1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 'comm --output-delimiter="" --total' now delimits columns in the total
8 line with the NUL character, consistent with NUL column delimiters in
9 the rest of the output. Previously no delimiters were used for the
10 total line in this case.
11 [bug introduced with the --total option in coreutils-8.26]
13 'cp -rx / /mnt' no longer complains "cannot create directory /mnt/".
14 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
16 'mv --backup=simple f d/' no longer mistakenly backs up d/f to f~.
17 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
19 runcon --compute no longer looks up the specified command in the $PATH
20 so that there is no mismatch between the inspected and executed file.
21 [bug introduced when runcon was introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
23 'sort -g' no longer infloops when given multiple NaNs on platforms
24 like x86_64 where 'long double' has padding bits in memory.
25 Although the fix alters sort -g's NaN ordering, that ordering has
26 long been documented to be platform-dependent.
27 [bug introduced 1999-05-02 and only partly fixed in coreutils-8.14]
29 stty ispeed and ospeed options no longer accept and silently ignore
30 invalid speed arguments, or give false warnings for valid speeds.
31 Now they're validated against both the general accepted set,
32 and the system supported set of valid speeds.
33 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
35 ** Changes in behavior
37 'cp --reflink=always A B' no longer leaves behind a newly created
38 empty file B merely because copy-on-write clones are not supported.
40 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' go back to sorting ".0" before ".A",
41 reverting to the behavior in coreutils-9.0 and earlier.
42 This behavior is now documented.
44 runcon now exits with status 125 for internal errors. Previously upon
45 internal errors it would exit with status 1, which was less distinguishable
46 from errors from the invoked command.
48 ’stat -c %s' now prints sizes as unsigned, consistent with 'ls'.
52 factor now accepts the --exponents (-h) option to print factors
53 in the form p^e, rather than repeating the prime p, e times.
55 ls now supports the --time=modification option, to explicitly
56 select the default mtime timestamp for display and sorting.
60 date --debug now diagnoses if multiple --date or --set options are
61 specified, as only the last specified is significant in that case.
64 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.1 (2022-04-15) [stable]
68 chmod -R no longer exits with error status when encountering symlinks.
69 All files would be processed correctly, but the exit status was incorrect.
70 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
72 If 'cp -Z A B' checks B's status and some other process then removes B,
73 cp no longer creates B with a too-generous SELinux security context
74 before adjusting it to the correct value.
75 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
77 'cp --preserve=ownership A B' no longer ignores the umask when creating B.
78 Also, 'cp --preserve-xattr A B' is less likely to temporarily chmod u+w B.
79 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.7]
81 On macOS, 'cp A B' no longer miscopies when A is in an APFS file system
82 and B is in some other file system.
83 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
85 On macOS, fmt no longer corrupts multi-byte characters
86 by misdetecting their component bytes as spaces.
87 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
89 'id xyz' now uses the name 'xyz' to determine groups, instead of xyz's uid.
90 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
92 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' no longer mishandle corner cases like "a..a" vs "a.+"
93 or lines containing NULs. Their behavior now matches the documentation
94 for file names like ".m4" that consist entirely of an extension,
95 and the documentation has been clarified for unusual cases.
96 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
98 On macOS, 'mv A B' no longer fails with "Operation not supported"
99 when A and B are in the same tmpfs file system.
100 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
102 'mv -T --backup=numbered A B/' no longer miscalculates the backup number
103 for B when A is a directory, possibly inflooping.
104 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.3]
106 ** Changes in behavior
108 cat now uses the copy_file_range syscall if available, when doing
109 simple copies between regular files. This may be more efficient, by avoiding
110 user space copies, and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking.
112 chown and chroot now warn about usages like "chown root.root f",
113 which have the nonstandard and long-obsolete "." separator that
114 causes problems on platforms where user names contain ".".
115 Applications should use ":" instead of ".".
117 cksum no longer allows abbreviated algorithm names,
118 so that forward compatibility and robustness is improved.
120 date +'%-N' now suppresses excess trailing digits, instead of always
121 padding them with zeros to 9 digits. It uses clock_getres and
122 clock_gettime to infer the clock resolution.
124 dd conv=fsync now synchronizes output even after a write error,
125 and similarly for dd conv=fdatasync.
127 dd now counts bytes instead of blocks if a block count ends in "B".
128 For example, 'dd count=100KiB' now copies 100 KiB of data, not
129 102,400 blocks of data. The flags count_bytes, skip_bytes and
130 seek_bytes are therefore obsolescent and are no longer documented,
131 though they still work.
133 ls no longer colors files with capabilities by default, as file-based
134 capabilties are very rarely used, and lookup increases processing per file by
135 about 30%. It's best to use getcap [-r] to identify files with capabilities.
137 ls no longer tries to automount files, reverting to the behavior
138 before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
140 stat no longer tries to automount files by default, reverting to the
141 behavior before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
142 Only `stat --cached=never` will continue to automount files.
144 timeout --foreground --kill-after=... will now exit with status 137
145 if the kill signal was sent, which is consistent with the behavior
146 when the --foreground option is not specified. This allows users to
147 distinguish if the command was more forcefully terminated.
151 dd now supports the aliases iseek=N for skip=N, and oseek=N for seek=N,
152 like FreeBSD and other operating systems.
154 dircolors takes a new --print-ls-colors option to display LS_COLORS
155 entries, on separate lines, colored according to the entry color code.
157 dircolors will now also match COLORTERM in addition to TERM environment
158 variables. The default config will apply colors with any COLORTERM set.
162 cp, mv, and install now use openat-like syscalls when copying to a directory.
163 This avoids some race conditions and should be more efficient.
165 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone if source and destination
166 are regular files on the same APFS file system, the destination does
167 not already exist, and cp is preserving mode and timestamps (e.g.,
170 The new 'date' option --resolution outputs the timestamp resolution.
172 With conv=fdatasync or conv=fsync, dd status=progress now reports
173 any extra final progress just before synchronizing output data,
174 since synchronizing can take a long time.
176 printf now supports printing the numeric value of multi-byte characters.
178 sort --debug now diagnoses issues with --field-separator characters
179 that conflict with characters possibly used in numbers.
181 'tail -f file | filter' now exits on Solaris when filter exits.
183 root invoked coreutils, that are built and run in single binary mode,
184 now adjust /proc/$pid/cmdline to be more specific to the utility
185 being run, rather than using the general "coreutils" binary name.
189 AIX builds no longer fail because some library functions are not found.
190 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.32]
193 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.0 (2021-09-24) [stable]
197 chmod -v no longer misreports modes of dangling symlinks.
198 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
200 cp -a --attributes-only now never removes destination files,
201 even if the destination files are hardlinked, or the source
202 is a non regular file.
203 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
205 csplit --suppress-matched now elides the last matched line
206 when a specific number of pattern matches are performed.
207 [bug introduced with the --suppress-matched feature in coreutils-8.22]
209 df no longer outputs duplicate remote mounts in the presence of bind mounts.
210 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
212 df no longer mishandles command-line args that it pre-mounts
213 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.29]
215 du no longer crashes on XFS file systems when the directory hierarchy is
216 heavily changed during the run.
217 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
219 env -S no longer crashes when given unusual whitespace characters
220 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.30]
222 expr no longer mishandles unmatched \(...\) in regular expressions.
223 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
225 ls no longer crashes when printing the SELinux context for unstatable files.
226 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.91]
228 mkdir -m no longer mishandles modes more generous than the umask.
229 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
231 nl now handles single character --section-delimiter arguments,
232 by assuming a second ':' character has been specified, as specified by POSIX.
233 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
235 pr again adjusts tabs in input, to maintain alignment in multi column output.
236 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
238 rm no longer skips an extra file when the removal of an empty directory fails.
239 [bug introduced by the rewrite to use fts in coreutils-8.0]
241 split --number=K/N will again correctly split chunk K of N to stdout.
242 Previously a chunk starting after 128KiB, output the wrong part of the file.
243 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
245 tail -f no longer overruns a stack buffer when given too many files
246 to follow and ulimit -n exceeds 1024.
247 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
249 tr no longer crashes when using --complement with certain
250 invalid combinations of case character classes.
251 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
253 basenc --base64 --decode no longer silently discards decoded characters
254 on (1024*5) buffer boundaries
255 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
257 ** Changes in behavior
259 cp and install now default to copy-on-write (COW) if available.
261 cp, install and mv now use the copy_file_range syscall if available.
