 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
1027 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1029 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
1030 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
1032 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
1033 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1035 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
1036 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1038 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
1039 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
1040 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
1041 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1043 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
1044 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
1045 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1047 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
1048 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
1049 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
1051 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
1052 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
1053 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1055 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
1056 only doing so if --retry is specified.
1057 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1059 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
1060 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1062 ** Changes in behavior
1064 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
1066 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
1067 values for any argument.
1069 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
1070 they are out of localtime range.
1072 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
1073 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
1074 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
1075 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
1079 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
1080 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
1081 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
1083 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
1084 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
1086 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
1087 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
1089 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
1091 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
1092 written to a terminal.
1094 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
1095 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
1097 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
1098 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
1099 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
1100 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
1101 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
1102 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
1103 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
1104 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
1105 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
1106 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
1107 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
1109 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
1110 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
1114 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
1115 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
1119 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
1121 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
1122 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
1124 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
1127 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
1131 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
1132 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
1133 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
1134 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1136 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
1137 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1139 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
1140 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
1141 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
1143 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
1144 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1146 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
1147 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
1148 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1150 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
1151 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1153 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
1154 that specify an offset for the first field.
1155 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
1157 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
1158 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1162 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
1163 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
1167 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
1168 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
1170 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
1171 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
1172 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
1173 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
1174 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
1176 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
1177 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
1178 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1180 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
1181 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
1182 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
1184 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
1185 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
1187 ** Changes in behavior
1189 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
1190 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
1192 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
1193 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
1195 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
1196 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
1198 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
1199 when outputting to a terminal.
1201 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
1205 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
1206 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
1208 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
1209 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
1211 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
1212 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
1213 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1215 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
1216 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
1218 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
1219 upon detection of a directory cycle.
1220 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1222 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
1224 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
1225 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
1226 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
1228 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
1229 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
1232 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
1236 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
1237 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
1239 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
1240 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1242 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
1243 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1244 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
1246 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
1247 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
1248 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
1249 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
1251 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
1252 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
1253 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
1254 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
1256 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
1257 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1259 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
1260 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
1262 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
1263 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
1264 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
1266 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
1267 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
1268 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1270 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
1271 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
1272 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1274 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
1275 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
1276 character at the 4GiB position.
1277 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1279 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
1280 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1282 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
1283 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1285 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
1286 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
1287 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1289 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
1290 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1292 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
1293 replaced before inotify watches were created.
1294 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1296 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
1297 [bug introduced in the beginning]
1299 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
1300 when those files are being created or renamed.
1301 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1305 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
1306 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
1307 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
1308 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
1310 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
1311 on stderr approximately every second.
1313 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
1314 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
1316 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
1317 other than the default newline character.
1319 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
1320 a useful setting with high latency links.
1322 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
1323 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
1325 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
1326 and output errors in general.
1328 ** Changes in behavior
1330 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
1331 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
1332 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
1333 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1335 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
1336 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
1337 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
1338 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
1339 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
1341 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
1342 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
1344 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
1346 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
1347 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
1349 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
1350 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
1354 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
1355 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
1357 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
1358 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
1360 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
1361 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
1363 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1364 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
1366 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
1368 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
1369 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
1370 documentation are provided.
1373 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
1377 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
1378 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1380 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
1381 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
1382 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
1383 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1385 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
1386 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
1387 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
1388 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1390 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
1391 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
1393 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
1394 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
1396 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
1397 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
1398 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
1399 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
1400 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
1401 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
1402 values are in octal.
1415 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1417 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
1418 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
1419 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
1420 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
1421 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
1422 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1424 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
1425 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
1426 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
1427 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1429 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
1430 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1431 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1433 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
1434 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
1435 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
1436 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
1438 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
1439 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
1440 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1442 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
1443 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
1444 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1446 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
1447 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
1448 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
1449 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
1450 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1452 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
1453 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
1454 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1456 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
1457 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
1459 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
1460 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
1461 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1463 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
1464 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1466 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
1467 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1469 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
1470 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
1472 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
1473 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
1475 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
1476 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
1477 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1479 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
1480 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1484 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
1485 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
1487 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
1488 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
1489 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
1490 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
1491 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
1492 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
1493 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
1494 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
1495 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
1496 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
1497 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
1498 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
1499 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
1500 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
1501 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
1502 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
1503 it suitable for embedded system.
1505 ** Changes in behavior
1507 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
1508 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
1510 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
1511 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
1513 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
1514 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
1515 will result in the delayed output of lines.
1517 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
1518 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
1519 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
1523 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
1524 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
1525 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
1527 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
1529 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
1530 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
1531 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
1533 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
1534 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
1535 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
1536 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
1538 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
1539 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
1541 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
1542 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
1543 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1546 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
1550 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
1551 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
1552 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1554 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
1555 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
1556 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
1557 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1559 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
1560 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
1561 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1563 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
1564 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
1566 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1568 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
1569 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
1570 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
1572 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
1573 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
1574 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1576 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
1577 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
1578 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
1579 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1581 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
1582 from the source, when copying across file systems.
1583 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1585 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
1586 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
1587 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1589 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
1590 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1592 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
1593 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
1594 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
1595 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1597 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
1598 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
1599 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1601 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
1602 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
1603 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1607 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
1608 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
1609 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
1611 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
1612 used to identify the split points.
