1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
8 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
10 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
11 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
12 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
13 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
15 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
16 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
17 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
18 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
20 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
21 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
25 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
26 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
27 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
28 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
30 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
31 on stderr approximately every second.
35 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
36 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
38 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
39 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
41 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
42 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
44 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
45 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
46 documentation are provided.
49 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
53 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
54 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
56 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
57 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
58 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendent.
59 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
61 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
62 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
63 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
64 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
66 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
67 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
69 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
70 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
72 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
73 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
74 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
75 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
76 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
77 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
91 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
93 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
94 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
95 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
96 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
97 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
98 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
100 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
101 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
102 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
103 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
105 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
106 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
107 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
109 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
110 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
111 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
112 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
114 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
115 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
116 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
118 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
119 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
120 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
122 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
123 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
124 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
125 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
126 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
128 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
129 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
130 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
132 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
133 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
135 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
136 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
137 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
139 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
140 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
142 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
143 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
145 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
146 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
148 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
149 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
151 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
152 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
153 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
155 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
156 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
160 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
161 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
163 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
164 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
165 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
166 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
167 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
168 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
169 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
170 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
171 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
172 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
173 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
174 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
175 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
176 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
177 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
178 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
179 it suitable for embedded system.
181 ** Changes in behavior
183 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
184 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
186 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
187 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
189 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
190 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
191 will result in the delayed output of lines.
193 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
194 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
195 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
199 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
200 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
201 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
203 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
205 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
206 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
207 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
209 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
210 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
211 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
212 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
214 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
215 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
217 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
218 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
219 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
222 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
226 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
227 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
228 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
230 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
231 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
232 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
233 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
235 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
236 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
237 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
239 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
240 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
242 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
244 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
245 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
246 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
248 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
249 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
250 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
252 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
253 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
254 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
255 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
257 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
258 from the source, when copying across file systems.
259 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
261 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
262 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
263 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
265 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
266 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
268 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
269 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
270 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
271 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
273 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
274 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
275 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
277 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
278 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
279 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
283 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
284 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
285 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
287 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
288 used to identify the split points.
290 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
291 command line argument through to the output.
293 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
296 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
297 a NUL instead of a white space character.
299 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
300 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
302 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
304 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
305 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
306 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
308 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
309 unique groups with empty lines.
311 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
312 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
314 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
317 ** Changes in behavior
319 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
320 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
321 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
322 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
324 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
325 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
327 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
328 not just the transfer counts.
330 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
332 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
333 as per the documented interface.
337 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
339 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
340 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
341 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
342 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
344 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
345 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
346 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
347 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
349 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
350 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
351 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
353 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
354 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
356 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
357 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
359 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
363 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
366 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
370 numfmt: reformat numbers
374 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
375 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
376 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
378 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
379 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
380 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
382 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
383 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminite amount of time.
387 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
388 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
390 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
391 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
392 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
394 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
395 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
396 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
398 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
399 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
400 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
402 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
403 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
404 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
406 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
407 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
408 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
410 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
411 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
413 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
414 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
416 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
417 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
418 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
420 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
421 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
422 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
424 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
425 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
426 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
428 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
429 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
430 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
431 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
433 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
434 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
435 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
437 ** Changes in behavior
439 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
440 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
441 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
442 'total' in the target column.
444 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
445 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
446 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
448 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
449 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
451 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
452 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
456 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
457 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
459 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
460 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
462 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
466 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
467 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
468 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
469 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
470 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
471 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
472 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
473 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
474 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
475 for a patched distribution package.
477 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
478 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
480 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
481 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
482 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
483 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
486 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
490 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
492 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
493 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
494 sha384sum and sha512sum.
498 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
499 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
500 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
501 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
502 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
504 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
505 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
507 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
508 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
509 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
510 eventually exits nonzero.
512 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
513 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
514 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
515 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
516 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
518 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
519 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
520 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
522 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
523 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
524 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
526 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
527 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
528 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
530 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
531 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
532 Before, this would infloop:
533 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
534 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
536 ** Changes in behavior
538 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
542 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
543 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
544 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
545 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
546 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
549 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
550 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
551 format-changing options.
553 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
554 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
555 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
556 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
557 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
561 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
562 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
563 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
564 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
565 are run without following the instructions in README.
567 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
568 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
569 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
570 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
571 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
572 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
573 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
576 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
580 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
581 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
582 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
583 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
585 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
586 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
587 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
588 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
590 sort -u could read freed memory.
591 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
592 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
593 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
597 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
598 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
599 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
600 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
603 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
607 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
608 processes will not intersperse their output.
609 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
611 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
612 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
613 date: invalid date '\260'
614 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
616 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
617 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
618 lines output by df, can work reliably.