262 Also, they use lseek+SEEK_HOLE rather than ioctl+FS_IOC_FIEMAP on sparse
263 files, as lseek is simpler and more portable.
265 On GNU/Linux systems, ls no longer issues an error message on a
266 directory merely because it was removed. This reverts a change
267 that was made in release 8.32.
269 ptx -T no longer attempts to substitute old-fashioned TeX escapes
270 for 8-bit non-ASCII alphabetic characters. TeX indexes should
271 instead use '\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}' or equivalent.
273 stat will use decomposed (major,minor) device numbers in its default format.
274 This is less ambiguous, and more consistent with ls.
276 sum [-r] will output a file name, even if only a single name is passed.
277 This is consistent with sum -s, cksum, and other sum(1) implementations.
281 cksum now supports the -a (--algorithm) option to select any
282 of the existing sum, md5sum, b2sum, sha*sum implementations etc.
283 cksum now subsumes all of these programs, and coreutils
284 will introduce no future standalone checksum utility.
286 cksum -a now supports the 'sm3' argument, to use the SM3 digest algorithm.
288 cksum --check now supports auto detecting the digest type to use,
289 when verifying tagged format checksums.
291 expr and factor now support bignums on all platforms.
293 ls --classify now supports the "always", "auto", or "never" flags,
294 to support only outputting classifier characters if connected to a tty.
296 ls now accepts the --sort=width option, to sort by file name width.
297 This is useful to more compactly organize the default vertical column output.
299 ls now accepts the --zero option, to terminate each output line with
300 NUL instead of newline.
302 nl --line-increment can now take a negative number to decrement the count.
304 stat supports more formats for representing decomposed device numbers.
305 %Hd,%Ld and %Hr,%Lr will output major,minor device numbers and device types
306 respectively. %d corresponds to st_dev and %r to std_rdev.
310 cat --show-ends will now show \r\n as ^M$. Previously the \r was taken
311 literally, thus overwriting the first character in the line with '$'.
313 cksum [-a crc] is now up to 4 times faster by using a slice by 8 algorithm,
314 and at least 8 times faster where pclmul instructions are supported.
315 A new --debug option will indicate if pclmul is being used.
317 md5sum --check now supports checksum files with CRLF line endings.
318 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
320 df now recognizes these file systems as remote:
321 acfs, coda, fhgfs, gpfs, ibrix, ocfs2, and vxfs.
323 rmdir now clarifies the error if a symlink_to_dir/ has not been traversed.
324 This is the case on GNU/Linux systems, where the trailing slash is ignored.
326 stat and tail now know about the "devmem", "exfat", "secretmem", "vboxsf",
327 and "zonefs" file system types. stat -f -c%T now reports the file system
328 type, and tail -f uses polling for "vboxsf" and inotify for the others.
330 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts on macOS.
332 wc is up to 5 times faster when counting only new line characters,
333 where avx2 instructions are supported.
334 A new --debug option will indicate if avx2 is being used.
337 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.32 (2020-03-05) [stable]
341 cp now copies /dev/fd/N correctly on platforms like Solaris where
342 it is a character-special file whose minor device number is N.
343 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
345 dd conv=fdatasync no longer reports a "Bad file descriptor" error
346 when fdatasync is interrupted, and dd now retries interrupted calls
347 to close, fdatasync, fstat and fsync instead of incorrectly
348 reporting an "Interrupted system call" error.
349 [bugs introduced in coreutils-6.0]
351 df now correctly parses the /proc/self/mountinfo file for unusual entries
352 like ones with '\r' in a field value ("mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /foo$'\r'bar"),
353 when the source field is empty ('mount -t tmpfs "" /mnt'), and when the
354 filesystem type contains characters like a blank which need escaping.
355 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.24 with the introduction of reading
356 the /proc/self/mountinfo file]
358 factor again outputs immediately when stdout is a tty but stdin is not.
359 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
361 ln works again on old systems without O_DIRECTORY support (like Solaris 10),
362 and on systems where symlink ("x", ".") fails with errno == EINVAL
363 (like Solaris 10 and Solaris 11).
364 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
366 rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty now works correctly for directories
367 that fail to be removed due to permission issues. Previously the exit status
368 was reversed, failing for non empty and succeeding for empty directories.
369 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
371 'shuf -r -n 0 file' no longer mistakenly reads from standard input.
372 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
374 split no longer reports a "output file suffixes exhausted" error
375 when the specified number of files is evenly divisible by 10, 16, 26,
376 for --numeric, --hex, or default alphabetic suffixes respectively.
377 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
379 seq no longer prints an extra line under certain circumstances (such as
380 'seq -f "%g " 1000000 1000000').
381 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.10]
383 ** Changes in behavior
385 Several programs now check that numbers end properly. For example,
386 'du -d 1x' now reports an error instead of silently ignoring the 'x'.
387 Affected programs and options include du -d, expr's numeric operands
388 on non-GMP builds, install -g and -o, ls's TABSIZE environment
389 variable, mknod b and c, ptx -g and -w, shuf -n, and sort --batch-size
392 date now parses military time zones in accordance with common usage:
393 "A" to "M" are equivalent to UTC+1 to UTC+12
394 "N" to "Y" are equivalent to UTC-1 to UTC-12
395 "Z" is "zulu" time (UTC).
396 For example, 'date -d "09:00B" is now equivalent to 9am in UTC+2 time zone.
397 Previously, military time zones were parsed according to the obsolete
398 rfc822, with their value negated (e.g., "B" was equivalent to UTC-2).
399 [The old behavior was introduced in sh-utils 2.0.15 ca. 1999, predating
402 date now pads nanoseconds on the right, not the left. For example,
403 if the time is currently 1590020079.003388470 seconds after the
404 Epoch, then "date '+%s.%-N'" formerly output "1590020079.3388470",
405 and it now outputs "1590020079.00338847".
407 ls issues an error message on a removed directory, on GNU/Linux systems.
408 Previously no error and no entries were output, and so indistinguishable
409 from an empty directory, with default ls options.
411 uniq no longer uses strcoll() to determine string equivalence,
412 and so will operate more efficiently and consistently.
416 ls now supports the --time=birth option to display and sort by
417 file creation time, where available.
419 od --skip-bytes now can use lseek even if the input is not a regular
420 file, greatly improving performance in some cases.
422 stat(1) supports a new --cached= option, used on systems with statx(2)
423 to control cache coherency of file system attributes,
424 useful on network file systems.
428 stat and ls now use the statx() system call where available, which can
429 operate more efficiently by only retrieving requested attributes.
431 stat and tail now know about the "binderfs", "dma-buf-fs", "erofs",
432 "ppc-cmm-fs", and "z3fold" file systems.
433 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
437 gzip-compressed tarballs are distributed once again
440 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.31 (2019-03-10) [stable]
444 'base64 a b' now correctly diagnoses 'b' as the extra operand, not 'a'.
445 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
447 When B already exists, 'cp -il A B' no longer immediately fails
448 after asking the user whether to proceed.
449 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
451 df no longer corrupts displayed multibyte characters on macOS.
452 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.18]
454 seq no longer outputs inconsistent decimal point characters
455 for the last number, when locales are misconfigured.
456 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
458 shred, sort, and split no longer falsely report ftruncate errors
459 when outputting to less-common file types. For example, the shell
460 command 'sort /dev/null -o /dev/stdout | cat' no longer fails with
461 an "error truncating" diagnostic.
462 [bug was introduced with coreutils-8.18 for sort and split, and
463 (for shared memory objects only) with fileutils-4.1 for shred]
465 sync no longer fails for write-only file arguments.
466 [bug introduced with argument support to sync in coreutils-8.24]
468 'tail -f file | filter' no longer exits immediately on AIX.
469 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
471 'tail -f file | filter' no longer goes into an infinite loop
472 if filter exits and SIGPIPE is ignored.
473 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
475 ** Changes in behavior
477 cksum, dd, hostid, hostname, link, logname, sleep, tsort, unlink,
478 uptime, users, whoami, yes: now always process --help and --version options,
479 regardless of any other arguments present before any optional '--'
480 end-of-options marker.
482 nohup now processes --help and --version as first options even if other
485 'yes a -- b' now outputs 'a b' instead of including the end-of-options
486 marker as before: 'a -- b'.
488 echo now always processes backslash escapes when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
489 environment variable is set.
