1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
8 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
9 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
11 df now processes symbolic links to disk device nodes correctly. Previously
12 df displayed the symlink's device rather than that for the device node.
13 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
15 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
16 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
17 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
19 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
20 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
22 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
24 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
25 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
26 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
28 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
29 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
30 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
32 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
33 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
34 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
35 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
37 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
38 from the source, when copying across file systems.
39 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
41 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
42 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
43 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
45 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
46 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
48 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
49 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
50 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
51 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
53 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
54 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
55 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
57 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
58 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
59 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
63 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
64 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
65 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
67 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
68 used to identify the split points.
70 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
71 command line argument through to the output.
73 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
76 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
77 a NUL instead of a white space character.
79 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
80 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with -Z set the SMACK context where available.
82 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
84 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
85 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
86 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
88 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
89 unique groups with empty lines.
91 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
92 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
94 shuf accepts a new option: --repetitions (-r), to allow repetitions
95 of input items in the permuted output.
97 ** Changes in behavior
99 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
100 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
101 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
102 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
104 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
105 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
107 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
108 not just the transfer counts.
110 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
112 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
113 as per the documented interface.
117 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
119 md5sum uses libcrypto hash routines where available to potentially
120 get better performance through using more system specific code.
121 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
122 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
124 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, SNFS and UBIFS.
125 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses
126 inotify for files on those file systems, rather than the default (for unknown
127 file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
129 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
130 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
131 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
133 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
134 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
136 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
137 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
139 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
143 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
146 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
150 numfmt: reformat numbers
154 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
155 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
156 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
158 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
159 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
160 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
164 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
165 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
167 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
168 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
169 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
171 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
172 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
173 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
175 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
176 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
177 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
179 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
180 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
181 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
183 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
184 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
185 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
187 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
188 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
190 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
191 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
193 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
194 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
195 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
197 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
198 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
199 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
201 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
202 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
203 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
205 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
206 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
207 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
208 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
210 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
211 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
212 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
214 ** Changes in behavior
216 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
217 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
218 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
219 'total' in the target column.
221 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
222 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
223 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
225 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
226 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
230 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
231 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
233 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
234 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
236 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
240 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
241 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
242 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
243 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
244 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
245 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
246 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
247 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
248 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
249 for a patched distribution package.
251 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
252 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
254 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
255 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
256 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
257 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
260 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
264 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
266 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
267 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
268 sha384sum and sha512sum.
272 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
273 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
274 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
275 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
276 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
278 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
279 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
281 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
282 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
283 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
284 eventually exits nonzero.
286 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
287 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
288 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
289 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
290 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
292 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
293 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
294 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
296 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
297 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
298 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
300 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
301 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
302 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
304 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
305 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
306 Before, this would infloop:
307 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
308 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
310 ** Changes in behavior
312 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
316 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
317 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
318 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
319 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
320 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
323 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
324 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
325 format-changing options.
327 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
328 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
329 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
330 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
331 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
335 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
336 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
337 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
338 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
339 are run without following the instructions in README.
341 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
342 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
343 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
344 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
345 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
346 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
347 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
350 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
354 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
355 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
356 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
357 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
359 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
360 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
361 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
362 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
364 sort -u could read freed memory.
365 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
366 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
367 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
371 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
372 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
373 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
374 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
377 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
381 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
382 processes will not intersperse their output.
383 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
385 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
386 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
387 date: invalid date '\260'
388 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
390 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
391 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
392 lines output by df, can work reliably.
393 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
395 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
396 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
397 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
399 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
400 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
401 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
402 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
403 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
404 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
406 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
407 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
409 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
410 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
412 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
413 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
414 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
416 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
417 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
418 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
422 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
424 ** Changes in behavior
426 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
427 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
428 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
429 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
430 have any reason to include it here.
434 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
435 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
436 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
438 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
439 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
440 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
443 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
447 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
448 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
449 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
450 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
451 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
452 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
454 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
455 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
456 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
457 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
458 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
459 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
460 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
462 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
463 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
465 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
466 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
470 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
471 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
473 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
475 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
477 ** Changes in behavior
479 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
480 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
481 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
483 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
484 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
487 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
491 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
492 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
493 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
494 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
495 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
496 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
497 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
498 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
500 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
501 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
502 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
503 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
504 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
506 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
507 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
509 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
510 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
512 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
513 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
515 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
516 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
518 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
519 additional static suffix to output file names.