619 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
621 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
622 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
623 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
625 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
626 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
627 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
628 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
629 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
630 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
632 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
633 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
635 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
636 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
638 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
639 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
640 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
642 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
643 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
644 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
648 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
650 ** Changes in behavior
652 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
653 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
654 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
655 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
656 have any reason to include it here.
660 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
661 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
662 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
664 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
665 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
666 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
669 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
673 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
674 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
675 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
676 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
677 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
678 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
680 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
681 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
682 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
683 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
684 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
685 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
686 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
688 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
689 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
691 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
692 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
696 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
697 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
699 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
701 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
703 ** Changes in behavior
705 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
706 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
707 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
709 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
710 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
713 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
717 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
718 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
719 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
720 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
721 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
722 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
723 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
724 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
726 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
727 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
728 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
729 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
730 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
732 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
733 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
735 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
736 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
738 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
739 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
741 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
742 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
744 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
745 additional static suffix to output file names.
747 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
748 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
749 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
751 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
752 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
756 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
757 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
758 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
760 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
761 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
762 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
763 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
764 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
765 typically still point to one of the hard links.
767 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
768 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
769 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
770 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
771 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
773 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
774 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
775 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
776 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
780 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
781 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
782 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
784 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
785 instead of causing a usage failure.
787 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
790 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
794 realpath: print resolved file names.
798 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
799 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
801 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
802 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
804 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
805 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
806 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
807 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
808 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
809 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
811 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
812 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
813 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
815 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
816 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
817 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
819 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
820 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
821 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
822 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
823 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
825 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
827 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
828 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
830 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
831 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
832 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
834 ** Changes in behavior
836 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
837 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
838 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
839 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
840 usually-short referent instead.
842 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
843 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
844 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
845 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
848 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
852 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
853 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
854 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
856 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
857 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
859 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
860 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
864 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
865 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
867 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
868 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
869 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
870 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
872 ** Changes in behavior
874 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
875 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
876 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
880 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
881 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
882 only .tar.xz files is enough.
885 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
889 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
890 I.E. for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
891 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
893 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
894 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
896 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
897 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
898 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
899 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
900 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
902 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
903 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
904 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
905 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
906 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
907 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
908 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
909 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
911 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
912 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
914 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
915 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
917 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
918 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
920 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
921 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
922 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
924 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
925 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
926 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
927 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
929 ** Changes in behavior
931 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
932 when -v or -c specified.
934 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
935 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
939 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
940 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
941 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
942 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
943 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
945 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
946 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
947 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
949 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
950 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
951 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
952 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
953 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
954 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
955 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
957 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
958 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
959 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
963 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
964 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
966 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
969 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
970 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
972 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
973 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
975 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
976 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
978 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
980 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
984 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
985 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
987 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
990 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
994 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
995 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
997 ** Changes in behavior
999 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
1000 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
1001 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
1002 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
1003 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
1004 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
1005 resolved for 2.6.39.
1006 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
1007 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
1008 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
1012 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
1015 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
1019 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
1020 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
1021 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1023 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
1024 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
1025 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1027 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
1028 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
1029 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1031 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
1032 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1034 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
1035 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1037 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
1038 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1040 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
1041 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1045 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
1046 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
1047 processed portion thereof.
1049 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
1050 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
1052 ** Changes in behavior
1054 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1055 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
1056 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1058 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
1059 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
1060 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
1062 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
1063 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
1065 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
1066 Use --preserve-context instead.
1068 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
1071 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
1075 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
1076 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
1077 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
1078 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
1079 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1081 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
1082 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
1084 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
1085 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
1086 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
1088 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
1089 reject file names invalid for that file system.
1091 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
1092 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1096 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
1097 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
1098 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
1099 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
1100 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
1101 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
1102 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
1103 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
1105 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
1106 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
1107 the same number of fields are output for each line.
1109 ** Changes in behavior
1111 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
1112 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
1113 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
1116 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
1120 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
1121 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
1122 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1125 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
1129 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
1130 has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
1132 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
1133 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
1135 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
1136 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1138 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
1139 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
1140 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
1141 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1143 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
1144 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1146 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
1147 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
1148 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
1150 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
1152 ** Changes in behavior
1154 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
1155 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
1156 to the number of available processors.
1160 split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
1163 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
1167 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
1168 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
1169 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
1170 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
1172 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
1173 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
1174 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
1176 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
1177 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1179 ** Changes in behavior
1181 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
1182 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
1184 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
1185 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
1186 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
1187 To obtain a nanosecond-precision time stamp for %X use %.X;
1188 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
1189 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
1191 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
1192 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
1193 the same way as the others.
1195 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
1196 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
1199 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
1203 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
1204 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
1205 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
1207 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
1208 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
1210 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
1211 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
1212 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
1214 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
1215 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
1217 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
1218 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
1220 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
1221 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
1222 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1224 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
1225 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
1226 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
1227 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
1231 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
1232 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
1234 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
1237 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
1238 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
1240 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
1242 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
1243 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
1244 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
1246 ** Changes in behavior
1248 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
1249 rather than its aliased target.
