1 GNU coreutils NEWS -*- outline -*-
3 * Noteworthy changes in release ?.? (????-??-??) [?]
7 On GNU/Linux s390x and alpha, programs like 'cp' and 'ls' no longer
8 fail on files with inode numbers that do not fit into 32 bits.
9 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
11 'b2sum --check' will no longer read unallocated memory when
12 presented with malformed checksum lines.
13 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
15 'cp --parents' again succeeds when preserving mode for absolute directories.
16 Previously it would have failed with a "No such file or directory" error.
17 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
19 'cp --sparse=never' will avoid copy-on-write (reflinking) and copy offloading,
20 to ensure no holes present in the destination copy.
21 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
23 cksum again diagnoses read errors in its default CRC32 mode.
24 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
26 'cksum --check' now ensures filenames with a leading backslash character
27 are escaped appropriately in the status output.
28 This also applies to the standalone checksumming utilities.
29 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
31 dd again supports more than two multipliers for numbers.
32 Previously numbers of the form '1024x1024x32' gave "invalid number" errors.
33 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
35 factor, numfmt, and tsort now diagnose read errors on the input.
36 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
38 'install --strip' now supports installing to files with a leading hyphen.
39 Previously such file names would have caused the strip process to fail.
40 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
42 ls now shows symlinks specified on the command line that can't be traversed.
43 Previously a "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic was given.
44 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
46 pinky, uptime, users, and who no longer misbehave on 32-bit GNU/Linux
47 platforms like x86 and ARM where time_t was historically 32 bits.
48 Also see the new --enable-systemd option mentioned below.
49 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
51 'pr --length=1 --double-space' no longer enters an infinite loop.
52 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
54 tac now handles short reads on its input. Previously it may have exited
55 erroneously, especially with large input files with no separators.
56 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
58 'uptime' no longer incorrectly prints "0 users" on OpenBSD,
59 and is being built again on FreeBSD and Haiku.
60 [bugs introduced in coreutils-9.2]
62 'wc -l' and 'cksum' no longer crash with an "Illegal instruction" error
63 on x86 Linux kernels that disable XSAVE YMM. This was seen on Xen VMs.
64 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
66 ** Changes in behavior
68 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will no longer output a message for each file skipped
69 due to -i, or -u. Instead they only output this information with --debug.
70 I.e., 'cp -u -v' etc. will have the same verbosity as before coreutils-9.3.
72 'cksum -b' no longer prints base64-encoded checksums. Rather that
73 short option is reserved to better support emulation of the standalone
74 checksum utilities with cksum.
76 'mv dir x' now complains differently if x/dir is a nonempty directory.
77 Previously it said "mv: cannot move 'dir' to 'x/dir': Directory not empty",
78 where it was unclear whether 'dir' or 'x/dir' was the problem.
79 Now it says "mv: cannot overwrite 'x/dir': Directory not empty".
80 Similarly for other renames where the destination must be the problem.
81 [problem introduced in coreutils-6.0]
85 cp, mv, and install now avoid copy_file_range on linux kernels before 5.3
86 irrespective of which kernel version coreutils is built against,
87 reinstating that behaviour from coreutils-9.0.
89 comm, cut, join, od, and uniq will now exit immediately upon receiving a
90 write error, which is significant when reading large / unbounded inputs.
92 split now uses more tuned access patterns for its potentially large input.
93 This was seen to improve throughput by 5% when reading from SSD.
95 split now supports a configurable $TMPDIR for handling any temporary files.
97 tac now falls back to '/tmp' if a configured $TMPDIR is unavailable.
99 'who -a' now displays the boot time on Alpine Linux, OpenBSD,
100 Cygwin, Haiku, and some Android distributions
102 'uptime' now succeeds on some Android distributions, and now counts
103 VM saved/sleep time on GNU (Linux, Hurd, kFreeBSD), NetBSD, OpenBSD,
106 On GNU/Linux platforms where utmp-format files have 32-bit timestamps,
107 pinky, uptime, and who can now work for times after the year 2038,
108 so long as systemd is installed, you configure with a new, experimental
109 option --enable-systemd, and you use the programs without file arguments.
110 (For example, with systemd 'who /var/log/wtmp' does not work because
111 systemd does not support the equivalent of /var/log/wtmp.)
114 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.3 (2023-04-18) [stable]
118 cp --reflink=auto (the default), mv, and install
119 will again fall back to a standard copy in more cases.
120 Previously copies could fail with permission errors on
121 more restricted systems like android or containers etc.
122 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
124 cp --recursive --backup will again operate correctly.
125 Previousy it may have issued "File exists" errors when
126 it failed to appropriately rename files being replaced.
127 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
129 date --file and dircolors will now diagnose a failure to read a file.
130 Previously they would have silently ignored the failure.
131 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
133 md5sum --check again correctly prints the status of each file checked.
134 Previously the status for files was printed as 'OK' once any file had passed.
135 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
136 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.2]
138 wc will now diagnose if any total counts have overflowed.
139 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
141 `wc -c` will again correctly update the read offset of inputs.
142 Previously it deduced the size of inputs while leaving the offset unchanged.
143 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
145 Coreutils programs no longer fail for timestamps past the year 2038
146 on obsolete configurations with 32-bit signed time_t, because the
147 build procedure now rejects these configurations.
148 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
150 ** Changes in behavior
152 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now issue an error diagnostic if skipping a file,
153 to correspond with -n inducing a nonzero exit status as of coreutils 9.2.
154 Similarly 'cp -v' and 'mv -v' will output a message for each file skipped
155 due to -n, -i, or -u.
159 cp and mv now support --update=none to always skip existing files
160 in the destination, while not affecting the exit status.