521 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
522 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
523 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
525 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
526 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
530 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
531 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
532 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
534 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
535 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
536 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
537 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
538 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
539 typically still point to one of the hard links.
541 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
542 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
543 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
544 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
545 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
547 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
548 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
549 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
550 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
554 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
555 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
556 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
558 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
559 instead of causing a usage failure.
561 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
564 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
568 realpath: print resolved file names.
572 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
573 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
575 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
576 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
578 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
579 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
580 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
581 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
582 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
583 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
585 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
586 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
587 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
589 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
590 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
591 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
593 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
594 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
595 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
596 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
597 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
599 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
601 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
602 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
604 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
605 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
606 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
608 ** Changes in behavior
610 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
611 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
612 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
613 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
614 usually-short referent instead.
616 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
617 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
618 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
619 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
622 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
626 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
627 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
628 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
630 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
631 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
633 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
634 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
638 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
639 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
641 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
642 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
643 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
644 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
646 ** Changes in behavior
648 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
649 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
650 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
654 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
655 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
656 only .tar.xz files is enough.
659 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
663 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
664 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
665 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
667 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
668 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
670 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
671 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
672 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
673 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
674 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
676 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
677 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
678 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
679 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
680 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
681 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
682 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
683 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
685 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
686 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
688 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
689 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
691 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
692 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
694 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
695 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
696 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
698 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
699 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
700 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
701 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
703 ** Changes in behavior
705 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
706 when -v or -c specified.
708 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
709 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
713 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
714 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
715 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
716 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
717 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
719 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
720 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
721 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
723 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
724 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
725 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
726 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
727 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
728 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
729 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
731 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
732 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
733 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
737 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
738 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
740 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
743 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
744 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
746 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
747 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
749 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
750 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
752 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
754 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
758 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
759 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
761 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
764 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
768 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
769 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
771 ** Changes in behavior
773 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
774 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
775 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
776 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
777 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
778 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
780 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
781 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
782 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
786 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
789 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
793 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
794 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
795 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
797 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
798 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
799 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
801 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
802 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
803 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
805 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
806 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
808 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
809 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
811 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
812 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
814 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
815 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
819 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
820 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
821 processed portion thereof.
823 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
824 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
826 ** Changes in behavior
828 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
829 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
830 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
832 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
833 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
834 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
836 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
837 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
839 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
840 Use --preserve-context instead.
842 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
845 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
849 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
850 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
851 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
852 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
853 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
855 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
856 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
858 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
859 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
860 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
862 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
863 reject file names invalid for that file system.
865 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
866 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
870 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
871 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
872 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
873 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
874 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
875 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
876 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
877 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
879 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
880 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
881 the same number of fields are output for each line.
883 ** Changes in behavior
885 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
886 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
887 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
890 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
894 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
895 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
896 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
899 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
903 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
904 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
906 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
907 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
909 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
910 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
912 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
913 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
914 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
915 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
917 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
918 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
920 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
921 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
922 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
924 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
926 ** Changes in behavior
928 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
929 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
930 to the number of available processors.
934 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
937 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
941 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
942 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
943 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
944 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
946 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
947 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
948 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
950 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
951 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
953 ** Changes in behavior
955 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
956 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
958 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
959 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
960 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
961 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
962 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
963 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
965 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
966 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
967 the same way as the others.
969 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
970 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
973 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
977 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
978 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
979 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
981 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
982 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
984 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
985 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
986 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
988 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
989 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
991 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
992 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
994 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
995 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
996 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
998 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
999 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
1000 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
1001 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
1005 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
1006 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
1008 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
1011 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
1012 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
1014 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
1016 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
1017 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
1018 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
1020 ** Changes in behavior
1022 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
1023 rather than its aliased target.
1025 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
1026 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
1027 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
1029 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
1030 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
1031 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
1032 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
1033 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
1034 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
1035 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
1036 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
1038 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
1040 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
1042 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
1043 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
1046 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
1047 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
1048 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
1049 control like taskset for example.