491 When possible 'ln A B' now merely links A to B and reports an error
492 if this fails, instead of statting A and B before linking. This
493 uses fewer system calls and avoids some races. The old statting
494 approach is still used in situations where hard links to directories
495 are allowed (e.g., NetBSD when superuser).
497 ls --group-directories-first will also group symlinks to directories.
499 'test -a FILE' is not supported anymore. Long ago, there were concerns about
500 the high probability of humans confusing the -a primary with the -a binary
501 operator, so POSIX changed this to 'test -e FILE'. Scripts using it were
502 already broken and non-portable; the -a unary operator was never documented.
504 wc now treats non breaking space characters as word delimiters
505 unless the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set.
509 id now supports specifying multiple users.
511 'date' now supports the '+' conversion specification flag,
512 introduced in POSIX.1-2017.
514 printf, seq, sleep, tail, and timeout now accept floating point
515 numbers in either the current or the C locale. For example, if the
516 current locale's decimal point is ',', 'sleep 0,1' and 'sleep 0.1'
517 now mean the same thing. Previously, these commands accepted only
518 C-locale syntax with '.' as the decimal point. The new behavior is
519 more compatible with other implementations in non-C locales.
521 test now supports the '-N FILE' unary operator (like e.g. bash) to check
522 whether FILE exists and has been modified since it was last read.
524 env now supports '--default-signal[=SIG]', '--ignore-signal[=SIG]', and
525 '--block-signal[=SIG], to setup signal handling before executing a program.
527 env now supports '--list-signal-handling' to indicate non-default
528 signal handling before executing a program.
532 basenc is added to complement existing base64,base32 commands,
533 and encodes and decodes printable text using various common encodings:
534 base64,base64url,base32,base32hex,base16,base2,z85.
538 ls -l now better aligns abbreviated months containing digits,
539 which is common in Asian locales.
541 stat and tail now know about the "sdcardfs" file system on Android.
542 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
544 stat now prints file creation time when supported by the file system,
545 on GNU Linux systems with glibc >= 2.28 and kernel >= 4.11.
548 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.30 (2018-07-01) [stable]
552 'cp --symlink SRC DST' will again correctly validate DST.
553 If DST is a regular file and SRC is a symlink to DST,
554 then cp will no longer allow that operation to clobber DST.
555 Also with -d, if DST is a symlink, then it can always be replaced,
556 even if it points to SRC on a separate device.
557 [bugs introduced with coreutils-8.27]
559 'cp -n -u' and 'mv -n -u' now consistently ignore the -u option.
560 Previously, this option combination suffered from race conditions
561 that caused -u to sometimes override -n.
562 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
564 'cp -a --no-preserve=mode' now sets appropriate default permissions
565 for non regular files like fifos and character device nodes etc.,
566 and leaves mode bits of existing files unchanged.
567 Previously it would have set executable bits on created special files,
568 and set mode bits for existing files as if they had been created.
569 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.20]
571 'cp --remove-destination file symlink' now removes the symlink
572 even if it can't be traversed.
573 [bug introduced with --remove-destination in fileutils-4.1.1]
575 ls no longer truncates the abbreviated month names that have a
576 display width between 6 and 12 inclusive. Previously this would have
577 output ambiguous months for Arabic or Catalan locales.
579 'ls -aA' is now equivalent to 'ls -A', since -A now overrides -a.
580 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
582 'mv -n A B' no longer suffers from a race condition that can
583 overwrite a simultaneously-created B. This bug fix requires
584 platform support for the renameat2 or renameatx_np syscalls, found
585 in recent Linux and macOS kernels. As a side effect, 'mv -n A A'
586 now silently does nothing if A exists.
587 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
589 ** Changes in behavior
591 'cp --force file symlink' now removes the symlink even if
592 it is self referential.
594 ls --color now matches file extensions case insensitively.
598 cp --reflink now supports --reflink=never to enforce a standard copy.
600 env supports a new -v/--debug option to show verbose information about
601 each processing step.
603 env supports a new -S/--split-string=S option to split a single argument
604 string into multiple arguments. Used to pass multiple arguments in scripts
607 md5sum accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output lines with a
608 NUL instead of a newline character. This also disables file name escaping.
609 This also applies to sha*sum and b2sum.
611 rm --preserve-root now supports the --preserve-root=all option to
612 reject any command line argument that is mounted to a separate file system.
616 cut supports line lengths up to the max file size on 32 bit systems.
617 Previously only offsets up to SIZE_MAX-1 were supported.
619 stat and tail now know about the "exfs" file system, which is a
620 version of XFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type,
621 and tail -f uses inotify.
623 wc avoids redundant processing of ASCII text in multibyte locales,
624 which is especially significant on macOS.
627 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.29 (2017-12-27) [stable]
631 b2sum no longer crashes when processing certain truncated check files.
632 [bug introduced with b2sum coreutils-8.26]
634 dd now ensures the correct cache ranges are specified for the "nocache"
635 and "direct" flags. Previously some pages in the page cache were not
636 invalidated. [bug introduced for "direct" in coreutils-7.5,
637 and with the "nocache" implementation in coreutils-8.11]
639 df no longer hangs when given a fifo argument.
640 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
642 ptx -S no longer infloops for a pattern which returns zero-length matches.
643 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
645 shred --remove will again repeatedly rename files with shortening names
646 to attempt to hide the original length of the file name.
647 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
649 stty no longer crashes when processing settings with -F also specified.
650 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
652 tail --bytes again supports non seekable inputs on all systems.
653 On systems like android it always tried to process as seekable inputs.
654 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
656 timeout will again notice its managed command exiting, even when
657 invoked with blocked CHLD signal, or in a narrow window where
658 this CHLD signal from the exiting child was missed. In each case
659 timeout would have then waited for the time limit to expire.
660 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
664 timeout now supports the --verbose option to diagnose forced termination.
668 dd now supports iflag=direct with arbitrary sized files on all file systems.
670 tail --bytes=NUM will efficiently seek to the end of block devices,
671 rather than reading from the start.
673 Utilities which do not support long options (other than the default --help
674 and --version), e.g. cksum and sleep, now use more consistent error diagnostic
675 for unknown long options.
679 Default man pages are now distributed which are used if perl is
680 not available on the build system, or when cross compiling.
683 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.28 (2017-09-01) [stable]
687 cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
688 Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
689 mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
690 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
692 When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
693 races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances. Since
694 the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
695 later, the races are still present on other platforms.
696 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
698 cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
699 backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
700 E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
701 now fails instead of losing the data.
702 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
704 cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
705 For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix='' are now no-ops.
706 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
708 date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
709 user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
710 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
712 dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
713 consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
714 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
716 df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
717 specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
718 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
720 df no longer interacts with dummy file system types, so for example
721 no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounted via system.automount(5).
722 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
724 `groups inva:lid root` no longer exits immediately upon failure.
725 Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
726 [bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]
728 kill now converts from number to signal name correctly on AIX.
729 Previously it would have always returned the 'EXIT' name.
730 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
732 ls now quotes symlink targets consistently. Previously it may not
733 have quoted the target name if the link name itself didn't need quoting.
734 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
736 split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
737 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
739 md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
740 ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
741 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
743 tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
744 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
746 tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
747 Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
748 or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
749 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
751 tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
752 non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
753 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
755 uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
756 as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
757 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
759 expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
760 number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.
764 expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
765 by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
766 useful for visualizing diff output for example.
768 ls supports a new --hyperlink[=when] option to output file://
769 format links to files, supported by some terminals.
771 split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
772 lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
774 env now has a --chdir (-C) option to change the working directory before
775 executing the subsidiary program.
777 expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.
779 ** Changes in behavior
781 tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped and the reader of
782 the pipe terminates. That allows `tail -f file | grep -q foo` to return
783 responsively, but does make `tail -f file | :` exit immediately without
784 waiting for data. Instead one should now `tail -f file | grep -q .`
788 mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
790 stat -f -c %l, used to output the max file name length on a file system,
791 is now supported on FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
793 tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
794 when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
795 is effective in this case.
798 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
802 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
803 as appropriate for the -a, --preseve=context, or -Z options.
804 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
806 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
807 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
808 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
810 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
811 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
812 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
814 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
815 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
816 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
818 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
819 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
820 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
822 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
823 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
824 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
825 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
826 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
828 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
829 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
830 depending on the size of the first file processed.
831 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
835 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
836 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
837 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
838 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
840 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
841 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
842 time zone is indeterminate.