1614 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
1615 command line argument through to the output.
1617 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
1620 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
1621 a NUL instead of a white space character.
1623 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
1624 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
1626 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
1628 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
1629 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
1630 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1632 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
1633 unique groups with empty lines.
1635 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
1636 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
1638 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
1641 ** Changes in behavior
1643 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
1644 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
1645 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
1646 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
1648 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
1649 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
1651 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
1652 not just the transfer counts.
1654 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
1656 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
1657 as per the documented interface.
1661 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
1663 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
1664 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
1665 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
1666 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1668 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
1669 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
1670 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
1671 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1673 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
1674 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
1675 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
1677 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
1678 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
1680 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
1681 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
1683 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
1687 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1690 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
1694 numfmt: reformat numbers
1698 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
1699 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
1700 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
1702 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
1703 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
1704 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
1706 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
1707 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
1711 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
1712 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1714 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
1715 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
1716 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1718 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
1719 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
1720 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1722 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
1723 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
1724 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1726 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
1727 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
1728 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
1730 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
1731 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
1732 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
1734 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
1735 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1737 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
1738 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
1740 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
1741 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
1742 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1744 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
1745 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
1746 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1748 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
1749 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
1750 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1752 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
1753 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
1754 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
1755 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1757 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
1758 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
1759 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1761 ** Changes in behavior
1763 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
1764 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
1765 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
1766 'total' in the target column.
1768 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
1769 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
1770 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
1772 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
1773 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
1775 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
1776 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
1780 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
1781 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1783 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1784 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
1786 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
1790 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
1791 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
1792 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
1793 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
1794 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
1795 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
1796 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
1797 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
1798 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
1799 for a patched distribution package.
1801 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
1802 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1804 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
1805 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
1806 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
1807 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1810 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
1814 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
1816 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
1817 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
1818 sha384sum and sha512sum.
1822 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
1823 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
1824 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
1825 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
1826 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
1828 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
1829 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
1831 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
1832 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
1833 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
1834 eventually exits nonzero.
1836 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
1837 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
1838 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
1839 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
1840 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
1842 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
1843 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
1844 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
1846 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
1847 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
1848 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
1850 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
1851 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
1852 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1854 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
1855 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
1856 Before, this would infloop:
1857 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
1858 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1860 ** Changes in behavior
1862 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
1866 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
1867 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
1868 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
1869 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
1870 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
1873 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
1874 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
1875 format-changing options.
1877 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
1878 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
1879 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
1880 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
1881 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
1885 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
1886 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
1887 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
1888 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
1889 are run without following the instructions in README.
1891 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
1892 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
1893 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
1894 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
1895 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
1896 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
1897 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
1900 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
1904 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
1905 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
1906 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
1907 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1909 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
1910 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
1911 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
1912 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1914 sort -u could read freed memory.
1915 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
1916 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
1917 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1921 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
1922 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
1923 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
1924 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
1927 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
1931 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1932 processes will not intersperse their output.
1933 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1935 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
1936 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
1937 date: invalid date '\260'
1938 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1940 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
1941 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
1942 lines output by df, can work reliably.
1943 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1945 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
1946 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
1947 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
1949 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
1950 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
1951 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
1952 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
1953 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
1954 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1956 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
1957 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
1959 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
1960 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1962 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
1963 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
1964 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
1966 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
1967 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1968 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
1972 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
1974 ** Changes in behavior
1976 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
1977 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
1978 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
1979 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
1980 have any reason to include it here.
1984 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
1985 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
1986 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
1988 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
1989 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
1990 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
1993 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
1997 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
1998 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
1999 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
2000 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
2001 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
2002 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2004 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
2005 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
2006 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
2007 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
2008 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
2009 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
2010 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2012 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
2013 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2015 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
2016 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
2020 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
2021 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
2023 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
2025 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
2027 ** Changes in behavior
2029 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
2030 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
2031 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
2033 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
2034 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
2037 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
2041 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
2042 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
2043 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
2044 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
2045 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
2046 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
2047 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
2048 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
2050 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
2051 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
2052 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
2053 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
2054 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
2056 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
2057 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
2059 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
2060 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
2062 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
2063 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
2065 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
2066 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
2068 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
2069 additional static suffix to output file names.
2071 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
2072 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
2073 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2075 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
2076 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2080 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
2081 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
2082 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
2084 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
2085 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
2086 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
2087 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
2088 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
2089 typically still point to one of the hard links.
2091 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
2092 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
2093 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
2094 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
2095 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
2097 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
2098 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
2099 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
2100 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
2104 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
2105 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
2106 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
2108 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
2109 instead of causing a usage failure.
2111 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
2114 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
2118 realpath: print resolved file names.
2122 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
2123 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2125 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
2126 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
2128 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
2129 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
2130 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
2131 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
2132 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
2133 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
2135 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
2136 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
2137 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
2139 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
2140 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
2141 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
2143 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
2144 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
2145 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
2146 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
2147 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
2149 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
2151 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
2152 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2154 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
2155 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2156 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
2158 ** Changes in behavior
2160 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
2161 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
2162 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
2163 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
2164 usually-short referent instead.