1051 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
1053 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
1054 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
1055 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
1056 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
1057 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
1058 includes %C when context information is available.
1060 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
1061 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
1062 rather than a file system attribute.
1064 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
1065 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
1066 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
1067 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
1069 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
1070 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
1071 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
1073 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
1074 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
1075 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
1078 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
1082 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
1083 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
1085 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
1087 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
1088 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1090 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
1091 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
1092 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
1093 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
1095 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
1096 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
1097 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1101 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
1102 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
1104 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
1105 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
1106 duration after the initial signal was sent.
1108 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
1109 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
1110 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
1111 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
1112 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
1113 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
1114 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
1115 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
1116 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
1118 ** Changes in behavior
1120 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
1121 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1123 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1124 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1127 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1131 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1132 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1133 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1134 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1138 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1139 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1141 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1142 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1143 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1144 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1146 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1147 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1148 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1151 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1155 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1156 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1157 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1159 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1160 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1161 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1163 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1164 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1166 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1167 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1168 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1169 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1171 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1172 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1173 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1175 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1176 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1177 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1178 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1180 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1181 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1182 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1184 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1185 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1186 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1187 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1189 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1190 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1191 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1193 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1194 processes will not intersperse their output.
1195 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1198 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1202 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1203 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1205 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1206 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1208 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1209 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1210 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1211 the presence of the empty string argument.
1212 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1214 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1215 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1216 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1217 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1219 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1220 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1222 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1223 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1224 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1226 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1227 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1228 and with a malicious user on the same system
1229 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1230 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1233 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1237 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1238 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1239 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1241 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1242 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1243 offending directory and all "contents."
1245 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1246 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1247 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1249 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1250 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1251 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1253 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1254 processes will not intersperse their output.
1255 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1256 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1258 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1259 output the name of the file to stdout.
1260 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1262 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1263 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1264 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1266 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1267 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1270 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1271 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1272 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1274 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1275 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1276 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1277 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1278 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1279 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1281 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1282 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1283 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1284 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1286 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1287 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1289 ** Changes in behavior
1291 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1292 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1293 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1294 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1295 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1297 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1298 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1299 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1300 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1302 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1304 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1305 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1306 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1307 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1308 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1312 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1316 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1317 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1319 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1320 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1322 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1323 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1324 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1326 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1327 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1330 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1334 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1335 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1336 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1338 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1339 to accommodate leap seconds.
1340 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1342 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1343 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1344 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1346 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1348 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1349 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1350 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1352 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1353 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1354 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1355 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1356 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1360 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1361 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1362 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1363 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1365 ** Changes in behavior
1367 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1368 environment variable is set.
1370 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1371 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1372 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1376 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1377 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1378 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1379 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1381 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1382 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1383 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1384 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1388 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1389 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1390 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1392 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1393 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1394 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1395 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1396 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1397 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1398 another improvement:
1400 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1401 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1404 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1408 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1409 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1410 and libraries tested at configure time.
1411 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1413 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1414 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1416 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1417 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1419 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1420 printing a summary to stderr.
1421 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1423 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1424 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1425 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1427 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1428 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1430 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1431 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1432 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1433 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1435 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1436 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1437 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1438 which is relatively unusual.
1439 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1441 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1442 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1443 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1444 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1445 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1446 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1447 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1451 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1452 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1453 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1454 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1455 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1459 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1460 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1462 ** Changes in behavior
1464 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1465 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1466 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1467 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1468 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1471 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1475 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1476 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1478 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1479 before data copying has started.
1481 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1482 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1484 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1485 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1486 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1487 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1489 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1490 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1491 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1492 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1494 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1499 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1500 for its standard streams.
1502 ** Changes in behavior
1504 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1505 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1506 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1507 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1508 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1509 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1511 ** Deprecated options
1513 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1514 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1518 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1520 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1521 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1522 a btrfs file system.
1524 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1526 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1527 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1529 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1530 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1533 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1537 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1538 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1539 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1540 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1542 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1543 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1544 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1545 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1546 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1551 make check: two tests have been corrected
1555 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1556 inherited from gnulib.