1251 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
1252 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
1253 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
1255 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
1256 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
1257 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
1258 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
1259 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
1260 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
1261 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
1262 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
1264 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
1266 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
1268 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
1269 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
1272 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
1273 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
1274 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
1275 control like taskset for example.
1277 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
1279 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
1280 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
1281 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
1282 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
1283 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
1284 includes %C when context information is available.
1286 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
1287 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
1288 rather than a file system attribute.
1290 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
1291 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
1292 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
1293 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
1295 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
1296 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
1297 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
1299 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
1300 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
1301 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
1304 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
1308 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
1309 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
1311 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
1313 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
1314 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1316 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
1317 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
1318 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
1319 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
1321 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
1322 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
1323 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1327 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
1328 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
1330 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
1331 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
1332 duration after the initial signal was sent.
1334 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
1335 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
1336 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
1337 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
1338 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
1339 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
1340 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
1341 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
1342 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
1344 ** Changes in behavior
1346 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
1347 sequence when it would be a no-op.
1349 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
1350 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
1353 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
1357 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
1358 of available processors, which may not have been the case
1359 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
1360 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1364 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
1365 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
1367 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
1368 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
1369 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
1370 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
1372 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
1373 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
1374 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
1377 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
1381 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
1382 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
1383 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
1385 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
1386 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
1387 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1389 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
1390 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1392 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
1393 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1394 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
1395 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1397 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
1398 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
1399 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1401 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
1402 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
1403 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
1404 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1406 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
1407 renamed-aside and then recreated.
1408 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1410 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
1411 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
1412 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
1413 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1415 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
1416 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
1417 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1419 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
1420 processes will not intersperse their output.
1421 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
1424 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
1428 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
1429 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1431 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
1432 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1434 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
1435 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
1436 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
1437 the presence of the empty string argument.
1438 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1440 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1441 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
1442 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
1443 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
1445 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
1446 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1448 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
1449 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
1450 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
1452 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
1453 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
1454 and with a malicious user on the same system
1455 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
1456 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
1459 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
1463 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
1464 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
1465 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
1467 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
1468 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
1469 offending directory and all "contents."
1471 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
1472 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
1473 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
1475 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
1476 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
1477 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1479 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1480 processes will not intersperse their output.
1481 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1482 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1484 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
1485 output the name of the file to stdout.
1486 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1488 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
1489 call fails with errno == EACCES.
1490 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1492 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
1493 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
1496 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
1497 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
1498 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
1500 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
1501 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
1502 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
1503 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
1504 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
1505 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1507 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
1508 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
1509 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
1510 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
1512 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
1513 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
1515 ** Changes in behavior
1517 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
1518 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
1519 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
1520 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
1521 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
1523 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
1524 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
1525 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
1526 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
1528 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
1530 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
1531 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
1532 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
1533 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
1534 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
1538 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
1542 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
1543 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
1545 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
1546 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1548 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
1549 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
1550 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
1552 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
1553 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
1556 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
1560 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
1561 when the source file doesn't have write access.
1562 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1564 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
1565 to accommodate leap seconds.
1566 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1568 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
1569 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
1570 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
1572 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
1574 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
1575 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
1576 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
1578 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
1579 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
1580 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
1581 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
1582 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
1586 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
1587 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
1588 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
1589 directory or a symlink to a directory.
1591 ** Changes in behavior
1593 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
1594 environment variable is set.
1596 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
1597 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
1598 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
1602 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
1603 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
1604 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
1605 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
1607 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
1608 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
1609 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
1610 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
1614 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
1615 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
1616 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
1618 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
1619 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
1620 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
1621 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
1622 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
1623 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
1624 another improvement:
1626 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
1627 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
1630 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
1634 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink time stamp, when it is
1635 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
1636 and libraries tested at configure time.
1637 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1639 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
1640 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1642 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
1643 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1645 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
1646 printing a summary to stderr.
1647 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1649 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
1650 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
1651 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
1653 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
1654 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
1656 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
1657 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
1658 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
1659 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1661 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
1662 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
1663 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
1664 which is relatively unusual.
1665 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1667 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
1668 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
1669 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
1670 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
1671 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
1672 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
1673 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1677 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
1678 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
1679 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
1680 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
1681 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
1685 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
1686 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
1688 ** Changes in behavior
1690 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1691 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
1692 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
1693 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
1694 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
1697 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
1701 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
1702 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
1704 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
1705 before data copying has started.
1707 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
1708 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1710 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
1711 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
1712 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
1713 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1715 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
1716 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
1717 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
1718 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
1720 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
1725 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
1726 for its standard streams.