2166 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
2167 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
2168 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
2169 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
2172 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
2176 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
2177 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
2178 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2180 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
2181 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
2183 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
2184 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2188 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
2189 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2191 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
2192 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
2193 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
2194 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
2196 ** Changes in behavior
2198 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
2199 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
2200 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
2204 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
2205 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
2206 only .tar.xz files is enough.
2209 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
2213 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
2214 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
2215 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
2217 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
2218 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2220 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
2221 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
2222 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
2223 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
2224 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2226 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
2227 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
2228 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
2229 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
2230 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
2231 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
2232 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
2233 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
2235 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
2236 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
2238 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
2239 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
2241 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
2242 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2244 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
2245 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
2246 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2248 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
2249 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
2250 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
2251 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2253 ** Changes in behavior
2255 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
2256 when -v or -c specified.
2258 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
2259 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
2263 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
2264 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
2265 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
2266 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
2267 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
2269 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
2270 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
2271 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2273 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
2274 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
2275 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
2276 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
2277 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
2278 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
2279 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
2281 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
2282 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
2283 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
2287 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
2288 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
2290 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
2293 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
2294 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
2296 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
2297 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
2299 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
2300 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
2302 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
2304 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
2308 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
2309 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
2311 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
2314 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
2318 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
2319 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2321 ** Changes in behavior
2323 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
2324 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
2325 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
2326 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
2327 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
2328 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
2329 resolved for 2.6.39.
2330 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
2331 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
2332 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
2336 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
2339 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
2343 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
2344 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
2345 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2347 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
2348 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
2349 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2351 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
2352 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
2353 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2355 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
2356 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2358 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
2359 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2361 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
2362 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2364 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
2365 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2369 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
2370 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
2371 processed portion thereof.
2373 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
2374 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
2376 ** Changes in behavior
2378 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2379 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
2380 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2382 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2383 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
2384 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
2386 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
2387 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
2389 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
2390 Use --preserve-context instead.
2392 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
2395 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
2399 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
2400 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
2401 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
2402 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
2403 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2405 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
2406 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2408 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
2409 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
2410 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
2412 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
2413 reject file names invalid for that file system.
2415 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
2416 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2420 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
2421 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
2422 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
2423 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
2424 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
2425 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
2426 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
2427 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
2429 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
2430 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
2431 the same number of fields are output for each line.
2433 ** Changes in behavior
2435 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
2436 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
2437 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
2440 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
2444 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
2445 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
2446 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2449 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
2453 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
2454 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
2456 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
2457 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
2459 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
2460 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2462 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
2463 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
2464 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
2465 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2467 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
2468 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2470 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
2471 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
2472 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
2474 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
2476 ** Changes in behavior
2478 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
2479 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
2480 to the number of available processors.
2484 split accepts the --number/-n option to generate a specific number of
2485 files, as well as the --elide-empty-files/-e and --unbuffered/-u
2486 options to fine-tune the resulting output.
2489 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
2493 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
2494 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
2495 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
2496 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
2498 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
2499 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
2500 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
2502 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
2503 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2505 ** Changes in behavior
2507 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
2508 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
2510 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
2511 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
2512 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
2513 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
2514 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
2515 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
2517 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
2518 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
2519 the same way as the others.
2521 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
2522 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
2525 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
2529 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
2530 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
2531 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
2533 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
2534 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
2536 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
2537 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
2538 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
2540 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
2541 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
2543 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
2544 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
2546 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
2547 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
2548 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2550 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
2551 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
2552 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
2553 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
2557 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
2558 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
2560 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
2563 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
2564 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
2566 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
2568 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
2569 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
2570 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
2572 ** Changes in behavior
2574 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
2575 rather than its aliased target.
2577 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
2578 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
2579 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
2581 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
2582 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
2583 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
2584 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
2585 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
2586 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
2587 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
2588 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
2590 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
2592 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
2594 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
2595 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
2598 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
2599 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
2600 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
2601 control like taskset for example.
2603 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
2605 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
2606 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
2607 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
2608 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
2609 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
2610 includes %C when context information is available.
2612 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
2613 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
2614 rather than a file system attribute.
2616 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
2617 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
2618 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
2619 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
2621 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
2622 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
2623 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
2625 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
2626 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
2627 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
2630 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
2634 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
2635 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
2637 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
2639 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
2640 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2642 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
2643 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
2644 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
2645 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
2647 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
2648 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
2649 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2653 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
2654 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
2656 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
2657 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
2658 duration after the initial signal was sent.
2660 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
2661 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
2662 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
2663 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
2664 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
2665 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
2666 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
2667 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
2668 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
2670 ** Changes in behavior
2672 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
2673 sequence when it would be a no-op.
2675 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
2676 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
2679 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
2683 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
2684 of available processors, which may not have been the case
2685 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
2686 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2690 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
2691 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
2693 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
2694 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
2695 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
2696 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
2698 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
2699 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
2700 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
2703 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
2707 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
2708 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
2709 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
2711 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
2712 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
2713 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2715 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
2716 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2718 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
2719 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2720 a command of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
2721 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2723 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
2724 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
2725 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2727 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
2728 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
2729 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
2730 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2732 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
2733 renamed-aside and then recreated.
2734 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2736 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
2737 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
2738 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
2739 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2741 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
2742 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
2743 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2745 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
2746 processes will not intersperse their output.