1559 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1563 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1564 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1565 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1566 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1568 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1569 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1571 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1573 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1574 systems without xattr support.
1576 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1577 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1578 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1580 ** Changes in behavior
1582 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1583 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1584 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1585 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1587 ** Improved robustness
1589 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1590 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1591 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1592 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1593 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1594 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1595 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1596 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1597 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1601 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1602 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1604 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1605 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1606 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1607 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1608 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1611 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1615 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1616 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1617 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1621 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1622 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1623 data was read, or on process exit.
1624 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1626 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1627 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1628 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1629 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1631 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1632 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1633 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1634 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1636 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1637 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1639 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1640 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1642 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1643 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1644 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1646 ** Changes in behavior
1648 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1649 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1650 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1652 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1653 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1655 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1656 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1657 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1660 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1664 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1666 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1667 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1668 install: Never copies xattrs
1670 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1671 from overwriting any existing destination file
1673 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1674 mode where this feature is available.
1676 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1677 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1678 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1679 do not modify the destination at all.
1681 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1683 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1687 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1688 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1690 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1692 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1693 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1695 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1696 processing the first file name
1698 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1699 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1700 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1701 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1703 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1704 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1706 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1707 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1710 ** Changes in behavior
1712 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1713 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1715 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1716 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1717 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1719 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1720 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1722 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1724 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1725 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1726 is still marked with a '+'.
1729 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1733 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1734 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1738 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1739 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1740 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1741 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1742 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1743 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1745 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1746 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1748 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1749 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1751 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1753 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1754 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1755 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1757 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1758 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1760 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1761 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1762 used to factor large numbers.
1764 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1767 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1769 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1771 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1772 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
1774 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
1775 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
1776 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
1777 maximum command-line (argv) length.
1779 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
1780 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
1781 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
1783 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
1784 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
1788 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
1790 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
1791 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
1793 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
1794 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
1796 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
1798 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
1799 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
1803 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
1804 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
1805 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
1807 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
1809 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
1810 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
1811 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
1813 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
1814 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
1815 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
1817 ** Changes in behavior
1819 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
1820 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
1823 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
1827 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
1828 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
1829 'futimens' system calls.
1833 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
1835 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
1836 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
1837 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
1839 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
1840 with no USERNAME argument.
1842 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
1843 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
1844 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
1846 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
1847 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
1848 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
1849 number of fields for some inputs.
1851 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
1852 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
1854 ** Changes in behavior
1856 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
1857 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
1860 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
1864 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
1866 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
1867 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
1868 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
1869 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1871 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
1872 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1874 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
1875 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
1877 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
1878 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
1880 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
1881 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
1882 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1883 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1885 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
1886 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
1887 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
1888 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
1889 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
1890 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
1892 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
1893 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
1895 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
1896 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
1897 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1899 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
1900 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1902 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
1903 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
1905 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
1906 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
1907 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
1908 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
1910 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
1911 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
1913 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
1914 in more cases when a directory is empty.
1916 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
1917 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
1918 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1922 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1923 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1925 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
1926 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
1927 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
1928 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
1932 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
1933 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
1935 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
1937 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
1941 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
1942 which have negative errno values.
1946 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
1950 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
1954 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
1955 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
1958 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
1962 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
1963 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
1964 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1966 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
1967 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
1968 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
1969 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1973 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
1974 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
1975 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
1976 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
1979 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
1983 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
1985 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
1986 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
1987 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1990 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
1994 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
1995 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
1997 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
1999 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
2001 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
2003 ** Programs no longer installed by default
2007 ** Changes in behavior
2009 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
2010 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
2012 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
2013 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
2015 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
2016 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
2017 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
2021 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
2022 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
2023 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
2024 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
2025 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
2026 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
2027 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
2028 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
2029 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
2030 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
2031 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
2033 The following commands and options now support the standard size
2034 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
2035 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
2038 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
2041 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
2042 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
2043 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
2045 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
2046 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
2047 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
2050 ** New build options
2052 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
2053 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
2054 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
2055 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
2057 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
2058 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
2059 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
2060 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
2061 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
2062 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
2063 of "make check" fail.