1728 ** Changes in behavior
1730 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
1731 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
1732 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
1733 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
1734 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
1735 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
1737 ** Deprecated options
1739 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
1740 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
1744 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
1746 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
1747 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
1748 a btrfs file system.
1750 cp now preserves time stamps on symbolic links, when possible
1752 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
1753 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
1755 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
1756 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
1759 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
1763 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
1764 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
1765 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
1766 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
1768 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
1769 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
1770 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
1771 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
1772 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
1777 make check: two tests have been corrected
1781 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
1782 inherited from gnulib.
1785 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
1789 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
1790 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
1791 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
1792 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
1794 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
1795 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
1797 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
1799 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
1800 systems without xattr support.
1802 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
1803 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
1804 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1806 ** Changes in behavior
1808 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
1809 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
1810 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
1811 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
1813 ** Improved robustness
1815 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
1816 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
1817 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
1818 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
1819 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
1820 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
1821 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
1822 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
1823 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1827 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
1828 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
1830 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
1831 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
1832 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
1833 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1834 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1837 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
1841 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
1842 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
1843 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
1847 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
1848 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
1849 data was read, or on process exit.
1850 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1852 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
1853 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
1854 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
1855 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1857 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
1858 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
1859 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
1860 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
1862 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
1863 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
1865 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
1866 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
1868 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
1869 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
1870 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
1872 ** Changes in behavior
1874 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
1875 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
1876 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
1878 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
1879 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
1881 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
1882 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
1883 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
1886 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
1890 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
1892 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
1893 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
1894 install: Never copies xattrs
1896 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
1897 from overwriting any existing destination file
1899 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
1900 mode where this feature is available.
1902 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
1903 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
1904 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
1905 do not modify the destination at all.
1907 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
1909 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
1913 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
1914 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
1916 cp uses much less memory in some situations
1918 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
1919 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
1921 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
1922 processing the first file name
1924 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
1925 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
1926 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
1927 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1929 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
1930 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
1932 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
1933 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
1936 ** Changes in behavior
1938 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
1939 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
1941 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
1942 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
1943 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
1945 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
1946 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
1948 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
1950 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
1951 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
1952 is still marked with a '+'.
1955 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
1959 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
1960 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
1964 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
1965 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
1966 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
1967 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
1968 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
1969 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
1971 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
1972 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
1974 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
1975 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
1977 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
1979 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
1980 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
1981 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
1983 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
1984 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
1986 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
1987 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
1988 used to factor large numbers.
1990 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
1993 ls now colorizes files with capabilities if libcap is available
1995 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
1997 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
1998 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
2000 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
2001 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
2002 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
2003 maximum command-line (argv) length.
2005 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
2006 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
2007 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
2009 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
2010 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
2014 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
2016 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
2017 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
2019 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
2020 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
2022 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
2024 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
2025 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
2029 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
2030 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
2031 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
2033 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
2035 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
2036 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
2037 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
2039 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
2040 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
2041 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
2043 ** Changes in behavior
2045 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
2046 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
2049 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
2053 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
2054 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
2055 'futimens' system calls.
2059 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
2061 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
2062 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
2063 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
2065 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
2066 with no USERNAME argument.
2068 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
2069 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
2070 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
2072 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
2073 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
2074 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
2075 number of fields for some inputs.
2077 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
2078 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
2080 ** Changes in behavior
2082 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
2083 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
2086 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
2090 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
2092 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
2093 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
2094 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
2095 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2097 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
2098 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
2100 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
2101 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
2103 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
2104 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
2106 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
2107 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
2108 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2109 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2111 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
2112 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
2113 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
2114 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
2115 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
2116 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
2118 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
2119 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
2121 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
2122 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
2123 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2125 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
2126 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2128 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
2129 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
2131 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
2132 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
2133 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
2134 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
2136 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
2137 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
2139 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
2140 in more cases when a directory is empty.
2142 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
2143 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
2144 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2148 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
2149 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
2151 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
2152 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
2153 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
2154 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
2158 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
2159 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
2161 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
2163 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
2167 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
2168 which have negative errno values.
2172 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
2176 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
2180 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
2181 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
2184 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
2188 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
2189 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
2190 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2192 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
2193 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
2194 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
2195 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
2199 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
2200 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
2201 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
2202 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
2205 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
2209 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
2211 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
2212 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
2213 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2216 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
2220 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
2221 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
2223 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
2225 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
2227 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
2229 ** Programs no longer installed by default
2233 ** Changes in behavior
2235 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
2236 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
2238 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
2239 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
2241 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
2242 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
2243 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
2247 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
2248 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
2249 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
2250 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
2251 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
2252 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
2253 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
2254 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
2255 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
2256 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
2257 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
2259 The following commands and options now support the standard size
2260 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
2261 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
2264 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
2267 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
2268 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
2269 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
2271 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
2272 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
2273 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
2276 ** New build options
2278 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
2279 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
2280 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
2281 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
2283 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
2284 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
2285 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
2286 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
2287 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
2288 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
2289 of "make check" fail.