2747 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
2750 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
2754 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
2755 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2757 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
2758 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2760 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
2761 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2762 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
2763 the presence of the empty string argument.
2764 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2766 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2767 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
2768 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
2769 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2771 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
2772 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2774 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2775 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
2776 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2778 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
2779 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
2780 and with a malicious user on the same system
2781 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
2782 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
2785 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
2789 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
2790 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
2791 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2793 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
2794 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
2795 offending directory and all "contents."
2797 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
2798 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
2799 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
2801 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
2802 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
2803 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2805 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2806 processes will not intersperse their output.
2807 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2808 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2810 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
2811 output the name of the file to stdout.
2812 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2814 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
2815 call fails with errno == EACCES.
2816 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2818 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
2819 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
2822 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
2823 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
2824 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
2826 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
2827 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
2828 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
2829 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
2830 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
2831 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2833 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
2834 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
2835 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
2836 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
2838 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
2839 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
2841 ** Changes in behavior
2843 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
2844 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
2845 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
2846 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
2847 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
2849 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
2850 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
2851 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
2852 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
2854 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
2856 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
2857 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
2858 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
2859 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
2860 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
2864 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
2868 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
2869 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
2871 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
2872 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2874 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
2875 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
2876 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
2878 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
2879 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
2882 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
2886 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
2887 when the source file doesn't have write access.
2888 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2890 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
2891 to accommodate leap seconds.
2892 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2894 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
2895 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
2896 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2898 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
2900 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
2901 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
2902 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
2904 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
2905 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
2906 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
2907 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
2908 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
2912 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
2913 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
2914 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
2915 directory or a symlink to a directory.
2917 ** Changes in behavior
2919 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
2920 environment variable is set.
2922 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
2923 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
2924 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
2928 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
2929 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
2930 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
2931 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
2933 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
2934 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
2935 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
2936 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
2940 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
2941 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
2942 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
2944 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
2945 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
2946 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
2947 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
2948 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
2949 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
2950 another improvement:
2952 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
2953 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
2956 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
2960 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
2961 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
2962 and libraries tested at configure time.
2963 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2965 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
2966 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2968 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
2969 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2971 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
2972 printing a summary to stderr.
2973 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2975 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
2976 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
2977 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
2979 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
2980 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
2982 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
2983 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
2984 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
2985 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2987 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
2988 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
2989 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
2990 which is relatively unusual.
2991 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2993 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
2994 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
2995 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
2996 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
2997 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
2998 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
2999 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3003 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
3004 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
3005 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
3006 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
3007 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
3011 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
3012 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
3014 ** Changes in behavior
3016 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3017 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3018 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
3019 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
3020 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
3023 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
3027 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
3028 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
3030 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
3031 before data copying has started.
3033 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
3034 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3036 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
3037 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
3038 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
3039 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3041 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
3042 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
3043 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
3044 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
3046 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
3051 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
3052 for its standard streams.
3054 ** Changes in behavior
3056 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
3057 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
3058 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
3059 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
3060 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
3061 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
3063 ** Deprecated options
3065 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
3066 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
3070 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
3072 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
3073 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
3074 a btrfs file system.
3076 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
3078 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
3079 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
3081 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
3082 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
3085 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
3089 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
3090 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
3091 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
3092 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
3094 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
3095 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
3096 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
3097 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
3098 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
3103 make check: two tests have been corrected
3107 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
3108 inherited from gnulib.
3111 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
3115 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
3116 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
3117 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
3118 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
3120 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
3121 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
3123 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
3125 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
3126 systems without xattr support.
3128 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
3129 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
3130 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
3132 ** Changes in behavior
3134 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
3135 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
3136 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
3137 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
3139 ** Improved robustness
3141 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
3142 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
3143 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
3144 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
3145 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
3146 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
3147 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
3148 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
3149 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3153 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
3154 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
3156 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
3157 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
3158 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
3159 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3160 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3163 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
3167 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
3168 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
3169 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
3173 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
3174 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
3175 data was read, or on process exit.
3176 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3178 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
3179 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
3180 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
3181 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3183 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
3184 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
3185 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
3186 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3188 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
3189 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
3191 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
3192 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3194 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
3195 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
3196 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
3198 ** Changes in behavior
3200 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
3201 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
3202 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
3204 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
3205 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
3207 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
3208 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
3209 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
3212 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
3216 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
3218 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
3219 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
3220 install: Never copies xattrs
3222 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
3223 from overwriting any existing destination file
3225 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
3226 mode where this feature is available.
3228 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
3229 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
3230 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
3231 do not modify the destination at all.
3233 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
3235 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
3239 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
3240 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
3242 cp uses much less memory in some situations
3244 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
3245 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
3247 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
3248 processing the first file name
3250 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
3251 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
3252 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
3253 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3255 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
3256 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
3258 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
3259 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
3262 ** Changes in behavior
3264 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
3265 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
3267 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
3268 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
3269 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
3271 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
3272 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
3274 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
3276 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
3277 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
3278 is still marked with a '+'.
3281 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
3285 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
3286 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
3290 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
3291 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
3292 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
3293 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
3294 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
3295 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
3297 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3298 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3300 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
3301 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
3303 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
3305 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
3306 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
3307 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
3309 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
3310 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
3312 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
3313 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
3314 used to factor large numbers.
3316 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
3319 ls now colors names of files with capabilities if libcap is available.