2065 ** Remove deprecated options
2067 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2068 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
2069 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2070 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
2071 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
2073 ** Improved robustness
2075 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
2076 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
2077 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
2078 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
2079 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
2080 loss of the contents of a/f.
2082 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
2083 in its 35-colon command-line argument
2087 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
2088 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
2089 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2091 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
2092 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
2093 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
2094 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2096 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
2097 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
2098 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
2099 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
2100 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
2101 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
2102 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
2103 destination is a symlink.
2105 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
2107 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
2108 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
2110 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
2111 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
2113 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
2115 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
2116 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
2118 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
2119 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
2121 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2124 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2125 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2127 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2128 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2130 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2131 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2132 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2133 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2135 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2136 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2137 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2139 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2140 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2141 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2143 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2144 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2145 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2146 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2148 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2149 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2150 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2152 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2153 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2155 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2156 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2158 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2160 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2161 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2162 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2164 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2165 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2167 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2168 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2170 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2171 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2173 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2174 [present in the original version]
2177 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2181 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2183 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2184 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2185 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2187 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2188 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2190 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2194 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2195 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2197 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2198 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2200 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2201 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2203 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2204 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2205 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2206 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2207 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2208 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2210 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2211 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2214 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2215 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2217 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2220 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2221 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2222 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2224 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2225 directory is unreadable.
2227 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2228 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2229 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2231 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2232 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2233 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2234 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2235 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2238 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2239 Before it would print nothing.
2241 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2243 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2244 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2245 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2246 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2247 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2248 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2249 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2250 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2252 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2256 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2257 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2258 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2260 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2261 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2262 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2263 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2266 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2270 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2271 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2272 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2273 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2274 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2275 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2276 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2278 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2279 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2280 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2281 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2282 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2283 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2284 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2285 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2287 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2288 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2289 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2292 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2296 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2297 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2299 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2300 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2301 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2303 ** Improved robustness
2305 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2306 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2307 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2310 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2314 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2315 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2316 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2317 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2318 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2320 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2324 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2327 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2331 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2332 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2333 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2334 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2336 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2337 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2339 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2340 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2341 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2344 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2346 ** Improved robustness
2348 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2349 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2351 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2352 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2353 or NFS-mounted partition.
2355 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2356 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2360 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2361 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2362 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2363 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2364 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2365 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2367 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2368 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2370 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2371 or neglect to report file removal.
2373 For the "groups" command:
2375 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2376 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2378 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2380 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2382 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2386 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2387 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2390 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2392 ** Changes in behavior
2394 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2395 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2396 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2397 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2399 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2400 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2401 a final './' or '../' component.
2403 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2404 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2405 this only for pipes.
2407 ** Infrastructure changes
2409 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2410 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2411 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2412 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2416 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2417 name is "." or "..".
2419 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2420 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2421 dirent.d_type support.
2423 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2424 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2426 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2427 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2428 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2429 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2432 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2434 ** Changes in behavior
2436 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2440 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2441 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2445 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2446 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2447 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2449 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2450 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2452 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2453 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2455 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2457 ** Improved robustness
2459 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2460 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2461 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2463 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2464 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2467 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2468 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2470 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2471 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2473 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2474 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2476 ** Changes in behavior
2478 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2479 where the two are distinct.
2481 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2482 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2483 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2484 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2485 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2486 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2487 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2488 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2489 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2490 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2491 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2492 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2493 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2494 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2495 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2496 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2497 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2499 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2500 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2501 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2503 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2504 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2505 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2506 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2509 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2510 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2514 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2515 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2516 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2517 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2519 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2520 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2521 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2523 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2524 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2525 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2526 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2527 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2530 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2531 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2533 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2534 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2535 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2536 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2538 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2539 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2540 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2542 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2543 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2544 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2545 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2547 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2548 and sticky) with the -m option.
2550 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2551 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2552 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2553 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2554 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2556 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2557 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2559 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2563 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2564 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2565 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2566 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2568 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2570 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2572 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2573 silently ignoring one of them.
2575 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2576 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2577 containing this change was 5.92.
2579 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2580 automatically newline terminated.