844 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
845 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
846 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
847 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
849 stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
850 to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
851 file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
853 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
854 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
856 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
857 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
858 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
862 expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
863 after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
864 specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
867 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
871 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
872 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
875 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
876 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
877 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
879 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
880 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
881 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
882 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
883 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
885 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
886 System V style platforms where this information is available only
887 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
889 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
890 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
892 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
893 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
894 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
896 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
897 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
898 defaults to a different SELinux context.
900 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
901 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
903 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
904 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
905 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
907 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
908 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
910 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
911 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
912 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
914 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
916 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
917 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
919 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
920 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
922 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
923 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
925 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
926 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
928 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
929 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
930 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
931 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
933 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
934 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
935 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
937 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
938 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
939 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
941 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
942 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
943 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
945 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
946 only doing so if --retry is specified.
947 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
949 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
950 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
952 ** Changes in behavior
954 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
956 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
957 values for any argument.
959 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
960 they are out of localtime range.
962 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
963 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
964 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
965 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
969 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
970 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
971 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
973 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
974 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
976 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
977 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
979 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
981 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
982 written to a terminal.
984 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
985 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
987 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
988 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
989 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
990 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
991 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
992 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
993 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
994 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
995 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
996 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
997 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
999 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
1000 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
1004 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
1005 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
1009 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
1011 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
1012 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
1014 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
1017 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
1021 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
1022 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
1023 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
1024 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1026 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
1027 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1029 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
1030 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
1031 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
1033 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
1034 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1036 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
1037 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
1038 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1040 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
1041 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1043 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
1044 that specify an offset for the first field.
1045 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
1047 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
1048 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1052 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
1053 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
1057 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
1058 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
1060 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
1061 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
1062 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
1063 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
1064 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
1066 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
1067 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
1068 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1070 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
1071 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
1072 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
1074 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
1075 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
1077 ** Changes in behavior
1079 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
1080 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
1082 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
1083 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
1085 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
1086 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
1088 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
1089 when outputting to a terminal.
1091 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
1095 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
1096 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
1098 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
1099 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
1101 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
1102 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
1103 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1105 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
1106 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
1108 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
1109 upon detection of a directory cycle.
1110 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1112 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
1114 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
1115 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
1116 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
1118 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
1119 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
1122 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
1126 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
1127 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
1129 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
1130 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1132 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
1133 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1134 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
1136 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
1137 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
1138 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
1139 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
1141 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
1142 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
1143 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
1144 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
1146 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
1147 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1149 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
1150 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
1152 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
1153 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
1154 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
1156 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
1157 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
1158 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1160 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
1161 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
1162 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1164 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
1165 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
1166 character at the 4GiB position.
1167 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1169 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
1170 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1172 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
1173 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1175 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
1176 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
1177 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1179 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
1180 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1182 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
1183 replaced before inotify watches were created.
1184 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1186 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
1187 [bug introduced in the beginning]
1189 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
1190 when those files are being created or renamed.
1191 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1195 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
1196 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
1197 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
1198 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
1200 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
1201 on stderr approximately every second.
1203 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
1204 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
1206 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
1207 other than the default newline character.
1209 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
1210 a useful setting with high latency links.
1212 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
1213 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
1215 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
1216 and output errors in general.
1218 ** Changes in behavior
1220 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
1221 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
1222 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
1223 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1225 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
1226 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
1227 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
1228 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
1229 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
1231 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
1232 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
1234 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
1236 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
1237 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
1239 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
1240 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
1244 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
1245 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
1247 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
1248 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
1250 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
1251 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
1253 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1254 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
1256 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
1258 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
1259 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
1260 documentation are provided.
1263 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
1267 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
1268 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1270 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
1271 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
1272 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
1273 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1275 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
1276 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
1277 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
1278 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1280 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
1281 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
1283 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
1284 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
1286 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
1287 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
1288 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
1289 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
1290 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
1291 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
1292 values are in octal.
1305 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1307 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
1308 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
1309 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
1310 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
1311 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
1312 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1314 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
1315 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
1316 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
1317 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1319 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
1320 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1321 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1323 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
1324 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
1325 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
1326 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
1328 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
1329 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
1330 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1332 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
1333 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
1334 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1336 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
1337 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
1338 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
1339 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
1340 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1342 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
1343 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
1344 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1346 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
1347 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
1349 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
1350 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
1351 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1353 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
1354 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1356 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
1357 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1359 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
1360 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
1362 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
1363 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
1365 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
1366 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
1367 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1369 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
1370 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1374 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
1375 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
1377 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
1378 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
1379 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
1380 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
1381 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
1382 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
1383 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
1384 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
1385 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
1386 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
1387 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
1388 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
1389 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
1390 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
1391 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
1392 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
1393 it suitable for embedded system.
1395 ** Changes in behavior
1397 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
1398 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
1400 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
1401 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
1403 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
1404 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
1405 will result in the delayed output of lines.
1407 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
1408 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
1409 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
1413 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
1414 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
1415 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
1417 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
1419 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
1420 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
1421 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
1423 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
1424 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
1425 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
1426 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
1428 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
1429 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
1431 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
1432 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
1433 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1436 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
1440 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
1441 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
1442 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1444 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
1445 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
1446 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
1447 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1449 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
1450 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
1451 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1453 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
1454 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
1456 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1458 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
1459 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
1460 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
1462 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
1463 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
1464 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1466 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
1467 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
1468 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
1469 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1471 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
1472 from the source, when copying across file systems.
1473 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1475 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
1476 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
1477 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1479 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
1480 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1482 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
1483 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
1484 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
1485 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1487 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
1488 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
1489 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1491 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
1492 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
1493 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1497 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
1498 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
1499 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
1501 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
1502 used to identify the split points.
1504 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
1505 command line argument through to the output.
1507 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
1510 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
1511 a NUL instead of a white space character.
1513 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
1514 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
1516 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
1518 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
1519 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
1520 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1522 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
1523 unique groups with empty lines.
1525 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
1526 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
1528 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
1531 ** Changes in behavior
1533 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
1534 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
1535 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
1536 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
1538 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
1539 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
1541 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
1542 not just the transfer counts.
1544 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
1546 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
1547 as per the documented interface.
1551 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
1553 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
1554 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
1555 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
1556 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1558 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
1559 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
1560 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
1561 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1563 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
1564 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
1565 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
1567 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
1568 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
1570 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
1571 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
1573 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
1577 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1580 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
1584 numfmt: reformat numbers
1588 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
1589 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
1590 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
1592 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
1593 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
1594 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
1596 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
1597 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
1601 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
1602 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1604 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
1605 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
1606 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1608 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
1609 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
1610 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1612 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
1613 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
1614 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1616 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
1617 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
1618 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
1620 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
1621 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
1622 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
1624 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
1625 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1627 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
1628 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
1630 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
1631 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
1632 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1634 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
1635 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
1636 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1638 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
1639 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
1640 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1642 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
1643 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
1644 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
1645 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1647 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
1648 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
1649 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1651 ** Changes in behavior
1653 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
1654 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
1655 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
1656 'total' in the target column.
1658 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
1659 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
1660 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
1662 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
1663 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
1665 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
1666 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
1670 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
1671 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1673 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1674 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
1676 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
1680 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
1681 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
1682 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
1683 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
1684 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
1685 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
1686 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
1687 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
1688 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
1689 for a patched distribution package.
1691 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
1692 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1694 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
1695 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
1696 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
1697 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1700 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
1704 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
1706 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
1707 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
1708 sha384sum and sha512sum.
1712 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
1713 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
1714 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
1715 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
1716 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
1718 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
1719 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
1721 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
1722 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
1723 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
1724 eventually exits nonzero.
1726 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
1727 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
1728 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
1729 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
1730 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
1732 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
1733 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
1734 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
1736 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
1737 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
1738 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
1740 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
1741 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
1742 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1744 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
1745 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
1746 Before, this would infloop:
1747 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
1748 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1750 ** Changes in behavior
1752 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
1756 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
1757 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
1758 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
1759 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
1760 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
1763 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
1764 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
1765 format-changing options.
1767 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
1768 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
1769 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
1770 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
1771 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
1775 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
1776 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
1777 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
1778 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
1779 are run without following the instructions in README.
1781 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
1782 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
1783 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
1784 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
1785 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
1786 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
1787 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
1790 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
1794 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
1795 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
1796 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
1797 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1799 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
1800 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
1801 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
1802 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1804 sort -u could read freed memory.