3321 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
3323 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
3324 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
3326 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
3327 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
3328 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
3329 maximum command-line (argv) length.
3331 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
3332 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
3333 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
3335 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
3336 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
3340 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
3342 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
3343 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
3345 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
3346 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
3348 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
3350 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
3351 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
3355 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
3356 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
3357 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
3359 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
3361 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
3362 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
3363 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
3365 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
3366 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
3367 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
3369 ** Changes in behavior
3371 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
3372 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
3375 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
3379 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
3380 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
3381 'futimens' system calls.
3385 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
3387 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
3388 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
3389 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
3391 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
3392 with no USERNAME argument.
3394 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
3395 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
3396 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
3398 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
3399 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
3400 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
3401 number of fields for some inputs.
3403 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
3404 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
3406 ** Changes in behavior
3408 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
3409 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
3412 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
3416 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
3418 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
3419 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
3420 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
3421 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3423 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
3424 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
3426 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
3427 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
3429 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
3430 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
3432 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
3433 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
3434 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3435 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3437 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
3438 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
3439 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
3440 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
3441 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3442 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
3444 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
3445 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
3447 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
3448 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
3449 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
3451 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
3452 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3454 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
3455 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3457 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
3458 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
3459 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
3460 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
3462 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
3463 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
3465 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
3466 in more cases when a directory is empty.
3468 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
3469 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
3470 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3474 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3475 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3477 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
3478 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
3479 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
3480 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
3484 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
3485 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
3487 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
3489 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
3493 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
3494 which have negative errno values.
3498 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
3502 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
3506 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
3507 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
3510 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
3514 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
3515 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
3516 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3518 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
3519 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
3520 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
3521 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3525 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
3526 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
3527 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
3528 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
3531 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
3535 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
3537 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
3538 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
3539 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
3542 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
3546 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
3547 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
3549 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
3551 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
3553 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
3555 ** Programs no longer installed by default
3559 ** Changes in behavior
3561 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
3562 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
3564 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
3565 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
3567 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
3568 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
3569 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
3573 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
3574 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
3575 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
3576 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
3577 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
3578 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
3579 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
3580 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
3581 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
3582 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
3583 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
3585 The following commands and options now support the standard size
3586 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
3587 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
3590 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
3593 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
3594 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
3595 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
3597 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
3598 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
3599 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
3602 ** New build options
3604 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
3605 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
3606 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
3607 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
3609 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
3610 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
3611 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
3612 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
3613 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
3614 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
3615 of "make check" fail.
3617 ** Remove deprecated options
3619 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3620 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
3621 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3622 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
3623 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
3625 ** Improved robustness
3627 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
3628 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
3629 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
3630 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
3631 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
3632 loss of the contents of a/f.
3634 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
3635 in its 35-colon command-line argument
3639 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
3640 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
3641 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3643 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
3644 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
3645 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
3646 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3648 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
3649 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
3650 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
3651 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
3652 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
3653 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
3654 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
3655 destination is a symlink.
3657 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
3659 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
3660 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
3662 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
3663 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
3665 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
3667 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
3668 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
3670 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
3671 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
3673 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
3676 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
3677 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
3679 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
3680 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
3682 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
3683 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
3684 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
3685 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3687 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
3688 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
3689 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3691 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
3692 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
3693 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
3695 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
3696 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
3697 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
3698 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
3700 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
3701 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
3702 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
3704 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
3705 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
3707 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
3708 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
3710 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
3712 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
3713 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
3714 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
3716 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
3717 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
3719 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
3720 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
3722 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
3723 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
3725 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
3726 [present in the original version]
3729 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
3733 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
3735 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
3736 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
3737 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
3739 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
3740 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
3742 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
3746 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
3747 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
3749 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
3750 support but with insufficient /proc support.
3752 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
3753 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
3755 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
3756 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
3757 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
3758 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
3759 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
3760 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
3762 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
3763 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
3766 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
3767 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
3769 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
3772 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
3773 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
3774 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
3776 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
3777 directory is unreadable.
3779 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
3780 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
3781 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
3783 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
3784 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
3785 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
3786 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
3787 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
3790 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
3791 Before it would print nothing.
3793 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
3795 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
3796 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
3797 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
3798 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
3799 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
3800 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
3801 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
3802 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
3804 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
3808 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
3809 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
3810 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
3812 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
3813 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
3814 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
3815 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
3818 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
3822 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
3823 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
3824 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
3825 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
3826 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
3827 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
3828 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3830 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
3831 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
3832 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
3833 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
3834 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
3835 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
3836 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
3837 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3839 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
3840 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
3841 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
3844 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
3848 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
3849 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
3851 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
3852 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
3853 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
3855 ** Improved robustness
3857 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
3858 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
3859 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
3862 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
3866 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
3867 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
3868 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
3869 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
3870 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3872 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
3876 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
3879 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
3883 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
3884 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
3885 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
3886 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3888 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
3889 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
3891 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
3892 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
3893 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
3896 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
3898 ** Improved robustness
3900 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
3901 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
3903 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
3904 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
3905 or NFS-mounted partition.
3907 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
3908 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
3912 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
3913 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
3914 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
3915 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
3916 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
3917 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
3919 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
3920 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
3922 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
3923 or neglect to report file removal.