2582 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2583 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2584 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2585 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2588 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2589 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2590 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2593 ** Scheduled for removal
2595 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2596 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2598 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2599 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2600 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2601 command to unlink a directory.
2603 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2604 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2605 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2606 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2610 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2611 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2612 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2613 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2614 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2615 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2619 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2620 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2622 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2624 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2625 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2626 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2628 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2629 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2632 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2633 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2635 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2636 list directories before files.
2638 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2639 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2640 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2641 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2644 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2646 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2648 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2649 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2650 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2652 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2653 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2657 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2658 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2659 usually printing nothing.
2661 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2663 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2664 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2665 them with hard-linked directories.
2667 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2668 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2669 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2671 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2672 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2673 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2675 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2678 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2679 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2681 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2682 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2684 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2685 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2687 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2688 all command-line arguments.
2690 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2692 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2694 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2695 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2697 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2699 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2700 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2701 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2702 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2703 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2705 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2706 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2708 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2709 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2710 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2711 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2713 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2715 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2719 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2720 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2722 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2723 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2725 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2726 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2728 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2729 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2731 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2732 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2734 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2736 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2737 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2738 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2741 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2743 ** Build-related bug fixes
2745 installing .mo files would fail
2748 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2752 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2754 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2757 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2761 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2762 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2766 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2768 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2769 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2771 ** Deprecated options
2773 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
2774 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
2776 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
2780 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
2782 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
2783 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
2784 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
2785 conforming to older POSIX versions.
2787 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
2790 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
2796 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
2801 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
2803 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
2805 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
2806 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
2807 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
2809 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
2810 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
2811 problematic usages. These include:
2813 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
2814 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
2815 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
2816 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
2817 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
2818 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
2819 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
2820 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
2821 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
2823 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
2824 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
2826 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
2827 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
2828 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
2829 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
2831 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
2832 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
2833 between binary and text files.
2835 The following programs now always use text input/output:
2839 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
2843 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
2844 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
2846 head tac tail tee tr
2847 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
2849 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
2850 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
2852 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
2853 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
2854 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
2856 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
2858 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
2860 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
2861 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
2862 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
2866 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
2868 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
2869 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2871 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
2872 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
2873 blocks until F contains N blocks.
2877 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
2878 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
2882 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
2883 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
2884 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
2888 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
2889 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
2893 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
2895 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
2897 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
2901 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
2902 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
2903 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
2905 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
2906 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
2907 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
2908 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
2909 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
2911 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
2915 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
2916 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
2917 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
2919 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
2921 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
2922 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
2923 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
2924 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
2926 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
2928 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
2929 rather than silently wrapping around.
2931 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
2932 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
2934 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
2935 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
2937 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
2938 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
2939 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
2940 file /tmp/a/b/file".
2942 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
2944 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
2946 ** Improved robustness
2948 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
2949 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
2950 no matter how large the result.
2952 ** Improved portability
2954 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
2955 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
2957 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
2959 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
2960 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
2961 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
2963 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
2964 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
2968 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
2969 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
2971 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
2973 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
2974 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
2975 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
2976 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
2978 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
2979 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
2981 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
2982 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
2983 categories if not specified by dircolors.
2985 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
2987 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
2988 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
2990 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
2991 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
2993 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
2995 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
2996 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
2998 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
2999 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
3001 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
3002 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
3003 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
3005 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
3007 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
3009 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
3013 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
3015 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
3016 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
3017 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
3019 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
3020 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
3022 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
3023 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
3024 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
3026 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
3027 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
3029 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
3030 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
3031 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
3032 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
3034 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
3035 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
3037 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
3038 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
3039 the file system does not support it.
3041 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
3043 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
3044 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
3046 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
3048 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
3049 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
3051 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
3052 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
3053 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
3054 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
3056 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
3057 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
3060 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
3061 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
3062 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
3063 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
3065 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
3066 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
3067 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
3068 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
3070 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
3071 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
3073 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
3075 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
3076 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
3077 reporting incorrect results.
3081 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
3082 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
3084 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
3087 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
3089 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
3090 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
3092 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
3093 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
3095 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
3098 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
3099 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
3100 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
3101 the file name does not look like a page range.