1805 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
1806 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
1807 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1811 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
1812 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
1813 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
1814 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
1817 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
1821 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
1822 processes will not intersperse their output.
1823 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1825 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
1826 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
1827 date: invalid date '\260'
1828 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1830 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
1831 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
1832 lines output by df, can work reliably.
1833 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1835 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
1836 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
1837 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
1839 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
1840 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
1841 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
1842 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
1843 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
1844 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1846 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
1847 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
1849 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
1850 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1852 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
1853 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
1854 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
1856 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
1857 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
1858 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
1862 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
1864 ** Changes in behavior
1866 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
1867 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
1868 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
1869 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
1870 have any reason to include it here.
1874 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
1875 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
1876 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
1878 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
1879 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
1880 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
1883 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
1887 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
1888 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
1889 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
1890 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
1891 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
1892 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1894 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
1895 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
1896 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
1897 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
1898 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
1899 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
1900 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1902 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
1903 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
1905 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
1906 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
1910 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
1911 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
1913 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
1915 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
1917 ** Changes in behavior
1919 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
1920 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
1921 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
1923 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
1924 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
1927 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
1931 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
1932 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
1933 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
1934 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
1935 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
1936 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
1937 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
1938 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
1940 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
1941 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
1942 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
1943 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
1944 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
1946 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
1947 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
1949 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
1950 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
1952 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
1953 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
1955 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
1956 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
1958 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
1959 additional static suffix to output file names.
1961 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
1962 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
1963 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1965 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
1966 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1970 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
1971 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
1972 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1974 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
1975 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
1976 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
1977 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
1978 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
1979 typically still point to one of the hard links.
1981 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
1982 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
1983 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
1984 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
1985 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
1987 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
1988 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
1989 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
1990 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
1994 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
1995 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
1996 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
1998 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
1999 instead of causing a usage failure.
2001 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
2004 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
2008 realpath: print resolved file names.
2012 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
2013 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2015 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
2016 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
2018 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
2019 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
2020 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
2021 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
2022 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
2023 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
2025 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
2026 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
2027 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
2029 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
2030 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
2031 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
2033 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
2034 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
2035 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
2036 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
2037 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
2039 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
2041 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
2042 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2044 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
2045 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2046 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
2048 ** Changes in behavior
2050 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
2051 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
2052 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
2053 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
2054 usually-short referent instead.
2056 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
2057 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
2058 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
2059 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
2062 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
2066 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
2067 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
2068 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2070 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
2071 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
2073 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
2074 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2078 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
2079 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2081 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
2082 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
2083 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
2084 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
2086 ** Changes in behavior
2088 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
2089 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
2090 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
2094 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
2095 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
2096 only .tar.xz files is enough.
2099 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
2103 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
2104 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
2105 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
2107 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
2108 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2110 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
2111 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
2112 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
2113 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
2114 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2116 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
2117 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
2118 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
2119 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
2120 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
2121 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
2122 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
2123 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
2125 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
2126 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
2128 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
2129 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
2131 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
2132 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2134 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
2135 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
2136 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2138 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
2139 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
2140 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
2141 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2143 ** Changes in behavior
2145 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
2146 when -v or -c specified.
2148 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
2149 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
2153 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
2154 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
2155 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
2156 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
2157 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
2159 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
2160 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
2161 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2163 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
2164 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
2165 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
2166 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
2167 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
2168 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
2169 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
2171 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
2172 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
2173 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
2177 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
2178 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
2180 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
2183 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
2184 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
2186 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
2187 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
2189 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
2190 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
2192 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
2194 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
2198 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
2199 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
2201 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
2204 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
2208 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
2209 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2211 ** Changes in behavior
2213 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
2214 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
2215 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
2216 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
2217 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
2218 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
2219 resolved for 2.6.39.
2220 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
2221 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
2222 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
2226 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
2229 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
2233 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
2234 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
2235 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2237 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
2238 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
2239 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2241 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
2242 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
2243 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2245 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
2246 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2248 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
2249 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2251 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
2252 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2254 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
2255 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2259 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
2260 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
2261 processed portion thereof.
2263 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
2264 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
2266 ** Changes in behavior
2268 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2269 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
2270 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2272 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2273 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
2274 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
2276 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
2277 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
2279 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
2280 Use --preserve-context instead.
2282 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
2285 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
2289 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
2290 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
2291 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
2292 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
2293 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2295 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
2296 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2298 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
2299 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
2300 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
2302 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
2303 reject file names invalid for that file system.
2305 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
2306 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2310 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
2311 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
2312 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
2313 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
2314 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
2315 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
2316 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
2317 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
2319 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
2320 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
2321 the same number of fields are output for each line.
2323 ** Changes in behavior
2325 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
2326 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
2327 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
2330 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
2334 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
2335 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
2336 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2339 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
2343 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
2344 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
2346 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
2347 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
2349 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
2350 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2352 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
2353 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
2354 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
2355 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2357 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
2358 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2360 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
2361 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
2362 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
2364 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
2366 ** Changes in behavior
2368 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
2369 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
2370 to the number of available processors.
2374 split accepts the --number/-n option to generate a specific number of
2375 files, as well as the --elide-empty-files/-e and --unbuffered/-u
2376 options to fine-tune the resulting output.
2379 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
2383 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
2384 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
2385 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
2386 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
2388 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
2389 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
2390 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
2392 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
2393 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2395 ** Changes in behavior
2397 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
2398 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
2400 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
2401 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
2402 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
2403 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
2404 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
2405 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
2407 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
2408 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
2409 the same way as the others.
2411 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
2412 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
2415 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
2419 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
2420 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
2421 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
2423 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
2424 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
2426 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
2427 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
2428 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
2430 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
2431 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
2433 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
2434 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
2436 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
2437 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
2438 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2440 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
2441 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
2442 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
2443 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
2447 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
2448 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
2450 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
2453 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
2454 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
2456 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
2458 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
2459 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
2460 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
2462 ** Changes in behavior
2464 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
2465 rather than its aliased target.
2467 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
2468 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
2469 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
2471 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
2472 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
2473 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
2474 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
2475 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
2476 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
2477 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
2478 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
2480 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
2482 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
2484 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
2485 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
2488 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
2489 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
2490 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
2491 control like taskset for example.
2493 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
2495 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
2496 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
2497 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
2498 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
2499 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
2500 includes %C when context information is available.
2502 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
2503 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
2504 rather than a file system attribute.
2506 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
2507 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
2508 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
2509 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
2511 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
2512 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
2513 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
2515 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
2516 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
2517 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
2520 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
2524 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
2525 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
2527 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
2529 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
2530 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2532 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
2533 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
2534 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
2535 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
2537 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
2538 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
2539 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2543 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
2544 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
2546 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
2547 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
2548 duration after the initial signal was sent.
2550 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
2551 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
2552 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
2553 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
2554 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
2555 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
2556 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
2557 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
2558 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
2560 ** Changes in behavior
2562 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
2563 sequence when it would be a no-op.
2565 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
2566 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
2569 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
2573 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
2574 of available processors, which may not have been the case
2575 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
2576 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2580 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
2581 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
2583 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
2584 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
2585 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
2586 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
2588 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
2589 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
2590 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
2593 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
2597 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
2598 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
2599 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
2601 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
2602 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
2603 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2605 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
2606 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2608 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
2609 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2610 a commmand of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
2611 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2613 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
2614 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
2615 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2617 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
2618 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
2619 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
2620 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2622 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
2623 renamed-aside and then recreated.
2624 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2626 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
2627 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
2628 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
2629 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2631 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
2632 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
2633 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2635 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
2636 processes will not intersperse their output.
2637 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
2640 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
2644 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
2645 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2647 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
2648 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2650 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
2651 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2652 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
2653 the presence of the empty string argument.
2654 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2656 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2657 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
2658 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
2659 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2661 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
2662 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2664 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2665 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
2666 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2668 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
2669 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
2670 and with a malicious user on the same system
2671 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
2672 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
2675 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
2679 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
2680 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
2681 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2683 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
2684 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
2685 offending directory and all "contents."
2687 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
2688 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
2689 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
2691 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
2692 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
2693 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2695 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2696 processes will not intersperse their output.
2697 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2698 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2700 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
2701 output the name of the file to stdout.
2702 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2704 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
2705 call fails with errno == EACCES.