2291 ** Remove deprecated options
2293 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2294 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
2295 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
2296 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
2297 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
2299 ** Improved robustness
2301 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
2302 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
2303 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
2304 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
2305 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
2306 loss of the contents of a/f.
2308 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
2309 in its 35-colon command-line argument
2313 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
2314 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
2315 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2317 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
2318 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
2319 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
2320 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2322 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
2323 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
2324 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
2325 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
2326 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
2327 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
2328 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
2329 destination is a symlink.
2331 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
2333 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
2334 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
2336 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
2337 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
2339 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
2341 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
2342 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
2344 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
2345 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
2347 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
2350 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
2351 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
2353 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
2354 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2356 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
2357 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
2358 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
2359 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2361 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
2362 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
2363 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2365 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
2366 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
2367 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
2369 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
2370 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
2371 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
2372 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
2374 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
2375 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
2376 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
2378 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
2379 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
2381 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
2382 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
2384 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
2386 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
2387 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
2388 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
2390 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
2391 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
2393 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
2394 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
2396 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
2397 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
2399 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
2400 [present in the original version]
2403 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
2407 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
2409 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
2410 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
2411 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
2413 Using pr -m -s (i.e. merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
2414 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
2416 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
2420 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
2421 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
2423 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
2424 support but with insufficient /proc support.
2426 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
2427 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
2429 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
2430 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
2431 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
2432 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
2433 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
2434 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
2436 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
2437 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
2440 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
2441 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
2443 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
2446 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
2447 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
2448 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
2450 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
2451 directory is unreadable.
2453 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
2454 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
2455 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
2457 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
2458 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
2459 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
2460 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
2461 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
2464 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
2465 Before it would print nothing.
2467 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
2469 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
2470 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
2471 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
2472 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
2473 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
2474 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
2475 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
2476 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
2478 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
2482 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
2483 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
2484 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
2486 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
2487 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
2488 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
2489 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
2492 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
2496 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
2497 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
2498 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
2499 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
2500 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
2501 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
2502 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2504 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
2505 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
2506 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
2507 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
2508 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
2509 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
2510 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
2511 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
2513 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
2514 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
2515 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
2518 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
2522 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
2523 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
2525 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
2526 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
2527 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
2529 ** Improved robustness
2531 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
2532 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
2533 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
2536 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
2540 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
2541 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
2542 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
2543 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
2544 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2546 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
2550 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
2553 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
2557 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
2558 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
2559 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
2560 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
2562 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
2563 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
2565 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
2566 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
2567 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
2570 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
2572 ** Improved robustness
2574 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
2575 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
2577 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
2578 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
2579 or NFS-mounted partition.
2581 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
2582 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
2586 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
2587 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
2588 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
2589 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
2590 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
2591 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
2593 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
2594 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
2596 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
2597 or neglect to report file removal.
2599 For the "groups" command:
2601 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
2602 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
2604 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
2606 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
2608 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
2612 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
2613 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
2616 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
2618 ** Changes in behavior
2620 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
2621 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
2622 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
2623 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
2625 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
2626 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
2627 a final './' or '../' component.
2629 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
2630 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
2631 this only for pipes.
2633 ** Infrastructure changes
2635 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
2636 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
2637 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
2638 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
2642 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
2643 name is "." or "..".
2645 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
2646 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
2647 dirent.d_type support.
2649 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
2650 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
2652 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
2653 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
2654 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
2655 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
2658 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
2660 ** Changes in behavior
2662 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
2666 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
2667 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
2671 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
2672 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
2673 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
2675 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
2676 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2678 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
2679 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2681 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
2683 ** Improved robustness
2685 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
2686 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
2687 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
2689 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
2690 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
2693 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
2694 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
2696 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
2697 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
2699 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
2700 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
2702 ** Changes in behavior
2704 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
2705 where the two are distinct.
2707 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
2708 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
2709 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
2710 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
2711 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
2712 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
2713 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
2714 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
2715 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
2716 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
2717 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
2718 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
2719 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
2720 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
2721 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
2722 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
2723 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
2725 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
2726 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
2727 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
2729 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
2730 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
2731 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
2732 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
2735 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
2736 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
2740 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
2741 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
2742 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
2743 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
2745 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
2746 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
2747 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
2749 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
2750 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
2751 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
2752 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
2753 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
2756 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
2757 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
2759 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
2760 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
2761 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
2762 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
2764 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
2765 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
2766 successful and the output is easier to parse.
2768 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
2769 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
2770 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
2771 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
2773 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
2774 and sticky) with the -m option.
2776 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
2777 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
2778 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
2779 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
2780 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
2782 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
2783 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
2785 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
2789 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
2790 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
2791 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
2792 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
2794 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
2796 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
2798 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
2799 silently ignoring one of them.