3925 For the "groups" command:
3927 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
3928 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
3930 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
3932 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
3934 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
3938 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
3939 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
3942 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
3944 ** Changes in behavior
3946 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
3947 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
3948 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
3949 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
3951 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
3952 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
3953 a final './' or '../' component.
3955 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
3956 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
3957 this only for pipes.
3959 ** Infrastructure changes
3961 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
3962 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
3963 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
3964 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
3968 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
3969 name is "." or "..".
3971 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
3972 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
3973 dirent.d_type support.
3975 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
3976 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
3978 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
3979 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
3980 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
3981 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
3984 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
3986 ** Changes in behavior
3988 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
3992 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
3993 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
3997 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
3998 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
3999 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
4001 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
4002 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4004 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
4005 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4007 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
4009 ** Improved robustness
4011 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
4012 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
4013 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
4015 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
4016 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
4019 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
4020 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
4022 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
4023 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
4025 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
4026 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
4028 ** Changes in behavior
4030 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
4031 where the two are distinct.
4033 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
4034 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
4035 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
4036 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
4037 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
4038 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
4039 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
4040 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
4041 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
4042 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
4043 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
4044 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
4045 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
4046 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
4047 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
4048 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
4049 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
4051 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
4052 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
4053 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
4055 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
4056 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
4057 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
4058 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
4061 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
4062 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
4066 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
4067 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
4068 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
4069 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
4071 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
4072 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
4073 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
4075 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
4076 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
4077 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
4078 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
4079 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
4082 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
4083 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
4085 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
4086 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
4087 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
4088 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
4090 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
4091 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
4092 successful and the output is easier to parse.
4094 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
4095 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
4096 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
4097 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
4099 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
4100 and sticky) with the -m option.
4102 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
4103 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
4104 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
4105 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
4106 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
4108 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
4109 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
4111 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
4115 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
4116 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
4117 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
4118 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
4120 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
4122 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
4124 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
4125 silently ignoring one of them.
4127 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
4128 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
4129 containing this change was 5.92.
4131 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
4132 automatically newline terminated.
4134 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
4135 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
4136 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
4137 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
4140 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
4141 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4142 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
4145 ** Scheduled for removal
4147 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
4148 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
4150 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
4151 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
4152 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
4153 command to unlink a directory.
4155 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
4156 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
4157 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
4158 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
4162 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
4163 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
4164 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
4165 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
4166 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
4167 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
4171 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
4172 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
4174 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
4176 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
4177 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
4178 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
4180 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
4181 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
4184 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
4185 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
4187 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
4188 list directories before files.
4190 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
4191 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
4192 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
4193 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
4196 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
4198 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
4200 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
4201 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
4202 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
4204 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4205 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4209 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
4210 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
4211 usually printing nothing.
4213 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
4215 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
4216 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
4217 them with hard-linked directories.
4219 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
4220 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
4221 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
4223 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
4224 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
4225 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
4227 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
4230 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
4231 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
4233 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
4234 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
4236 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
4237 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
4239 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
4240 all command-line arguments.
4242 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
4244 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
4246 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
4247 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
4249 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
4251 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
4252 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
4253 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
4254 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
4255 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
4257 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
4258 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
4260 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
4261 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
4262 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
4263 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
4265 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
4267 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
4271 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
4272 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
4274 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
4275 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
4277 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
4278 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
4280 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
4281 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
4283 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
4284 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
4286 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
4288 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
4289 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
4290 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
4293 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
4295 ** Build-related bug fixes
4297 installing .mo files would fail
4300 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
4304 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
4306 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
4309 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
4313 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
4314 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
4318 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
4320 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
4321 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
4323 ** Deprecated options
4325 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
4326 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
4328 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
4332 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
4334 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
4335 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
4336 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
4337 conforming to older POSIX versions.
4339 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
4342 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
4348 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
4353 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
4355 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
4357 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
4358 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
4359 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
4361 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
4362 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
4363 problematic usages. These include:
4365 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
4366 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
4367 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
4368 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
4369 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
4370 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
4371 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
4372 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
4373 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
4375 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
4376 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
4378 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
4379 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
4380 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
4381 Meeting <https://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
4383 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
4384 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
4385 between binary and text files.
4387 The following programs now always use text input/output:
4391 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
4395 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
4396 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
4398 head tac tail tee tr
4399 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
4401 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
4402 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
4404 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
4405 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
4406 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
4408 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
4410 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
4412 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
4413 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
4414 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
4418 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
4420 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
4421 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4423 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
4424 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
4425 blocks until F contains N blocks.
4429 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
4430 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
4434 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
4435 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
4436 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
4440 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
4441 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
4445 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
4447 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
4449 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
4453 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
4454 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
4455 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
4457 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
4458 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
4459 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6232>.
4460 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
4461 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6233>.
4463 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
4467 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
4468 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
4469 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
4471 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
4473 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
4474 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
4475 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
4476 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
4478 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
4480 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
4481 rather than silently wrapping around.
4483 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
4484 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
4486 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
4487 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
4489 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
4490 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
4491 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
4492 file /tmp/a/b/file".
4494 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
4496 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
4498 ** Improved robustness
4500 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
4501 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
4502 no matter how large the result.