2706 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2708 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
2709 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
2712 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
2713 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
2714 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
2716 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
2717 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
2718 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
2719 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
2720 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
2721 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2723 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
2724 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
2725 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
2726 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
2728 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
2729 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
2731 ** Changes in behavior
2733 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
2734 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
2735 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
2736 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
2737 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
2739 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
2740 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
2741 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
2742 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
2744 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
2746 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
2747 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
2748 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
2749 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
2750 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
2754 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
2758 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
2759 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
2761 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
2762 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2764 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
2765 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
2766 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
2768 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
2769 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
2772 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
2776 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
2777 when the source file doesn't have write access.
2778 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2780 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
2781 to accommodate leap seconds.
2782 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2784 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
2785 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
2786 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
2788 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
2790 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
2791 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
2792 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
2794 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
2795 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
2796 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
2797 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
2798 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
2802 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
2803 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
2804 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
2805 directory or a symlink to a directory.
2807 ** Changes in behavior
2809 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
2810 environment variable is set.
2812 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
2813 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
2814 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
2818 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
2819 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
2820 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
2821 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
2823 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
2824 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
2825 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
2826 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
2830 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
2831 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
2832 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
2834 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
2835 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
2836 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
2837 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
2838 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
2839 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
2840 another improvement:
2842 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
2843 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
2846 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
2850 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
2851 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
2852 and libraries tested at configure time.
2853 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2855 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
2856 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2858 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
2859 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2861 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
2862 printing a summary to stderr.
2863 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2865 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
2866 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
2867 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
2869 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
2870 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
2872 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
2873 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
2874 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
2875 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
2877 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
2878 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
2879 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
2880 which is relatively unusual.
2881 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2883 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
2884 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
2885 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
2886 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
2887 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
2888 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
2889 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2893 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
2894 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
2895 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
2896 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
2897 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
2901 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
2902 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
2904 ** Changes in behavior
2906 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2907 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
2908 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
2909 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
2910 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
2913 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
2917 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
2918 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
2920 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
2921 before data copying has started.
2923 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
2924 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2926 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
2927 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
2928 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
2929 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2931 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
2932 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
2933 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
2934 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2936 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
2941 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
2942 for its standard streams.
2944 ** Changes in behavior
2946 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
2947 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
2948 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
2949 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
2950 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
2951 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
2953 ** Deprecated options
2955 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
2956 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
2960 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
2962 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
2963 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
2964 a btrfs file system.
2966 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
2968 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
2969 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
2971 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
2972 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
2975 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
2979 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
2980 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
2981 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
2982 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
2984 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
2985 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
2986 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
2987 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
2988 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
2993 make check: two tests have been corrected
2997 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
2998 inherited from gnulib.
3001 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
3005 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
3006 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
3007 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
3008 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
3010 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
3011 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
3013 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
3015 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
3016 systems without xattr support.
3018 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
3019 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
3020 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
3022 ** Changes in behavior
3024 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
3025 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
3026 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
3027 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
3029 ** Improved robustness
3031 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
3032 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
3033 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
3034 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
3035 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
3036 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
3037 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
3038 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
3039 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3043 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
3044 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
3046 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
3047 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
3048 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
3049 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3050 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3053 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
3057 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
3058 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
3059 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
3063 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
3064 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
3065 data was read, or on process exit.
3066 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3068 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
3069 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
3070 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
3071 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3073 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
3074 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
3075 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
3076 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3078 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
3079 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
3081 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
3082 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3084 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
3085 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
3086 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
3088 ** Changes in behavior
3090 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
3091 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
3092 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
3094 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
3095 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
3097 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
3098 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
3099 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
3102 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
3106 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
3108 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
3109 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
3110 install: Never copies xattrs
3112 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
3113 from overwriting any existing destination file
3115 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
3116 mode where this feature is available.
3118 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
3119 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
3120 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
3121 do not modify the destination at all.
3123 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
3125 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
3129 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
3130 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
3132 cp uses much less memory in some situations
3134 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
3135 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
3137 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
3138 processing the first file name
3140 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
3141 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
3142 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
3143 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3145 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
3146 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
3148 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
3149 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
3152 ** Changes in behavior
3154 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
3155 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
3157 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
3158 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
3159 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
3161 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
3162 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
3164 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
3166 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
3167 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
3168 is still marked with a '+'.
3171 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
3175 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
3176 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
3180 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
3181 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
3182 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
3183 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
3184 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
3185 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
3187 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3188 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3190 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
3191 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
3193 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
3195 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
3196 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
3197 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
3199 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
3200 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
3202 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
3203 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
3204 used to factor large numbers.
3206 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
3209 ls now colors names of files with capabilities if libcap is available.
3211 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
3213 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
3214 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
3216 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
3217 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
3218 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
3219 maximum command-line (argv) length.
3221 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
3222 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
3223 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
3225 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
3226 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
3230 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
3232 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
3233 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
3235 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
3236 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
3238 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
3240 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
3241 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
3245 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
3246 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
3247 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
3249 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
3251 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
3252 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
3253 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
3255 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
3256 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
3257 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
3259 ** Changes in behavior
3261 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
3262 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
3265 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
3269 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
3270 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
3271 'futimens' system calls.
3275 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
3277 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
3278 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
3279 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
3281 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
3282 with no USERNAME argument.
3284 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
3285 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
3286 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
3288 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
3289 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
3290 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
3291 number of fields for some inputs.
3293 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
3294 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
3296 ** Changes in behavior
3298 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
3299 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
3302 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
3306 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
3308 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
3309 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
3310 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
3311 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3313 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
3314 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
3316 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
3317 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
3319 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
3320 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
3322 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
3323 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
3324 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3325 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3327 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
3328 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
3329 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
3330 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
3331 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3332 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
3334 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
3335 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
3337 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
3338 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
3339 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
3341 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
3342 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3344 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
3345 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3347 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
3348 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
3349 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
3350 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
3352 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
3353 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
3355 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
3356 in more cases when a directory is empty.
3358 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
3359 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
3360 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3364 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3365 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3367 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
3368 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
3369 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
3370 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
3374 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
3375 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
3377 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
3379 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
3383 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
3384 which have negative errno values.
3388 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
3392 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
3396 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
3397 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
3400 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
3404 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
3405 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
3406 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3408 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
3409 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
3410 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
3411 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3415 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
3416 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
3417 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
3418 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
3421 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
3425 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
3427 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
3428 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
3429 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
3432 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
3436 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
3437 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
3439 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
3441 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
3443 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
3445 ** Programs no longer installed by default
3449 ** Changes in behavior
3451 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
3452 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
3454 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
3455 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
3457 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
3458 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
3459 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
3463 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
3464 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
3465 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
3466 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
3467 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
3468 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
3469 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
3470 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
3471 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
3472 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
3473 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
3475 The following commands and options now support the standard size
3476 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
3477 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
3480 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
3483 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
3484 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
3485 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
3487 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
3488 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
3489 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
3492 ** New build options
3494 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
3495 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
3496 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
3497 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
3499 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
3500 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
3501 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
3502 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
3503 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
3504 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
3505 of "make check" fail.
3507 ** Remove deprecated options
3509 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3510 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
3511 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3512 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
3513 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
3515 ** Improved robustness
3517 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
3518 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
3519 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
3520 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
3521 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
3522 loss of the contents of a/f.
3524 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
3525 in its 35-colon command-line argument
3529 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
3530 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
3531 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3533 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
3534 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
3535 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
3536 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3538 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
3539 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
3540 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
3541 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
3542 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
3543 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
3544 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
3545 destination is a symlink.
3547 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
3549 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
3550 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
3552 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
3553 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
3555 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
3557 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
3558 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
3560 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
3561 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
3563 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
3566 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
3567 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
3569 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
3570 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
3572 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
3573 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
3574 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
3575 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3577 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
3578 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
3579 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3581 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
3582 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
3583 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
3585 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
3586 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
3587 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
3588 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
3590 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
3591 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
3592 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
3594 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
3595 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
3597 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
3598 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
3600 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
3602 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
3603 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
3604 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
3606 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
3607 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
3609 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
3610 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
3612 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
3613 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
3615 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
3616 [present in the original version]
3619 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
3623 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
3625 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
3626 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
3627 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
3629 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
3630 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
3632 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
3636 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
3637 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
3639 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
3640 support but with insufficient /proc support.
3642 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
3643 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
3645 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
3646 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
3647 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
3648 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
3649 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
3650 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
3652 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
3653 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
3656 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
3657 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
3659 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
3662 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
3663 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
3664 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
3666 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
3667 directory is unreadable.