161 This is equivalent to the --no-clobber behavior from before v9.2.
164 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.2 (2023-03-20) [stable]
168 'comm --output-delimiter="" --total' now delimits columns in the total
169 line with the NUL character, consistent with NUL column delimiters in
170 the rest of the output. Previously no delimiters were used for the
171 total line in this case.
172 [bug introduced with the --total option in coreutils-8.26]
174 'cp -p' no longer has a security hole when cloning into a dangling
175 symbolic link on macOS 10.12 and later.
176 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
178 'cp -rx / /mnt' no longer complains "cannot create directory /mnt/".
179 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
181 cp, mv, and install avoid allocating too much memory, and possibly
182 triggering "memory exhausted" failures, on file systems like ZFS,
183 which can return varied file system I/O block size values for files.
184 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
186 cp, mv, and install now immediately acknowledge transient errors
187 when creating copy-on-write or cloned reflink files, on supporting
188 file systems like XFS, BTRFS, APFS, etc.
189 Previously they would have tried again with other copy methods
190 which may have resulted in data corruption.
191 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5 and enabled by default in coreutils-9.0]
193 cp, mv, and install now handle ENOENT failures across CIFS file systems,
194 falling back from copy_file_range to a better supported standard copy.
195 [issue introduced in coreutils-9.0]
197 'mv --backup=simple f d/' no longer mistakenly backs up d/f to f~.
198 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.1]
200 rm now fails gracefully when memory is exhausted.
201 Previously it may have aborted with a failed assertion in some cases.
202 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
204 rm -d (--dir) now properly handles unreadable empty directories.
205 E.g., before, this would fail to remove d: mkdir -m0 d; src/rm -d d
206 [bug introduced in v8.19 with the addition of this option]
208 runcon --compute no longer looks up the specified command in the $PATH
209 so that there is no mismatch between the inspected and executed file.
210 [bug introduced when runcon was introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
212 'sort -g' no longer infloops when given multiple NaNs on platforms
213 like x86_64 where 'long double' has padding bits in memory.
214 Although the fix alters sort -g's NaN ordering, that ordering has
215 long been documented to be platform-dependent.
216 [bug introduced 1999-05-02 and only partly fixed in coreutils-8.14]
218 stty ispeed and ospeed options no longer accept and silently ignore
219 invalid speed arguments, or give false warnings for valid speeds.
220 Now they're validated against both the general accepted set,
221 and the system supported set of valid speeds.
222 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
224 stty now wraps output appropriately for the terminal width.
225 Previously it may have output 1 character too wide for certain widths.
226 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3]
228 tail --follow=name works again with non seekable files. Previously it
229 exited with an "Illegal seek" error when such a file was replaced.
230 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
232 'wc -c' will again efficiently determine the size of large files
233 on all systems. It no longer redundantly reads data from certain
234 sized files larger than SIZE_MAX.
235 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
237 ** Changes in behavior
239 Programs now support the new Ronna (R), and Quetta (Q) SI prefixes,
240 corresponding to 10^27 and 10^30 respectively,
241 along with their binary counterparts Ri (2^90) and Qi (2^100).
242 In some cases (e.g., 'sort -h') these new prefixes simply work;
243 in others, where they exceed integer width limits, they now elicit
244 the same integer overflow diagnostics as other large prefixes.
246 'cp --reflink=always A B' no longer leaves behind a newly created
247 empty file B merely because copy-on-write clones are not supported.
249 'cp -n' and 'mv -n' now exit with nonzero status if they skip their
250 action because the destination exists, and likewise for 'cp -i',
251 'ln -i', and 'mv -i' when the user declines. (POSIX specifies this
252 for 'cp -i' and 'mv -i'.)
254 cp, mv, and install again read in multiples of the reported block size,
255 to support unusual devices that may have this constraint.
256 [behavior inadvertently changed in coreutils-7.2]
258 du --apparent now counts apparent sizes only of regular files and
259 symbolic links. POSIX does not specify the meaning of apparent
260 sizes (i.e., st_size) for other file types, and counting those sizes
261 could cause confusing and unwanted size mismatches.
263 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' go back to sorting ".0" before ".A",
264 reverting to the behavior in coreutils-9.0 and earlier.
265 This behavior is now documented.
267 ls --color now matches a file extension case sensitively
268 if there are different sequences defined for separate cases.
270 printf unicode \uNNNN, \UNNNNNNNN syntax, now supports all valid
271 unicode code points. Previously is was restricted to the C
272 universal character subset, which restricted most points <= 0x9F.
274 runcon now exits with status 125 for internal errors. Previously upon
275 internal errors it would exit with status 1, which was less distinguishable
276 from errors from the invoked command.
278 'split -n N' now splits more evenly when the input size is not a
279 multiple of N, by creating N output files whose sizes differ by at
280 most 1 byte. Formerly, it did this only when the input size was
283 'stat -c %s' now prints sizes as unsigned, consistent with 'ls'.
287 cksum now accepts the --base64 (-b) option to print base64-encoded
288 checksums. It also accepts/checks such checksums.
290 cksum now accepts the --raw option to output a raw binary checksum.
291 No file name or other information is output in this mode.
293 cp, mv, and install now accept the --debug option to
294 print details on how a file is being copied.
296 factor now accepts the --exponents (-h) option to print factors
297 in the form p^e, rather than repeating the prime p, e times.
299 ls now supports the --time=modification option, to explicitly
300 select the default mtime timestamp for display and sorting.
302 mv now supports the --no-copy option, which causes it to fail when
303 asked to move a file to a different file system.
305 split now accepts options like '-n SIZE' that exceed machine integer
306 range, when they can be implemented as if they were infinity.