4504 ** Improved portability
4506 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
4507 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
4509 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
4511 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
4512 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
4513 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
4515 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
4516 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
4520 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
4521 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
4523 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
4525 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
4526 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
4527 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
4528 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
4530 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
4531 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
4533 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
4534 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
4535 categories if not specified by dircolors.
4537 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
4539 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
4540 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
4542 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
4543 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
4545 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
4547 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
4548 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
4550 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
4551 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
4553 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
4554 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
4555 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
4557 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
4559 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
4561 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
4565 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
4567 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
4568 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
4569 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
4571 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
4572 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
4574 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
4575 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
4576 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
4578 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
4579 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
4581 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
4582 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
4583 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
4584 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
4586 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
4587 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
4589 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
4590 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
4591 the file system does not support it.
4593 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
4595 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
4596 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
4598 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
4600 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
4601 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
4603 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
4604 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
4605 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
4606 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
4608 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
4609 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
4612 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
4613 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
4614 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
4615 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
4617 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
4618 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
4619 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
4620 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
4622 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
4623 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
4625 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
4627 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
4628 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
4629 reporting incorrect results.
4633 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
4634 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
4636 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
4639 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
4641 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
4642 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
4644 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
4645 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
4647 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
4650 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
4651 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
4652 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
4653 the file name does not look like a page range.
4655 printf has several changes:
4657 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
4658 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
4660 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
4661 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
4662 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
4664 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
4665 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
4668 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
4669 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
4671 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
4672 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
4674 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
4676 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
4677 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
4679 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
4681 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
4683 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
4684 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
4685 when first encountering the directory.
4689 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
4690 output; POSIX requires this.
4692 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
4693 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
4695 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
4697 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
4698 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
4700 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
4701 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
4703 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
4704 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
4705 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
4706 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
4707 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
4708 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
4709 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
4711 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
4712 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
4713 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
4715 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
4716 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
4718 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
4720 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
4722 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
4723 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
4724 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
4725 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
4727 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
4731 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
4732 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
4733 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
4734 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
4735 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
4737 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
4738 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
4739 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
4741 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
4742 is longer than PATH_MAX.
4744 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
4745 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
4747 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
4748 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
4749 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
4750 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
4751 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
4753 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
4754 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
4756 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
4757 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
4759 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
4761 nocreat do not create the output file
4762 excl fail if the output file already exists
4763 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
4764 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
4766 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
4768 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
4769 direct use direct I/O for data
4770 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
4771 sync likewise, but also for metadata
4772 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
4773 nofollow do not follow symlinks
4774 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
4776 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
4778 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
4779 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
4782 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
4783 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
4784 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
4785 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
4786 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
4787 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
4789 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4790 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4792 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
4795 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
4797 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
4799 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
4800 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
4802 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
4803 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
4804 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
4806 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
4807 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
4808 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
4810 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
4812 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
4813 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
4815 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
4816 for compatibility with bash.
4818 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
4820 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
4821 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
4822 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
4823 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
4825 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
4826 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
4828 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
4829 ls supports TABSIZE.
4830 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
4831 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
4832 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
4834 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
4837 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
4839 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
4840 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
4841 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
4842 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
4843 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
4844 an offset, not as a file name.
4846 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
4847 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
4849 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
4850 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
4852 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
4853 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
4855 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
4856 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
4857 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
4859 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
4860 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
4862 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
4863 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
4867 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
4869 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
4871 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
4875 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
4876 or more arguments between partitions.
4878 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
4879 holes in the destination.
4881 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
4882 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
4883 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
4884 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
4885 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
4886 terminates immediately.
4888 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
4890 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
4892 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
4893 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
4894 not the empty string.
4896 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
4897 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
4901 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
4902 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
4903 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
4906 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
4913 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
4917 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
4918 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
4920 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
4921 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
4923 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
4924 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
4925 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
4928 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
4932 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
4933 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
4935 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
4936 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
4938 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
4939 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
4940 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
4942 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
4944 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
4947 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
4949 ** Configuration option
4951 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
4952 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
4956 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
4957 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
4961 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
4962 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
4963 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
4966 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
4967 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
4968 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
4969 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
4970 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
4971 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
4972 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4975 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
4979 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
4980 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
4981 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
4983 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
4984 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
4986 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
4988 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
4989 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
4990 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
4991 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
4993 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
4995 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
4996 not just the ones that reference directories
4998 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
4999 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
5001 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
5002 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
5003 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
5005 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
5006 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
5007 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
5008 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
5009 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
5010 ragged when a datum was too wide.
5012 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
5017 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
5018 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
5020 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
5022 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
5024 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
5026 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
5027 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
5029 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
5030 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
5032 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
5034 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
5038 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
5040 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
5042 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
5043 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
5044 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
5045 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
5046 resolution is the best we can do right now.
5048 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
5049 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
5051 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
5052 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
5054 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
5055 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
5057 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
5058 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
5059 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
5063 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
5064 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
5065 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
5066 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
5067 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
5068 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
5069 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
5070 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
5071 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
5072 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
5073 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
5074 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
5075 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
5076 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
5078 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
5080 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
5081 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
5083 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
5085 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
5087 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
5088 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
5090 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
5092 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
5093 without a trailing newline.
5095 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
5096 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
5098 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
5101 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
5105 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
5107 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
5109 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
5110 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
5111 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
5112 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
5114 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
5116 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
5117 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
5118 be printed without leading spaces.