2801 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
2802 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
2803 containing this change was 5.92.
2805 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
2806 automatically newline terminated.
2808 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
2809 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
2810 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
2811 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
2814 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
2815 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
2816 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
2819 ** Scheduled for removal
2821 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
2822 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
2824 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
2825 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
2826 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
2827 command to unlink a directory.
2829 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
2830 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
2831 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
2832 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
2836 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
2837 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
2838 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
2839 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
2840 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
2841 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
2845 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
2846 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
2848 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
2850 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
2851 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
2852 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
2854 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
2855 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
2858 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
2859 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
2861 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
2862 list directories before files.
2864 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
2865 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
2866 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
2867 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
2870 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
2872 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
2874 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
2875 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
2876 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
2878 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
2879 list of NUL-terminated file names.
2883 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
2884 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
2885 usually printing nothing.
2887 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
2889 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
2890 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
2891 them with hard-linked directories.
2893 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
2894 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
2895 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
2897 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
2898 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
2899 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
2901 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
2904 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
2905 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
2907 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
2908 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
2910 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
2911 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
2913 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
2914 all command-line arguments.
2916 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
2918 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
2920 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
2921 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
2923 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
2925 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
2926 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
2927 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
2928 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
2929 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
2931 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
2932 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
2934 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
2935 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
2936 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
2937 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
2939 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
2941 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
2945 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
2946 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
2948 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
2949 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
2951 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
2952 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
2954 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
2955 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
2957 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
2958 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
2960 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
2962 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
2963 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
2964 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
2967 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
2969 ** Build-related bug fixes
2971 installing .mo files would fail
2974 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
2978 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
2980 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
2983 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
2987 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
2988 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
2992 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
2994 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
2995 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
2997 ** Deprecated options
2999 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
3000 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
3002 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
3006 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
3008 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
3009 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
3010 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
3011 conforming to older POSIX versions.
3013 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
3016 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
3022 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
3027 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
3029 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
3031 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
3032 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
3033 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
3035 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
3036 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
3037 problematic usages. These include:
3039 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
3040 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
3041 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
3042 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
3043 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
3044 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
3045 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
3046 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
3047 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
3049 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
3050 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
3052 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
3053 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
3054 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
3055 Meeting <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
3057 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
3058 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
3059 between binary and text files.
3061 The following programs now always use text input/output:
3065 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
3069 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
3070 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
3072 head tac tail tee tr
3073 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
3075 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
3076 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
3078 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
3079 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
3080 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
3082 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
3084 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
3086 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
3087 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
3088 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
3092 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
3094 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
3095 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
3097 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
3098 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
3099 blocks until F contains N blocks.
3103 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
3104 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
3108 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
3109 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
3110 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
3114 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
3115 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
3119 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
3121 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
3123 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
3127 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
3128 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
3129 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
3131 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
3132 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
3133 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6232>.
3134 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
3135 <http://www.opengroup.org/austin/interps/doc.tpl?gdid=6233>.
3137 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
3141 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
3142 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
3143 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
3145 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
3147 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
3148 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
3149 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
3150 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
3152 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
3154 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
3155 rather than silently wrapping around.
3157 ls now refuses to generate time stamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
3158 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
3160 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
3161 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
3163 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
3164 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
3165 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
3166 file /tmp/a/b/file".
3168 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
3170 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
3172 ** Improved robustness
3174 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
3175 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
3176 no matter how large the result.
3178 ** Improved portability
3180 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
3181 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
3183 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
3185 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
3186 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
3187 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
3189 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
3190 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
3194 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
3195 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
3197 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
3199 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
3200 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
3201 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
3202 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
3204 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
3205 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
3207 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
3208 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
3209 categories if not specified by dircolors.
3211 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
3213 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
3214 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
3216 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
3217 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
3219 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
3221 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
3222 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
3224 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
3225 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
3227 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
3228 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
3229 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
3231 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
3233 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
3235 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
3239 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
3241 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
3242 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
3243 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
3245 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
3246 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
3248 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
3249 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
3250 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
3252 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
3253 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
3255 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
3256 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
3257 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
3258 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
3260 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
3261 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
3263 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
3264 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
3265 the file system does not support it.
3267 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
3269 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
3270 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
3272 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
3274 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
3275 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
3277 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
3278 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
3279 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
3280 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
3282 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
3283 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
3286 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
3287 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
3288 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
3289 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
3291 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
3292 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
3293 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
3294 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
3296 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
3297 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
3299 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
3301 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
3302 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
3303 reporting incorrect results.
3307 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
3308 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
3310 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
3313 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
3315 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
3316 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
3318 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
3319 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
3321 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
3324 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
3325 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
3326 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
3327 the file name does not look like a page range.