308 split -n now accepts piped input even when not in round-robin mode,
309 by first copying input to a temporary file to determine its size.
311 wc now accepts the --total={auto,never,always,only} option
312 to give explicit control over when the total is output.
316 cp --sparse=auto (the default), mv, and install,
317 will use the copy_file_range syscall now also with sparse files.
318 This may be more efficient, by avoiding user space copies,
319 and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking,
320 for the non sparse portion of such sparse files.
322 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone in more cases.
323 Previously cp would only do this when preserving mode and timestamps.
325 date --debug now diagnoses if multiple --date or --set options are
326 specified, as only the last specified is significant in that case.
328 rm outputs more accurate diagnostics in the presence of errors
329 when removing directories. For example EIO will be faithfully
330 diagnosed, rather than being conflated with ENOTEMPTY.
332 tail --follow=name now works with single non regular files even
333 when their modification time doesn't change when new data is available.
334 Previously tail would not show any new data in this case.
336 tee -p detects when all remaining outputs have become broken pipes, and
337 exits, rather than waiting for more input to induce an exit when written.
339 tee now handles non blocking outputs, which can be seen for example with
340 telnet or mpirun piping through tee to a terminal.
341 Previously tee could truncate data written to such an output and fail,
342 and also potentially output a "Resource temporarily unavailable" error.
345 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.1 (2022-04-15) [stable]
349 chmod -R no longer exits with error status when encountering symlinks.
350 All files would be processed correctly, but the exit status was incorrect.
351 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
353 If 'cp -Z A B' checks B's status and some other process then removes B,
354 cp no longer creates B with a too-generous SELinux security context
355 before adjusting it to the correct value.
356 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
358 'cp --preserve=ownership A B' no longer ignores the umask when creating B.
359 Also, 'cp --preserve-xattr A B' is less likely to temporarily chmod u+w B.
360 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.7]
362 On macOS, 'cp A B' no longer miscopies when A is in an APFS file system
363 and B is in some other file system.
364 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
366 On macOS, fmt no longer corrupts multi-byte characters
367 by misdetecting their component bytes as spaces.
368 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
370 'id xyz' now uses the name 'xyz' to determine groups, instead of xyz's uid.
371 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
373 'ls -v' and 'sort -V' no longer mishandle corner cases like "a..a" vs "a.+"
374 or lines containing NULs. Their behavior now matches the documentation
375 for file names like ".m4" that consist entirely of an extension,
376 and the documentation has been clarified for unusual cases.
377 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
379 On macOS, 'mv A B' no longer fails with "Operation not supported"
380 when A and B are in the same tmpfs file system.
381 [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
383 'mv -T --backup=numbered A B/' no longer miscalculates the backup number
384 for B when A is a directory, possibly inflooping.
385 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.3]
387 ** Changes in behavior
389 cat now uses the copy_file_range syscall if available, when doing
390 simple copies between regular files. This may be more efficient, by avoiding
391 user space copies, and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking.
393 chown and chroot now warn about usages like "chown root.root f",
394 which have the nonstandard and long-obsolete "." separator that
395 causes problems on platforms where user names contain ".".
396 Applications should use ":" instead of ".".
398 cksum no longer allows abbreviated algorithm names,
399 so that forward compatibility and robustness is improved.
401 date +'%-N' now suppresses excess trailing digits, instead of always
402 padding them with zeros to 9 digits. It uses clock_getres and
403 clock_gettime to infer the clock resolution.
405 dd conv=fsync now synchronizes output even after a write error,
406 and similarly for dd conv=fdatasync.
408 dd now counts bytes instead of blocks if a block count ends in "B".
409 For example, 'dd count=100KiB' now copies 100 KiB of data, not
410 102,400 blocks of data. The flags count_bytes, skip_bytes and
411 seek_bytes are therefore obsolescent and are no longer documented,
412 though they still work.
414 ls no longer colors files with capabilities by default, as file-based
415 capabilties are very rarely used, and lookup increases processing per file by
416 about 30%. It's best to use getcap [-r] to identify files with capabilities.
418 ls no longer tries to automount files, reverting to the behavior
419 before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
421 stat no longer tries to automount files by default, reverting to the
422 behavior before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
423 Only `stat --cached=never` will continue to automount files.
425 timeout --foreground --kill-after=... will now exit with status 137
426 if the kill signal was sent, which is consistent with the behavior
427 when the --foreground option is not specified. This allows users to
428 distinguish if the command was more forcefully terminated.
432 dd now supports the aliases iseek=N for skip=N, and oseek=N for seek=N,
433 like FreeBSD and other operating systems.
435 dircolors takes a new --print-ls-colors option to display LS_COLORS
436 entries, on separate lines, colored according to the entry color code.
438 dircolors will now also match COLORTERM in addition to TERM environment
439 variables. The default config will apply colors with any COLORTERM set.
443 cp, mv, and install now use openat-like syscalls when copying to a directory.
444 This avoids some race conditions and should be more efficient.
446 On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone if source and destination
447 are regular files on the same APFS file system, the destination does
448 not already exist, and cp is preserving mode and timestamps (e.g.,
451 The new 'date' option --resolution outputs the timestamp resolution.
453 With conv=fdatasync or conv=fsync, dd status=progress now reports
454 any extra final progress just before synchronizing output data,
455 since synchronizing can take a long time.
457 printf now supports printing the numeric value of multi-byte characters.
459 sort --debug now diagnoses issues with --field-separator characters
460 that conflict with characters possibly used in numbers.
462 'tail -f file | filter' now exits on Solaris when filter exits.
464 root invoked coreutils, that are built and run in single binary mode,
465 now adjust /proc/$pid/cmdline to be more specific to the utility
466 being run, rather than using the general "coreutils" binary name.