3103 printf has several changes:
3105 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
3106 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
3108 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
3109 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
3110 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
3112 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
3113 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
3116 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
3117 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
3119 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
3120 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
3122 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3124 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3125 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3127 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3129 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3131 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3132 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3133 when first encountering the directory.
3137 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3138 output; POSIX requires this.
3140 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3141 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3143 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3145 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3146 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3148 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3149 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3151 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3152 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3153 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3154 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3155 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3156 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3157 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3159 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3160 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3161 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3163 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3164 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3166 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3168 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3170 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3171 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3172 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3173 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3175 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3179 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3180 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3181 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3182 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3183 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3185 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3186 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3187 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3189 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3190 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3192 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3193 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3195 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3196 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
3197 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
3198 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3199 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
3201 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3202 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3204 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3205 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3207 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3209 nocreat do not create the output file
3210 excl fail if the output file already exists
3211 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3212 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3214 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3216 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3217 direct use direct I/O for data
3218 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3219 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3220 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3221 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3222 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3224 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3226 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3227 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3230 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3231 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3232 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3233 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3234 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3235 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3237 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3238 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3240 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3243 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3245 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3247 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3248 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3250 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3251 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3252 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3254 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3255 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3256 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3258 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3260 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3261 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3263 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3264 for compatibility with bash.
3266 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3268 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3269 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3270 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3271 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3273 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3274 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3276 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3277 ls supports TABSIZE.
3278 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3279 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3280 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3282 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3285 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3287 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3288 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3289 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3290 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3291 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3292 an offset, not as a file name.
3294 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3295 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3297 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3298 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3300 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3301 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3303 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3304 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3305 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3307 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3308 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3310 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3311 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3315 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3317 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3319 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3323 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3324 or more arguments between partitions.
3326 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3327 holes in the destination.
3329 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3330 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3331 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3332 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3333 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3334 terminates immediately.
3336 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3338 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3340 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3341 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3342 not the empty string.
3344 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3345 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3349 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3350 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3351 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3354 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3361 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3365 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3366 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3368 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3369 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3371 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3372 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3373 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3376 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3380 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3381 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3383 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3384 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3386 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3387 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3388 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3390 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3392 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3395 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3397 ** Configuration option
3399 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3400 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3404 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3405 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3409 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3410 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3411 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3414 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3415 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3416 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3417 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3418 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3419 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3420 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3423 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3427 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3428 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3429 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3431 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3432 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3434 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3436 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3437 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3438 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3439 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3441 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3443 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3444 not just the ones that reference directories
3446 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3447 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3449 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3450 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3451 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3453 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3454 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3455 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3456 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3457 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3458 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3460 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3465 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3466 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3468 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3470 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3472 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3474 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3475 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3477 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3478 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3480 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3482 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3486 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3488 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3490 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3491 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3492 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3493 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3494 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3496 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3497 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3499 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3500 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3502 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3503 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3505 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3506 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3507 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3511 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3512 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3513 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3514 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3515 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3516 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3517 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3518 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3519 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3520 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3521 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3522 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3523 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3524 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3526 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3528 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3529 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3531 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3533 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3535 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3536 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3538 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3540 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3541 without a trailing newline.
3543 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3544 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3546 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3549 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3553 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3555 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3557 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3558 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3559 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3560 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3562 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3564 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3565 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3566 be printed without leading spaces.
3568 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3569 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3574 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3575 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3576 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3578 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3580 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3581 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3583 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3584 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3586 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3587 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3589 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3591 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3593 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3595 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3596 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3598 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3600 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3602 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3603 byte offsets are specified.
3606 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3609 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3612 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3613 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3614 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3615 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3616 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3617 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3618 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3619 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3620 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3621 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3622 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3623 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3624 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3625 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3626 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3627 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3628 directory where M has write access.
3629 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3630 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3631 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3634 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3635 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3636 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3637 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3638 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3639 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3640 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3641 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3642 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3643 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3644 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3645 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3646 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3647 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3648 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3649 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3650 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3651 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3652 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3653 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3654 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3655 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3656 appeared one additional time.