3329 printf has several changes:
3331 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
3332 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
3334 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
3335 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
3336 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
3338 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
3339 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
3342 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
3343 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
3345 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
3346 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
3348 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
3350 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
3351 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
3353 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
3355 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
3357 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
3358 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
3359 when first encountering the directory.
3363 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
3364 output; POSIX requires this.
3366 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
3367 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
3369 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
3371 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
3372 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
3374 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
3375 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
3377 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
3378 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
3379 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
3380 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
3381 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
3382 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
3383 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
3385 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
3386 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
3387 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
3389 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
3390 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
3392 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
3394 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
3396 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
3397 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
3398 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
3399 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
3401 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
3405 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
3406 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
3407 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
3408 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
3409 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
3411 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
3412 commands now output time stamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
3413 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
3415 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
3416 is longer than PATH_MAX.
3418 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
3419 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
3421 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
3422 destination if the resulting time stamp would be no newer than the
3423 preexisting time stamp. This saves work in the common case when
3424 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
3425 system with a coarse time stamp resolution.
3427 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
3428 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
3430 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
3431 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
3433 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
3435 nocreat do not create the output file
3436 excl fail if the output file already exists
3437 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
3438 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
3440 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
3442 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
3443 direct use direct I/O for data
3444 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
3445 sync likewise, but also for metadata
3446 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
3447 nofollow do not follow symlinks
3448 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
3450 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
3452 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
3453 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
3456 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
3457 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
3458 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
3459 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
3460 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
3461 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
3463 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
3464 list of NUL-terminated file names.
3466 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
3469 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
3471 Dates can have fractional time stamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
3473 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
3474 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
3476 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
3477 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
3478 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
3480 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
3481 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
3482 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
3484 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
3486 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
3487 nanosecond-resolution time stamps.
3489 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
3490 for compatibility with bash.
3492 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
3494 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
3495 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
3496 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
3497 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
3499 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
3500 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
3502 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
3503 ls supports TABSIZE.
3504 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
3505 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
3506 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
3508 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
3511 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
3513 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
3514 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
3515 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
3516 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
3517 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
3518 an offset, not as a file name.
3520 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
3521 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
3523 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
3524 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
3526 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
3527 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
3529 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
3530 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
3531 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
3533 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
3534 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
3536 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
3537 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
3541 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
3543 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
3545 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
3549 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
3550 or more arguments between partitions.
3552 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
3553 holes in the destination.
3555 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
3556 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
3557 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
3558 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
3559 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
3560 terminates immediately.
3562 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
3564 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
3566 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
3567 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
3568 not the empty string.
3570 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
3571 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
3575 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
3576 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
3577 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
3580 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
3587 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
3591 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
3592 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
3594 time stamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
3595 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
3597 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
3598 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
3599 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
3602 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
3606 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
3607 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
3609 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
3610 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
3612 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
3613 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
3614 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
3616 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
3618 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
3621 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
3623 ** Configuration option
3625 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
3626 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
3630 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
3631 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
3635 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
3636 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
3637 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
3640 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
3641 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
3642 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
3643 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
3644 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
3645 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3646 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
3649 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
3653 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
3654 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
3655 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
3657 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
3658 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
3660 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
3662 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
3663 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
3664 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
3665 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
3667 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
3669 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
3670 not just the ones that reference directories
3672 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
3673 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
3675 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
3676 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
3677 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
3679 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
3680 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
3681 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
3682 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
3683 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
3684 ragged when a datum was too wide.
3686 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
3691 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
3692 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
3694 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
3696 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
3698 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
3700 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
3701 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
3703 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
3704 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
3706 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
3708 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
3712 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
3714 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
3716 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
3717 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
3718 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
3719 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
3720 resolution is the best we can do right now.
3722 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
3723 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
3725 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
3726 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
3728 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
3729 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
3731 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
3732 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
3733 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
3737 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
3738 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
3739 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
3740 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
3741 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
3742 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
3743 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
3744 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
3745 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
3746 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
3747 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
3748 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
3749 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
3750 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
3752 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
3754 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
3755 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
3757 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
3759 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
3761 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
3762 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
3764 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
3766 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
3767 without a trailing newline.
3769 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
3770 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
3772 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
3775 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
3779 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
3781 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
3783 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
3784 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
3785 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
3786 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
3788 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
3790 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
3791 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
3792 be printed without leading spaces.
3794 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
3795 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
3800 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
3801 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
3802 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
3804 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
3806 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
3807 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
3809 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
3810 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
3812 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
3813 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
3815 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
3817 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
3819 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
3821 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
3822 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
3824 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
3826 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3828 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
3829 byte offsets are specified.
3832 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
3835 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
3838 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
3839 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
3840 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
3841 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
3842 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
3843 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
3844 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
3845 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
3846 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
3847 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
3848 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
3849 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
3850 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
3851 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
3852 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
3853 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
3854 directory where M has write access.