470 AIX builds no longer fail because some library functions are not found.
471 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.32]
474 * Noteworthy changes in release 9.0 (2021-09-24) [stable]
478 chmod -v no longer misreports modes of dangling symlinks.
479 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
481 cp -a --attributes-only now never removes destination files,
482 even if the destination files are hardlinked, or the source
483 is a non regular file.
484 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
486 csplit --suppress-matched now elides the last matched line
487 when a specific number of pattern matches are performed.
488 [bug introduced with the --suppress-matched feature in coreutils-8.22]
490 df no longer outputs duplicate remote mounts in the presence of bind mounts.
491 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
493 df no longer mishandles command-line args that it pre-mounts
494 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.29]
496 du no longer crashes on XFS file systems when the directory hierarchy is
497 heavily changed during the run.
498 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.25]
500 env -S no longer crashes when given unusual whitespace characters
501 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.30]
503 expr no longer mishandles unmatched \(...\) in regular expressions.
504 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
506 ls no longer crashes when printing the SELinux context for unstatable files.
507 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.91]
509 mkdir -m no longer mishandles modes more generous than the umask.
510 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
512 nl now handles single character --section-delimiter arguments,
513 by assuming a second ':' character has been specified, as specified by POSIX.
514 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
516 pr again adjusts tabs in input, to maintain alignment in multi column output.
517 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
519 rm no longer skips an extra file when the removal of an empty directory fails.
520 [bug introduced by the rewrite to use fts in coreutils-8.0]
522 split --number=K/N will again correctly split chunk K of N to stdout.
523 Previously a chunk starting after 128KiB, output the wrong part of the file.
524 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
526 tail -f no longer overruns a stack buffer when given too many files
527 to follow and ulimit -n exceeds 1024.
528 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
530 tr no longer crashes when using --complement with certain
531 invalid combinations of case character classes.
532 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
534 basenc --base64 --decode no longer silently discards decoded characters
535 on (1024*5) buffer boundaries
536 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
538 ** Changes in behavior
540 cp and install now default to copy-on-write (COW) if available.
541 I.e., cp now uses --reflink=auto mode by default.
543 cp, install and mv now use the copy_file_range syscall if available.
544 Also, they use lseek+SEEK_HOLE rather than ioctl+FS_IOC_FIEMAP on sparse
545 files, as lseek is simpler and more portable.
547 On GNU/Linux systems, ls no longer issues an error message on a
548 directory merely because it was removed. This reverts a change
549 that was made in release 8.32.
551 ptx -T no longer attempts to substitute old-fashioned TeX escapes
552 for 8-bit non-ASCII alphabetic characters. TeX indexes should
553 instead use '\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}' or equivalent.
555 stat will use decomposed (major,minor) device numbers in its default format.
556 This is less ambiguous, and more consistent with ls.
558 sum [-r] will output a file name, even if only a single name is passed.
559 This is consistent with sum -s, cksum, and other sum(1) implementations.
563 cksum now supports the -a (--algorithm) option to select any
564 of the existing sum, md5sum, b2sum, sha*sum implementations etc.
565 cksum now subsumes all of these programs, and coreutils
566 will introduce no future standalone checksum utility.
568 cksum -a now supports the 'sm3' argument, to use the SM3 digest algorithm.
570 cksum --check now supports auto detecting the digest type to use,
571 when verifying tagged format checksums.
573 expr and factor now support bignums on all platforms.
575 ls --classify now supports the "always", "auto", or "never" flags,
576 to support only outputting classifier characters if connected to a tty.
578 ls now accepts the --sort=width option, to sort by file name width.
579 This is useful to more compactly organize the default vertical column output.
581 ls now accepts the --zero option, to terminate each output line with
582 NUL instead of newline.
584 nl --line-increment can now take a negative number to decrement the count.
586 stat supports more formats for representing decomposed device numbers.
587 %Hd,%Ld and %Hr,%Lr will output major,minor device numbers and device types
588 respectively. %d corresponds to st_dev and %r to std_rdev.
592 cat --show-ends will now show \r\n as ^M$. Previously the \r was taken
593 literally, thus overwriting the first character in the line with '$'.
595 cksum [-a crc] is now up to 4 times faster by using a slice by 8 algorithm,
596 and at least 8 times faster where pclmul instructions are supported.
597 A new --debug option will indicate if pclmul is being used.
599 md5sum --check now supports checksum files with CRLF line endings.
600 This also applies to cksum, sha*sum, and b2sum.
602 df now recognizes these file systems as remote:
603 acfs, coda, fhgfs, gpfs, ibrix, ocfs2, and vxfs.
605 rmdir now clarifies the error if a symlink_to_dir/ has not been traversed.
606 This is the case on GNU/Linux systems, where the trailing slash is ignored.
608 stat and tail now know about the "devmem", "exfat", "secretmem", "vboxsf",
609 and "zonefs" file system types. stat -f -c%T now reports the file system
610 type, and tail -f uses polling for "vboxsf" and inotify for the others.
612 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts on macOS.
614 wc is up to 5 times faster when counting only new line characters,
615 where avx2 instructions are supported.
616 A new --debug option will indicate if avx2 is being used.
619 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.32 (2020-03-05) [stable]
623 cp now copies /dev/fd/N correctly on platforms like Solaris where
624 it is a character-special file whose minor device number is N.
625 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.6]
627 dd conv=fdatasync no longer reports a "Bad file descriptor" error
628 when fdatasync is interrupted, and dd now retries interrupted calls
629 to close, fdatasync, fstat and fsync instead of incorrectly
630 reporting an "Interrupted system call" error.