3669 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
3670 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
3671 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
3673 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
3674 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
3675 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
3676 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
3677 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
3680 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
3681 Before it would print nothing.
3683 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
3685 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
3686 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
3687 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
3688 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
3689 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
3690 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
3691 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
3692 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
3694 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
3698 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
3699 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
3700 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
3702 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
3703 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
3704 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
3705 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
3708 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
3712 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
3713 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
3714 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
3715 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
3716 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
3717 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
3718 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3720 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
3721 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
3722 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
3723 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
3724 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
3725 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
3726 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
3727 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
3729 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
3730 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
3731 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
3734 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
3738 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
3739 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
3741 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
3742 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
3743 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
3745 ** Improved robustness
3747 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
3748 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
3749 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
3752 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
3756 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
3757 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
3758 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
3759 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
3760 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3762 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
3766 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
3769 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
3773 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
3774 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
3775 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
3776 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
3778 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
3779 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
3781 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
3782 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
3783 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
3786 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
3788 ** Improved robustness
3790 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
3791 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
3793 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
3794 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
3795 or NFS-mounted partition.
3797 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
3798 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
3802 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
3803 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
3804 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
3805 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
3806 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
3807 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
3809 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
3810 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
3812 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
3813 or neglect to report file removal.
3815 For the "groups" command:
3817 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
3818 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
3820 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
3822 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
3824 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
3828 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
3829 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
3832 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
3834 ** Changes in behavior
3836 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
3837 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
3838 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
3839 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
3841 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
3842 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
3843 a final './' or '../' component.
3845 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
3846 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
3847 this only for pipes.
3849 ** Infrastructure changes
3851 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
3852 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
3853 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
3854 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
3858 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
3859 name is "." or "..".
3861 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
3862 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
3863 dirent.d_type support.
3865 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
3866 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
3868 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
3869 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
3870 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
3871 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
3874 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
3876 ** Changes in behavior
3878 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
3882 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
3883 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
3887 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
3888 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
3889 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
3891 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
3892 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3894 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
3895 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3897 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
3899 ** Improved robustness
3901 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
3902 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
3903 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
3905 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
3906 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
3909 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
3910 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
3912 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
3913 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
3915 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
3916 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
3918 ** Changes in behavior
3920 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
3921 where the two are distinct.
3923 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
3924 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
3925 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
3926 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
3927 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
3928 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
3929 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
3930 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
3931 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
3932 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
3933 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
3934 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
3935 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
3936 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
3937 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
3938 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
3939 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
3941 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
3942 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
3943 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
3945 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
3946 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
3947 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
3948 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
3951 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
3952 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
3956 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
3957 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
3958 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
3959 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
3961 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
3962 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
3963 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
3965 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
3966 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
3967 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
3968 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
3969 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
3972 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
3973 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
3975 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
3976 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
3977 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
3978 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
3980 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
3981 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
3982 successful and the output is easier to parse.
3984 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
3985 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
3986 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
3987 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
3989 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
3990 and sticky) with the -m option.
3992 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
3993 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
3994 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
3995 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
3996 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
3998 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
3999 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
4001 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
4005 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
4006 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
4007 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
4008 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
4010 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
4012 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
4014 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
4015 silently ignoring one of them.
4017 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
4018 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
4019 containing this change was 5.92.
4021 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
4022 automatically newline terminated.
4024 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
4025 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
4026 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
4027 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
4030 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
4031 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4032 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
4035 ** Scheduled for removal
4037 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
4038 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
4040 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
4041 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
4042 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
4043 command to unlink a directory.
4045 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
4046 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
4047 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
4048 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
4052 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
4053 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
4054 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
4055 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
4056 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
4057 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
4061 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
4062 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
4064 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
4066 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
4067 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
4068 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
4070 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
4071 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
4074 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
4075 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
4077 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
4078 list directories before files.
4080 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
4081 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
4082 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
4083 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
4086 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
4088 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
4090 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
4091 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
4092 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
4094 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4095 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4099 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
4100 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
4101 usually printing nothing.
4103 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
4105 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
4106 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
4107 them with hard-linked directories.
4109 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
4110 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
4111 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
4113 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
4114 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
4115 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
4117 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
4120 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
4121 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
4123 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
4124 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
4126 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
4127 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
4129 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
4130 all command-line arguments.
4132 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
4134 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
4136 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
4137 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
4139 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
4141 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
4142 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
4143 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
4144 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
4145 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
4147 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
4148 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
4150 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
4151 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
4152 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
4153 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
4155 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
4157 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
4161 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
4162 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
4164 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
4165 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
4167 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
4168 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
4170 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
4171 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
4173 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
4174 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
4176 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
4178 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
4179 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
4180 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
4183 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
4185 ** Build-related bug fixes
4187 installing .mo files would fail
4190 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
4194 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
4196 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
4199 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
4203 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
4204 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
4208 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
4210 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
4211 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
4213 ** Deprecated options
4215 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
4216 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
4218 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
4222 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
4224 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
4225 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
4226 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
4227 conforming to older POSIX versions.
4229 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
4232 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
4238 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
4243 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
4245 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
4247 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
4248 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
4249 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
4251 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
4252 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
4253 problematic usages. These include:
4255 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
4256 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
4257 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
4258 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
4259 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
4260 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
4261 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
4262 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
4263 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
4265 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
4266 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
4268 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
4269 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
4270 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
4271 Meeting <https://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
4273 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
4274 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
4275 between binary and text files.
4277 The following programs now always use text input/output:
4281 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
4285 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
4286 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
4288 head tac tail tee tr
4289 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
4291 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
4292 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
4294 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
4295 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
4296 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
4298 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
4300 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
4302 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
4303 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
4304 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
4308 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
4310 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
4311 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4313 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
4314 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
4315 blocks until F contains N blocks.
4319 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
4320 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
4324 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
4325 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
4326 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
4330 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
4331 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
4335 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
4337 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
4339 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
4343 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
4344 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
4345 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
4347 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
4348 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
4349 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6232>.
4350 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
4351 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6233>.
4353 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
4357 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
4358 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
4359 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
4361 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
4363 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
4364 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
4365 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
4366 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
4368 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
4370 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
4371 rather than silently wrapping around.
4373 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
4374 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
4376 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
4377 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
4379 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
4380 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
4381 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
4382 file /tmp/a/b/file".
4384 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
4386 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
4388 ** Improved robustness
4390 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
4391 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
4392 no matter how large the result.
4394 ** Improved portability
4396 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
4397 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
4399 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
4401 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
4402 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
4403 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
4405 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
4406 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
4410 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
4411 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
4413 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
4415 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
4416 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
4417 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
4418 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
4420 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
4421 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
4423 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
4424 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
4425 categories if not specified by dircolors.
4427 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
4429 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
4430 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
4432 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
4433 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
4435 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
4437 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
4438 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
4440 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
4441 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
4443 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
4444 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
4445 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
4447 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
4449 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
4451 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
4455 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
4457 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
4458 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
4459 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
4461 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
4462 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
4464 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
4465 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
4466 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
4468 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
4469 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
4471 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
4472 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
4473 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
4474 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
4476 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
4477 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
4479 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
4480 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
4481 the file system does not support it.
4483 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
4485 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
4486 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
4488 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
4490 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
4491 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
4493 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
4494 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
4495 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
4496 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
4498 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
4499 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
4502 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
4503 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
4504 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
4505 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
4507 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
4508 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
4509 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
4510 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
4512 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
4513 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
4515 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
4517 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
4518 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
4519 reporting incorrect results.
4523 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
4524 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
4526 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
4529 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
4531 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
4532 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
4534 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
4535 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
4537 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
4540 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
4541 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
4542 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
4543 the file name does not look like a page range.
4545 printf has several changes:
4547 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
4548 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
4550 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
4551 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
4552 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
4554 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
4555 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
4558 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
4559 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
4561 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
4562 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
4564 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
4566 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
4567 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
4569 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
4571 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
4573 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
4574 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
4575 when first encountering the directory.
4579 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
4580 output; POSIX requires this.
4582 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
4583 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
4585 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
4587 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
4588 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
4590 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
4591 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
4593 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
4594 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
4595 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
4596 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
4597 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
4598 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
4599 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
4601 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
4602 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
4603 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
4605 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
4606 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
4608 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
4610 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
4612 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
4613 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
4614 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
4615 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
4617 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
4621 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
4622 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
4623 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
4624 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
4625 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
4627 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
4628 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
4629 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
4631 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
4632 is longer than PATH_MAX.