5120 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
5121 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
5126 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
5127 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
5128 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
5130 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
5132 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
5133 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
5135 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
5136 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
5138 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
5139 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
5141 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
5143 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
5145 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
5147 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
5148 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
5150 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
5152 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5154 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
5155 byte offsets are specified.
5158 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
5161 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
5164 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
5165 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
5166 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
5167 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
5168 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
5169 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
5170 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
5171 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
5172 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
5173 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5174 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
5175 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
5176 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
5177 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
5178 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
5179 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
5180 directory where M has write access.
5181 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
5182 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
5183 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
5186 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
5187 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
5188 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
5189 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
5190 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
5191 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
5192 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
5193 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
5194 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
5195 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
5196 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
5197 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
5198 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
5199 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
5200 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
5201 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
5202 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
5203 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
5204 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
5205 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
5206 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
5207 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
5208 appeared one additional time.
5210 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5211 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
5212 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
5213 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
5216 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
5217 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
5218 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
5219 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
5220 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
5221 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
5222 if there were more than 338.
5224 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
5225 - false --help now exits nonzero
5228 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
5229 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
5230 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
5231 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
5234 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
5235 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
5236 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
5237 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
5238 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
5241 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
5242 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
5243 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
5244 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
5245 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
5246 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
5247 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5250 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
5251 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
5252 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
5253 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
5254 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
5255 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
5257 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5258 under certain unusual conditions
5259 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
5260 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
5263 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5264 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
5265 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
5266 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
5267 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
5268 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
5269 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
5270 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
5271 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
5272 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
5273 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
5274 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
5275 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
5276 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
5277 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
5278 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
5281 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
5282 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
5285 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
5286 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
5287 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
5288 involving hard-linked directories
5289 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
5290 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
5291 character-special and block files
5294 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
5295 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
5296 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
5297 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
5298 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
5299 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
5300 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
5301 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
5302 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
5304 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
5305 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
5306 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
5307 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
5308 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
5309 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
5310 specified on the command line.
5311 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
5312 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
5313 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
5314 the first file untouched.
5315 * readlink: new program
5316 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
5317 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
5318 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
5319 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
5320 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
5321 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
5324 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
5325 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
5326 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
5327 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
5328 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
5329 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
5330 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
5331 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
5332 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
5333 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
5334 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
5335 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
5337 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
5338 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
5339 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
5341 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
5342 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
5343 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
5344 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
5345 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
5346 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
5347 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
5348 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
5351 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
5352 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
5355 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
5356 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
5357 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
5358 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
5359 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
5360 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
5361 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
5364 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
5365 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
5367 ========================================================================
5368 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
5369 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5372 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
5374 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5375 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
5376 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
5377 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
5378 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
5379 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
5380 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
5381 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
5382 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
5383 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
5384 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
5385 The old options will continue to work for a while.
5387 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
5388 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
5389 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
5390 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
5392 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
5395 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
5397 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
5398 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
5399 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
5400 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
5401 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
5402 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
5403 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
5406 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
5407 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
5408 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
5409 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
5410 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
5411 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
5412 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
5413 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
5414 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
5415 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
5416 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
5417 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
5418 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
5419 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
5420 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
5421 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
5423 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
5424 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
5426 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
5427 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
5428 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
5429 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
5430 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
5431 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
5433 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
5434 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
5435 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
5436 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
5437 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
5438 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
5439 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
5441 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
5442 the source files in the following example:
5443 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
5444 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
5445 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
5446 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
5447 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
5448 links between source files with --preserve=links
5449 * cp accepts new options:
5450 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
5451 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
5452 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
5453 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
5454 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
5455 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
5456 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
5457 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
5458 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
5460 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
5461 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
5462 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
5463 even though it's older than dest.
5464 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
5465 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
5466 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
5467 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
5468 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
5470 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
5471 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
5472 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
5473 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
5474 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
5475 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
5476 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
5478 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
5479 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
5480 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
5482 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
5483 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
5484 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
5485 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
5486 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
5487 This is the default.
5489 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
5490 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
5491 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
5492 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
5493 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
5495 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
5498 ========================================================================
5499 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
5500 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5503 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
5504 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
5506 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5507 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
5508 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
5509 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
5510 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
5512 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
5513 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
5514 that specifies a non-directory
5517 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
5518 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
5519 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
5520 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
5521 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5522 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
5523 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
5524 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5525 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
5526 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
5527 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
5528 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
5529 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
5530 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
5531 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
5532 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
5533 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
5534 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
5535 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
5536 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
5537 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
5538 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
5539 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
5540 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
5542 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
5543 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
5544 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
5546 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
5548 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
5549 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
5551 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
5552 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
5553 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
5554 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
5555 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
5557 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
5558 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
5559 required support; from Bruno Haible.
5560 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
5561 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
5563 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
5565 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
5566 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
5567 * still more portability fixes
5568 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
5569 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5571 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
5573 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
5575 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
5577 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
5578 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
5579 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
5580 there is any time remaining
5581 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
5583 ========================================================================
5584 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5585 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
5587 This package began as the union of the following:
5588 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
5590 ========================================================================
5592 Copyright (C) 2001-2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5594 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
5595 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
5596 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
5597 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
5598 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
5599 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.