631 [bugs introduced in coreutils-6.0]
633 df now correctly parses the /proc/self/mountinfo file for unusual entries
634 like ones with '\r' in a field value ("mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /foo$'\r'bar"),
635 when the source field is empty ('mount -t tmpfs "" /mnt'), and when the
636 filesystem type contains characters like a blank which need escaping.
637 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.24 with the introduction of reading
638 the /proc/self/mountinfo file]
640 factor again outputs immediately when stdout is a tty but stdin is not.
641 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
643 ln works again on old systems without O_DIRECTORY support (like Solaris 10),
644 and on systems where symlink ("x", ".") fails with errno == EINVAL
645 (like Solaris 10 and Solaris 11).
646 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.31]
648 rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty now works correctly for directories
649 that fail to be removed due to permission issues. Previously the exit status
650 was reversed, failing for non empty and succeeding for empty directories.
651 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
653 'shuf -r -n 0 file' no longer mistakenly reads from standard input.
654 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
656 split no longer reports a "output file suffixes exhausted" error
657 when the specified number of files is evenly divisible by 10, 16, 26,
658 for --numeric, --hex, or default alphabetic suffixes respectively.
659 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
661 seq no longer prints an extra line under certain circumstances (such as
662 'seq -f "%g " 1000000 1000000').
663 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.10]
665 ** Changes in behavior
667 Several programs now check that numbers end properly. For example,
668 'du -d 1x' now reports an error instead of silently ignoring the 'x'.
669 Affected programs and options include du -d, expr's numeric operands
670 on non-GMP builds, install -g and -o, ls's TABSIZE environment
671 variable, mknod b and c, ptx -g and -w, shuf -n, and sort --batch-size
674 date now parses military time zones in accordance with common usage:
675 "A" to "M" are equivalent to UTC+1 to UTC+12
676 "N" to "Y" are equivalent to UTC-1 to UTC-12
677 "Z" is "zulu" time (UTC).
678 For example, 'date -d "09:00B" is now equivalent to 9am in UTC+2 time zone.
679 Previously, military time zones were parsed according to the obsolete
680 rfc822, with their value negated (e.g., "B" was equivalent to UTC-2).
681 [The old behavior was introduced in sh-utils 2.0.15 ca. 1999, predating
684 date now pads nanoseconds on the right, not the left. For example,
685 if the time is currently 1590020079.003388470 seconds after the
686 Epoch, then "date '+%s.%-N'" formerly output "1590020079.3388470",
687 and it now outputs "1590020079.00338847".
689 ls issues an error message on a removed directory, on GNU/Linux systems.
690 Previously no error and no entries were output, and so indistinguishable
691 from an empty directory, with default ls options.
693 uniq no longer uses strcoll() to determine string equivalence,
694 and so will operate more efficiently and consistently.
698 ls now supports the --time=birth option to display and sort by
699 file creation time, where available.
701 od --skip-bytes now can use lseek even if the input is not a regular
702 file, greatly improving performance in some cases.
704 stat(1) supports a new --cached= option, used on systems with statx(2)
705 to control cache coherency of file system attributes,
706 useful on network file systems.
710 stat and ls now use the statx() system call where available, which can
711 operate more efficiently by only retrieving requested attributes.
713 stat and tail now know about the "binderfs", "dma-buf-fs", "erofs",
714 "ppc-cmm-fs", and "z3fold" file systems.
715 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
719 gzip-compressed tarballs are distributed once again
722 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.31 (2019-03-10) [stable]
726 'base64 a b' now correctly diagnoses 'b' as the extra operand, not 'a'.
727 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
729 When B already exists, 'cp -il A B' no longer immediately fails
730 after asking the user whether to proceed.
731 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
733 df no longer corrupts displayed multibyte characters on macOS.
734 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.18]
736 seq no longer outputs inconsistent decimal point characters
737 for the last number, when locales are misconfigured.
738 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
740 shred, sort, and split no longer falsely report ftruncate errors
741 when outputting to less-common file types. For example, the shell
742 command 'sort /dev/null -o /dev/stdout | cat' no longer fails with
743 an "error truncating" diagnostic.
744 [bug was introduced with coreutils-8.18 for sort and split, and
745 (for shared memory objects only) with fileutils-4.1 for shred]
747 sync no longer fails for write-only file arguments.
748 [bug introduced with argument support to sync in coreutils-8.24]
750 'tail -f file | filter' no longer exits immediately on AIX.
751 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
753 'tail -f file | filter' no longer goes into an infinite loop
754 if filter exits and SIGPIPE is ignored.
755 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
757 ** Changes in behavior
759 cksum, dd, hostid, hostname, link, logname, sleep, tsort, unlink,
760 uptime, users, whoami, yes: now always process --help and --version options,
761 regardless of any other arguments present before any optional '--'
762 end-of-options marker.
764 nohup now processes --help and --version as first options even if other
767 'yes a -- b' now outputs 'a b' instead of including the end-of-options
768 marker as before: 'a -- b'.
770 echo now always processes backslash escapes when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
771 environment variable is set.
773 When possible 'ln A B' now merely links A to B and reports an error
774 if this fails, instead of statting A and B before linking. This
775 uses fewer system calls and avoids some races. The old statting
776 approach is still used in situations where hard links to directories
777 are allowed (e.g., NetBSD when superuser).
779 ls --group-directories-first will also group symlinks to directories.
781 'test -a FILE' is not supported anymore. Long ago, there were concerns about
782 the high probability of humans confusing the -a primary with the -a binary
783 operator, so POSIX changed this to 'test -e FILE'. Scripts using it were
784 already broken and non-portable; the -a unary operator was never documented.
786 wc now treats non breaking space characters as word delimiters
787 unless the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable is set.