4634 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
4635 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
4637 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
4638 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
4639 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
4640 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
4641 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
4643 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
4644 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
4646 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
4647 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
4649 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
4651 nocreat do not create the output file
4652 excl fail if the output file already exists
4653 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
4654 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
4656 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
4658 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
4659 direct use direct I/O for data
4660 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
4661 sync likewise, but also for metadata
4662 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
4663 nofollow do not follow symlinks
4664 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
4666 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
4668 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
4669 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
4672 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
4673 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
4674 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
4675 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
4676 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
4677 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
4679 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4680 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4682 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
4685 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
4687 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
4689 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
4690 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
4692 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
4693 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
4694 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
4696 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
4697 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
4698 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
4700 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
4702 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
4703 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
4705 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
4706 for compatibility with bash.
4708 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
4710 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
4711 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
4712 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
4713 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
4715 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
4716 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
4718 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
4719 ls supports TABSIZE.
4720 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
4721 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
4722 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
4724 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
4727 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
4729 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
4730 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
4731 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
4732 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
4733 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
4734 an offset, not as a file name.
4736 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
4737 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
4739 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
4740 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
4742 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
4743 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
4745 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
4746 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
4747 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
4749 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
4750 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
4752 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
4753 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
4757 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
4759 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
4761 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
4765 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
4766 or more arguments between partitions.
4768 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
4769 holes in the destination.
4771 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
4772 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
4773 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
4774 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
4775 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
4776 terminates immediately.
4778 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
4780 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
4782 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
4783 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
4784 not the empty string.
4786 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
4787 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
4791 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
4792 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
4793 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
4796 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
4803 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
4807 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
4808 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
4810 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
4811 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
4813 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
4814 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
4815 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
4818 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
4822 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
4823 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
4825 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
4826 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
4828 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
4829 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
4830 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
4832 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
4834 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
4837 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
4839 ** Configuration option
4841 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
4842 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
4846 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
4847 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
4851 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
4852 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
4853 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
4856 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
4857 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
4858 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
4859 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
4860 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
4861 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
4862 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
4865 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
4869 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
4870 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
4871 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
4873 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
4874 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
4876 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
4878 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
4879 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
4880 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
4881 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
4883 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
4885 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
4886 not just the ones that reference directories
4888 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
4889 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
4891 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
4892 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
4893 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
4895 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
4896 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
4897 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
4898 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
4899 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
4900 ragged when a datum was too wide.
4902 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
4907 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
4908 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
4910 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
4912 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
4914 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
4916 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
4917 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
4919 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
4920 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
4922 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
4924 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
4928 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
4930 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
4932 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
4933 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
4934 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
4935 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
4936 resolution is the best we can do right now.
4938 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
4939 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
4941 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
4942 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
4944 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
4945 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
4947 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
4948 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
4949 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
4953 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
4954 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
4955 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
4956 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
4957 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
4958 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
4959 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
4960 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
4961 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
4962 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
4963 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
4964 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
4965 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
4966 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
4968 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
4970 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
4971 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
4973 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
4975 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
4977 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
4978 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
4980 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
4982 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
4983 without a trailing newline.
4985 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
4986 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
4988 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
4991 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
4995 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
4997 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
4999 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
5000 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
5001 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
5002 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
5004 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
5006 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
5007 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
5008 be printed without leading spaces.
5010 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
5011 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
5016 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
5017 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
5018 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
5020 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
5022 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
5023 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
5025 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
5026 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
5028 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
5029 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
5031 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
5033 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
5035 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
5037 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
5038 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
5040 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
5042 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5044 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
5045 byte offsets are specified.
5048 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
5051 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
5054 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
5055 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
5056 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
5057 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
5058 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
5059 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
5060 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
5061 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
5062 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
5063 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5064 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
5065 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
5066 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
5067 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
5068 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
5069 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
5070 directory where M has write access.
5071 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
5072 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
5073 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
5076 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
5077 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
5078 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
5079 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
5080 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
5081 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
5082 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
5083 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
5084 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
5085 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
5086 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
5087 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
5088 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
5089 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
5090 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
5091 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
5092 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
5093 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
5094 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
5095 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
5096 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
5097 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
5098 appeared one additional time.
5100 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5101 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
5102 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
5103 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
5106 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
5107 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
5108 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
5109 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
5110 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
5111 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
5112 if there were more than 338.
5114 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
5115 - false --help now exits nonzero
5118 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
5119 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
5120 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
5121 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
5124 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
5125 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
5126 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
5127 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
5128 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
5131 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
5132 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
5133 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
5134 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
5135 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
5136 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
5137 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5140 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
5141 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
5142 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
5143 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
5144 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
5145 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
5147 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5148 under certain unusual conditions
5149 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
5150 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
5153 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5154 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
5155 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
5156 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
5157 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
5158 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
5159 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
5160 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
5161 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
5162 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
5163 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
5164 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
5165 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
5166 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
5167 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
5168 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
5171 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
5172 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
5175 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
5176 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
5177 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
5178 involving hard-linked directories
5179 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
5180 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
5181 character-special and block files
5184 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
5185 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
5186 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
5187 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
5188 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
5189 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
5190 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
5191 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
5192 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
5194 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
5195 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
5196 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
5197 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
5198 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
5199 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
5200 specified on the command line.
5201 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
5202 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
5203 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
5204 the first file untouched.
5205 * readlink: new program
5206 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
5207 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
5208 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
5209 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
5210 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
5211 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
5214 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
5215 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
5216 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
5217 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
5218 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
5219 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
5220 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
5221 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
5222 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
5223 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
5224 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
5225 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
5227 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
5228 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
5229 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
5231 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
5232 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
5233 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
5234 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
5235 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
5236 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
5237 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
5238 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
5241 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
5242 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
5245 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
5246 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
5247 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
5248 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
5249 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
5250 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
5251 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
5254 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
5255 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
5257 ========================================================================
5258 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
5259 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5262 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
5264 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5265 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
5266 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
5267 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
5268 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
5269 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
5270 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
5271 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
5272 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
5273 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
5274 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
5275 The old options will continue to work for a while.
5277 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
5278 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
5279 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
5280 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
5282 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
5285 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
5287 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
5288 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
5289 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
5290 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
5291 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
5292 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
5293 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
5296 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
5297 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
5298 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
5299 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
5300 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
5301 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
5302 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
5303 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
5304 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
5305 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
5306 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
5307 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
5308 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
5309 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
5310 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
5311 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
5313 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
5314 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
5316 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
5317 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
5318 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
5319 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
5320 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
5321 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
5323 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
5324 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
5325 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
5326 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
5327 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
5328 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
5329 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
5331 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
5332 the source files in the following example:
5333 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
5334 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
5335 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
5336 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
5337 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
5338 links between source files with --preserve=links
5339 * cp accepts new options:
5340 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
5341 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
5342 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
5343 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
5344 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
5345 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
5346 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
5347 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
5348 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
5350 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
5351 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
5352 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
5353 even though it's older than dest.
5354 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
5355 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
5356 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
5357 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
5358 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
5360 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
5361 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
5362 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
5363 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
5364 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
5365 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
5366 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
5368 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
5369 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
5370 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
5372 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
5373 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
5374 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
5375 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
5376 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
5377 This is the default.
5379 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
5380 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
5381 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
5382 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
5383 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
5385 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
5388 ========================================================================
5389 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
5390 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5393 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
5394 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
5396 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5397 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
5398 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
5399 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
5400 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
5402 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
5403 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
5404 that specifies a non-directory
5407 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
5408 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
5409 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
5410 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
5411 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5412 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
5413 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
5414 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5415 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
5416 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
5417 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
5418 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
5419 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
5420 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
5421 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
5422 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
5423 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
5424 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
5425 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
5426 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
5427 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
5428 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
5429 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
5430 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
5432 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
5433 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
5434 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
5436 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
5438 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
5439 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
5441 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
5442 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
5443 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
5444 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
5445 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
5447 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
5448 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
5449 required support; from Bruno Haible.
5450 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
5451 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
5453 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
5455 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
5456 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
5457 * still more portability fixes
5458 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
5459 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5461 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
5463 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
5465 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
5467 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
5468 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
5469 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
5470 there is any time remaining
5471 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
5473 ========================================================================
5474 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5475 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
5477 This package began as the union of the following:
5478 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
5480 ========================================================================
5482 Copyright (C) 2001-2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5484 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
5485 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
5486 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
5487 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
5488 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
5489 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.