3855 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
3856 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
3857 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
3860 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
3861 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
3862 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
3863 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
3864 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
3865 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
3866 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
3867 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
3868 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
3869 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
3870 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
3871 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
3872 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
3873 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
3874 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
3875 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
3876 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
3877 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
3878 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
3879 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
3880 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
3881 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
3882 appeared one additional time.
3884 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
3885 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
3886 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
3887 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
3890 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
3891 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
3892 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
3893 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
3894 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
3895 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
3896 if there were more than 338.
3898 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
3899 - false --help now exits nonzero
3902 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
3903 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
3904 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
3905 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
3908 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
3909 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
3910 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
3911 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
3912 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
3915 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
3916 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
3917 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
3918 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
3919 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
3920 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
3921 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3924 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
3925 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
3926 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
3927 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
3928 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
3929 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
3931 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
3932 under certain unusual conditions
3933 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
3934 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
3937 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
3938 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
3939 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
3940 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
3941 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
3942 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
3943 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
3944 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
3945 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
3946 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
3947 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
3948 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
3949 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
3950 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
3951 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
3952 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
3955 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
3956 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
3959 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
3960 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
3961 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
3962 involving hard-linked directories
3963 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
3964 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
3965 character-special and block files
3968 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
3969 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
3970 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
3971 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
3972 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
3973 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
3974 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
3975 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
3976 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
3978 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
3979 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
3980 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
3981 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
3982 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
3983 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
3984 specified on the command line.
3985 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
3986 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
3987 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
3988 the first file untouched.
3989 * readlink: new program
3990 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
3991 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
3992 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
3993 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
3994 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
3995 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
3998 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
3999 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
4000 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
4001 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
4002 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
4003 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
4004 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
4005 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
4006 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
4007 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
4008 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
4009 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
4011 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
4012 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
4013 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
4015 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
4016 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
4017 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
4018 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
4019 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
4020 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
4021 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
4022 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
4025 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
4026 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
4029 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
4030 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
4031 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
4032 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
4033 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
4034 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
4035 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
4038 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
4039 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
4041 ========================================================================
4042 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
4043 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4046 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
4048 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
4049 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
4050 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
4051 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
4052 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
4053 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
4054 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
4055 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
4056 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
4057 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
4058 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
4059 The old options will continue to work for a while.
4061 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
4062 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
4063 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
4064 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
4066 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
4069 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
4071 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
4072 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
4073 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
4074 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
4075 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
4076 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
4077 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
4080 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
4081 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
4082 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
4083 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
4084 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
4085 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
4086 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
4087 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
4088 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
4089 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
4090 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
4091 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
4092 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
4093 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
4094 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
4095 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
4097 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
4098 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
4100 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
4101 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
4102 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
4103 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
4104 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
4105 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
4107 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
4108 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
4109 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
4110 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
4111 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
4112 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
4113 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
4115 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
4116 the source files in the following example:
4117 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
4118 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
4119 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
4120 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
4121 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
4122 links between source files with --preserve=links
4123 * cp accepts new options:
4124 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
4125 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
4126 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
4127 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
4128 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
4129 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
4130 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
4131 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
4132 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
4134 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
4135 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
4136 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
4137 even though it's older than dest.
4138 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
4139 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
4140 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
4141 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
4142 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
4144 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
4145 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
4146 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
4147 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
4148 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
4149 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
4150 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
4152 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style time stamps like
4153 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
4154 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style time stamps like '2001-05-14 '
4156 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent time stamps like
4157 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
4158 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
4159 time stamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
4160 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
4161 This is the default.
4163 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
4164 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
4165 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
4166 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
4167 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
4169 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
4172 ========================================================================
4173 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
4174 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
4177 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
4178 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
4180 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4181 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
4182 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
4183 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
4184 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
4186 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
4187 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
4188 that specifies a non-directory
4191 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
4192 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
4193 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
4194 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
4195 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
4196 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
4197 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
4198 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4199 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
4200 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
4201 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
4202 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
4203 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
4204 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
4205 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
4206 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
4207 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
4208 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
4209 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
4210 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
4211 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
4212 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
4213 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
4214 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
4216 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
4217 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
4218 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
4220 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
4222 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
4223 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
4225 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
4226 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
4227 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
4228 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
4229 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
4231 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
4232 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
4233 required support; from Bruno Haible.
4234 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
4235 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
4237 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
4239 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
4240 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
4241 * still more portability fixes
4242 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
4243 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4245 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
4247 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
4249 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
4251 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
4252 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
4253 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
4254 there is any time remaining
4255 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
4257 ========================================================================
4258 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
4259 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
4261 This package began as the union of the following:
4262 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
4264 ========================================================================
4266 Copyright (C) 2001-2014 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4268 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
4269 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
4270 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
4271 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
4272 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
4273 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.