791 id now supports specifying multiple users.
793 'date' now supports the '+' conversion specification flag,
794 introduced in POSIX.1-2017.
796 printf, seq, sleep, tail, and timeout now accept floating point
797 numbers in either the current or the C locale. For example, if the
798 current locale's decimal point is ',', 'sleep 0,1' and 'sleep 0.1'
799 now mean the same thing. Previously, these commands accepted only
800 C-locale syntax with '.' as the decimal point. The new behavior is
801 more compatible with other implementations in non-C locales.
803 test now supports the '-N FILE' unary operator (like e.g. bash) to check
804 whether FILE exists and has been modified since it was last read.
806 env now supports '--default-signal[=SIG]', '--ignore-signal[=SIG]', and
807 '--block-signal[=SIG], to setup signal handling before executing a program.
809 env now supports '--list-signal-handling' to indicate non-default
810 signal handling before executing a program.
814 basenc is added to complement existing base64,base32 commands,
815 and encodes and decodes printable text using various common encodings:
816 base64,base64url,base32,base32hex,base16,base2,z85.
820 ls -l now better aligns abbreviated months containing digits,
821 which is common in Asian locales.
823 stat and tail now know about the "sdcardfs" file system on Android.
824 stat -f -c%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
826 stat now prints file creation time when supported by the file system,
827 on GNU Linux systems with glibc >= 2.28 and kernel >= 4.11.
830 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.30 (2018-07-01) [stable]
834 'cp --symlink SRC DST' will again correctly validate DST.
835 If DST is a regular file and SRC is a symlink to DST,
836 then cp will no longer allow that operation to clobber DST.
837 Also with -d, if DST is a symlink, then it can always be replaced,
838 even if it points to SRC on a separate device.
839 [bugs introduced with coreutils-8.27]
841 'cp -n -u' and 'mv -n -u' now consistently ignore the -u option.
842 Previously, this option combination suffered from race conditions
843 that caused -u to sometimes override -n.
844 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
846 'cp -a --no-preserve=mode' now sets appropriate default permissions
847 for non regular files like fifos and character device nodes etc.,
848 and leaves mode bits of existing files unchanged.
849 Previously it would have set executable bits on created special files,
850 and set mode bits for existing files as if they had been created.
851 [bug introduced with coreutils-8.20]
853 'cp --remove-destination file symlink' now removes the symlink
854 even if it can't be traversed.
855 [bug introduced with --remove-destination in fileutils-4.1.1]
857 ls no longer truncates the abbreviated month names that have a
858 display width between 6 and 12 inclusive. Previously this would have
859 output ambiguous months for Arabic or Catalan locales.
861 'ls -aA' is now equivalent to 'ls -A', since -A now overrides -a.
862 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
864 'mv -n A B' no longer suffers from a race condition that can
865 overwrite a simultaneously-created B. This bug fix requires
866 platform support for the renameat2 or renameatx_np syscalls, found
867 in recent Linux and macOS kernels. As a side effect, 'mv -n A A'
868 now silently does nothing if A exists.
869 [bug introduced with coreutils-7.1]
871 ** Changes in behavior
873 'cp --force file symlink' now removes the symlink even if
874 it is self referential.
876 ls --color now matches file extensions case insensitively.
880 cp --reflink now supports --reflink=never to enforce a standard copy.
882 env supports a new -v/--debug option to show verbose information about
883 each processing step.
885 env supports a new -S/--split-string=S option to split a single argument
886 string into multiple arguments. Used to pass multiple arguments in scripts
889 md5sum accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output lines with a
890 NUL instead of a newline character. This also disables file name escaping.
891 This also applies to sha*sum and b2sum.
893 rm --preserve-root now supports the --preserve-root=all option to
894 reject any command line argument that is mounted to a separate file system.
898 cut supports line lengths up to the max file size on 32 bit systems.
899 Previously only offsets up to SIZE_MAX-1 were supported.
901 stat and tail now know about the "exfs" file system, which is a
902 version of XFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type,
903 and tail -f uses inotify.
905 wc avoids redundant processing of ASCII text in multibyte locales,
906 which is especially significant on macOS.
909 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.29 (2017-12-27) [stable]
913 b2sum no longer crashes when processing certain truncated check files.
914 [bug introduced with b2sum coreutils-8.26]
916 dd now ensures the correct cache ranges are specified for the "nocache"
917 and "direct" flags. Previously some pages in the page cache were not
918 invalidated. [bug introduced for "direct" in coreutils-7.5,
919 and with the "nocache" implementation in coreutils-8.11]
921 df no longer hangs when given a fifo argument.
922 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
924 ptx -S no longer infloops for a pattern which returns zero-length matches.
925 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
927 shred --remove will again repeatedly rename files with shortening names
928 to attempt to hide the original length of the file name.
929 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.28]
931 stty no longer crashes when processing settings with -F also specified.
932 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
934 tail --bytes again supports non seekable inputs on all systems.
935 On systems like android it always tried to process as seekable inputs.
936 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
938 timeout will again notice its managed command exiting, even when
939 invoked with blocked CHLD signal, or in a narrow window where
940 this CHLD signal from the exiting child was missed. In each case
941 timeout would have then waited for the time limit to expire.
942 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
946 timeout now supports the --verbose option to diagnose forced termination.
950 dd now supports iflag=direct with arbitrary sized files on all file systems.
952 tail --bytes=NUM will efficiently seek to the end of block devices,
953 rather than reading from the start.
955 Utilities which do not support long options (other than the default --help
956 and --version), e.g. cksum and sleep, now use more consistent error diagnostic
957 for unknown long options.
961 Default man pages are now distributed which are used if perl is
962 not available on the build system, or when cross compiling.