3658 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3659 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3660 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3661 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3664 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3665 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3666 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3667 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3668 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3669 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3670 if there were more than 338.
3672 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3673 - false --help now exits nonzero
3676 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3677 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3678 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3679 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3682 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3683 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3684 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3685 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3686 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3689 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3690 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3691 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3692 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3693 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3694 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3695 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3698 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3699 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3700 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3701 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3702 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3703 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3705 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3706 under certain unusual conditions
3707 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3708 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3711 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3712 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3713 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3714 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3715 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3716 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3717 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3718 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3719 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3720 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3721 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3722 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3723 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3724 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3725 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3726 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3729 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3730 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3733 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3734 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3735 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3736 involving hard-linked directories
3737 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3738 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3739 character-special and block files
3742 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3743 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3744 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3745 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3746 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3747 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3748 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3749 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3750 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3752 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3753 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3754 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3755 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3756 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3757 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3758 specified on the command line.
3759 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3760 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3761 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3762 the first file untouched.
3763 * readlink: new program
3764 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3765 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3766 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3767 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3768 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3769 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3772 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3773 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
3774 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
3775 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
3776 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
3777 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
3778 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
3779 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
3780 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
3781 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
3782 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
3783 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
3785 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
3786 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
3787 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
3789 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
3790 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
3791 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
3792 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
3793 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
3794 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
3795 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
3796 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
3799 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
3800 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
3803 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
3804 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
3805 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
3806 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
3807 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
3808 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
3809 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
3812 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
3813 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
3815 ========================================================================
3816 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
3817 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3820 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
3822 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3823 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
3824 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
3825 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
3826 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
3827 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
3828 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
3829 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
3830 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
3831 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
3832 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
3833 The old options will continue to work for a while.
3835 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
3836 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
3837 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
3838 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
3840 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
3843 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
3845 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
3846 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
3847 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
3848 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
3849 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
3850 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
3851 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
3854 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
3855 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
3856 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
3857 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
3858 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
3859 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
3860 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
3861 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
3862 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
3863 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
3864 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
3865 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
3866 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
3867 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
3868 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
3869 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
3871 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
3872 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
3874 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
3875 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
3876 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
3877 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
3878 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
3879 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
3881 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
3882 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
3883 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
3884 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
3885 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
3886 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
3887 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
3889 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
3890 the source files in the following example:
3891 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
3892 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
3893 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
3894 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
3895 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
3896 links between source files with --preserve=links
3897 * cp accepts new options:
3898 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
3899 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
3900 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
3901 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
3902 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
3903 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
3904 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
3905 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
3906 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
3908 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
3909 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
3910 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
3911 even though it's older than dest.
3912 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
3913 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
3914 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
3915 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
3916 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
3918 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
3919 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
3920 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
3921 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
3922 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
3923 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
3924 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
3926 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
3927 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
3928 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
3930 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
3931 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
3932 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
3933 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
3934 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
3935 This is the default.
3937 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
3938 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
3939 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
3940 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
3941 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
3943 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
3946 ========================================================================
3947 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
3948 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
3951 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
3952 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
3954 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3955 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
3956 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
3957 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
3958 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
3960 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
3961 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
3962 that specifies a non-directory
3965 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
3966 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
3967 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
3968 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
3969 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
3970 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
3971 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
3972 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3973 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
3974 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
3975 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
3976 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
3977 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
3978 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
3979 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
3980 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
3981 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
3982 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
3983 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
3984 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
3985 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
3986 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
3987 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
3988 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
3990 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
3991 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
3992 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
3994 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
3996 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
3997 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
3999 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
4000 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
4001 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
4002 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
4003 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
4005 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
4006 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
4007 required support; from Bruno Haible.
4008 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
4009 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
4011 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
4013 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
4014 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
4015 * still more portability fixes
4016 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
4017 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4019 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
4021 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
4023 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
4025 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
4026 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
4027 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
4028 there is any time remaining
4029 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
4031 ========================================================================
4032 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4033 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
4035 This package began as the union of the following:
4036 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
4038 ========================================================================
4040 Copyright (C) 2001-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4042 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
4043 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
4044 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
4045 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
4046 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
4047 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.