965 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.28 (2017-09-01) [stable]
969 cp and mv now merely warn about any failure to preserve symlink ownership.
970 Before, cp (without -p) would exit with a failure status, and a cross-device
971 mv would leave such symlinks behind in the source file system.
972 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
974 When creating numbered backups, cp, install, ln, and mv now avoid
975 races that could lose backup data in unlikely circumstances. Since
976 the fix relies on the renameat2 system call of Linux kernel 3.15 and
977 later, the races are still present on other platforms.
978 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
980 cp, install, ln, and mv no longer lose data when asked to copy a
981 backup file to its original via a differently-spelled file name.
982 E.g., 'rm -f a a~; : > a; echo data > a~; cp --backup=simple a~ ./a'
983 now fails instead of losing the data.
984 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
986 cp, install, ln, and mv now ignore nonsensical backup suffixes.
987 For example, --suffix='/' and --suffix='' are now no-ops.
988 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
990 date and touch no longer overwrite the heap with large
991 user specified TZ values (CVE-2017-7476).
992 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.27]
994 dd status=progress now just counts seconds; e.g., it outputs "6 s"
995 consistently rather than sometimes outputting "6.00001 s".
996 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
998 df no longer interacts with excluded file system types, so for example
999 specifying -x nfs no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounts.
1000 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1002 df no longer interacts with dummy file system types, so for example
1003 no longer hangs with problematic nfs mounted via system.automount(5).
1004 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1006 `groups inva:lid root` no longer exits immediately upon failure.
1007 Now, it prints a diagnostic or a line to stdout for each argument.
1008 [bug introduced in the bourne-shell-to-C rewrite for coreutils-6.11]
1010 kill now converts from number to signal name correctly on AIX.
1011 Previously it would have always returned the 'EXIT' name.
1012 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
1014 ls now quotes symlink targets consistently. Previously it may not
1015 have quoted the target name if the link name itself didn't need quoting.
1016 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1018 split no longer exits when invocations of a --filter return EPIPE.
1019 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1021 md5sum --check no longer incorrectly enables BSD reversed format mode when
1022 ignoring some non checksum lines. This also affects sha*sum and b2sum.
1023 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
1025 tail -F 'dir/file' is now monitored even when 'dir' is replaced.
1026 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1028 tail -f with --pid=PID now processes all inotify events.
1029 Previously events may have been ignored completely upon PID death,
1030 or ignored until future events on the monitored files.
1031 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1033 tail -f /dev/tty is now supported by not using inotify when any
1034 non regular files are specified, as inotify is ineffective with these.
1035 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1037 uptime no longer outputs the AM/PM component of the current time,
1038 as that's inconsistent with the 24 hour time format used.
1039 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1041 expr now returns number of characters matched (instead of incorrect
1042 number of bytes matched) with 'match'/':' operators on multibyte strings.
1046 expand and unexpand now support specifying an offset for tab stops
1047 by prefixing the last specified number like --tabs=1,+8 which is
1048 useful for visualizing diff output for example.
1050 ls supports a new --hyperlink[=when] option to output file://
1051 format links to files, supported by some terminals.
1053 split supports a new --hex-suffixes[=from] option to create files with
1054 lower case hexadecimal suffixes, similar to the --numeric-suffixes option.
1056 env now has a --chdir (-C) option to change the working directory before
1057 executing the subsidiary program.
1059 expr supports multibyte strings for all string operations.
1061 ** Changes in behavior
1063 tail -f now exits immediately if the output is piped and the reader of
1064 the pipe terminates. That allows `tail -f file | grep -q foo` to return
1065 responsively, but does make `tail -f file | :` exit immediately without
1066 waiting for data. Instead one should now `tail -f file | grep -q .`
1070 mv --verbose now distinguishes rename and copy operations.
1072 stat -f -c %l, used to output the max file name length on a file system,
1073 is now supported on FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
1075 tail -f no longer erroneously warns about being ineffective
1076 when following a single tty, as the simple blocking loop used
1077 is effective in this case.
1080 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.27 (2017-03-08) [stable]
1084 cp --parents will now set an SELinux context for created directories,
1085 as appropriate for the -a, --preseve=context, or -Z options.
1086 [bug present since SELinux support added in coreutils-6.10]
1088 date again converts from a specified time zone. Previously output was
1089 not converted to the local time zone, and remained in the specified one.
1090 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]
1092 Commands like 'cp --no-dereference -l A B' are no longer quiet no-ops
1093 when A is a regular file and B is a symbolic link that points to A.
1094 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
1096 factor no longer goes into an infinite loop for certain numbers like
1097 158909489063877810457 and 222087527029934481871.
1098 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1100 tail no longer prints redundant file headers with interleaved inotify events,
1101 which could be triggered especially when tail was suspended and resumed.
1102 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1104 timeout no longer has a race that may terminate the wrong process.
1105 The race is unlikely, as timeout(1) needs to receive a signal right
1106 after the command being monitored finishes. Also the system needs
1107 to have reallocated that command's pid in that short time window.
1108 [bug introduced when timeout was added in coreutils-7.0]
1110 wc --bytes --files0-from now correctly reports byte counts.
1111 Previously it may have returned values that were too large,
1112 depending on the size of the first file processed.
1113 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1117 The new 'date' option --rfc-email is now the long form for -R.
1118 The new option spelling is intended to avoid the need to track the
1119 Internet RFC number for email dates (currently RFC 5322). The old
1120 option spellings --rfc-2822 and --rfc-822 still work.
1122 date now outputs "-00" for a numeric time zone if the time is UTC
1123 and the time zone abbreviation begins with "-", indicating that the
1124 time zone is indeterminate.
1126 nproc now honors the OMP_THREAD_LIMIT environment variable to
1127 set the maximum returned value. OMP_NUM_THREADS continues to
1128 set the minimum returned value, but is updated to support the
1129 nested level syntax allowed in this variable.
1131 stat and tail now know about the "rdt" file system, which is an interface
1132 to Resource Director Technology. stat -f --format=%T now reports the
1133 file system type, and tail -f uses inotify.
1135 stty now validates arguments before interacting with the device,
1136 ensuring there are no side effects to specifying an invalid option.
1138 If the file B already exists, commands like 'ln -f A B' and
1139 'cp -fl A B' no longer remove B before creating the new link.
1140 That is, there is no longer a brief moment when B does not exist.
1144 expand and unexpand now support specifying a tab size to use
1145 after explicitly specified tab stops, by prefixing the last
1146 specified number like --tabs=2,4,/8.
1149 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.26 (2016-11-30) [stable]
1153 cp, mv, and install no longer run into undefined behavior when
1154 handling ACLs on Cygwin and Solaris platforms. [bug introduced in
1157 cp --parents --no-preserve=mode, no longer copies permissions from source
1158 directories, instead using default permissions for created directories.
1159 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1161 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown, du, and rm, or specifically utilities
1162 using the FTS interface, now diagnose failures returned by readdir().
1163 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
1164 introduced in coreutils-8.0. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using
1165 fts in 6.0. chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
1167 date, du, ls, and pr no longer mishandle time zone abbreviations on
1168 System V style platforms where this information is available only
1169 in the global variable 'tzname'. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1171 factor again outputs immediately when numbers are input interactively.
1172 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1174 head no longer tries to process non-seekable input as seekable,
1175 which resulted in failures on FreeBSD 11 at least.
1176 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1178 install -DZ and mkdir -pZ now set default SELinux context correctly even if
1179 two or more directories nested in each other are created and each of them
1180 defaults to a different SELinux context.
1182 ls --time-style no longer mishandles '%%b' in formats.
1183 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
1185 md5sum --check --ignore-missing no longer treats files with checksums
1186 starting with "00" as missing. This also affects sha*sum.
1187 [bug introduced with the --ignore-missing feature in coreutils-8.25]
1189 nl now resets numbering for each page section rather than just for each page.
1190 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1192 pr now handles specified separator strings containing tabs correctly.
1193 Previously it would have output random data from memory.
1194 [This bug was detected with ASAN and present in "the beginning".]
1196 sort -h -k now works even in locales that use blank as thousands separator.
1198 stty --help no longer outputs extraneous gettext header lines
1199 for translated languages. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1201 stty "sane" again sets "susp" to ^z on Solaris, and leaves "swtch" undefined.
1202 [This bug previously fixed only on some older Solaris systems]
1204 seq now immediately exits upon write errors.
1205 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1207 tac no longer crashes when there are issues reading from non-seekable inputs.
1208 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
1210 tail -F now continues to process initially untailable files that are replaced
1211 by a tailable file. This was handled correctly when inotify was available,
1212 and is now handled correctly in all cases.
1213 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
1215 tail -f - 'untailable file' will now terminate when there is no more data
1216 to read from stdin. Previously it behaved as if --retry was specified.
1217 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1219 tail -f 'remote file' will now avoid outputting repeated data on network
1220 file systems that misreport file sizes through stale metadata.
1221 [This bug was present in "the beginning" but exacerbated in coreutils-8.24]
1223 tail -f --retry 'missing file' will now process truncations of that file.
1224 Previously truncation was ignored thus not outputting new data in the file.
1225 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1227 tail -f will no longer continually try to open inaccessible files,
1228 only doing so if --retry is specified.
1229 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1231 yes now handles short writes, rather than assuming all writes complete.
1232 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1234 ** Changes in behavior
1236 rm no longer accepts shortened variants of the --no-preserve-root option.
1238 seq no longer accepts 0 value as increment, and now also rejects NaN
1239 values for any argument.
1241 stat now outputs nanosecond information for timestamps even if
1242 they are out of localtime range.
1244 sort, tail, and uniq now support traditional usage like 'sort +2'
1245 and 'tail +10' on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2008 and later.
1246 The 2008 edition of POSIX dropped the requirement that arguments
1247 like '+2' must be treated as file names.
1251 dd now warns about counts specified with a 0x "prefix", since dd will
1252 interpret those as a zero multiplier rather than a hex constant.
1253 The warning suggests to use 00x if a zero multiplier is really intended.
1255 df now filters the system mount list more efficiently, with 20000
1256 mount entries now being processed in about 1.1s compared to 1.7s.
1258 du, shuf, sort, and uniq no longer fail to process a specified file
1259 when their stdin is closed, which would have happened with glibc >= 2.14.
1261 install -Z now also sets the default SELinux context for created directories.
1263 ls is now fully responsive to signals until the first escape sequence is
1264 written to a terminal.
1266 ls now aligns quoted items with non quoted items, which is easier to read,
1267 and also better indicates that the quote is not part of the actual name.
1269 stat and tail now know about these file systems:
1270 "balloon-kvm-fs" KVM dynamic RAM allocation support,
1271 "cgroup2" Linux Control Groups V2 support,
1272 "daxfs" Optical media file system,
1273 "m1fs" A Plexistor file system,
1274 "prl_fs" A parallels file system,
1275 "smb2" Samba for SMB protocol V2,
1276 "wslfs" Windows Subsystem for Linux,
1277 "zsmalloc" Linux compressed swap support,
1278 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and
1279 tail -f uses polling for "prl_fs" and "smb2", and inotify for others.
1281 stat --format=%N for quoting file names now honors the
1282 same QUOTING_STYLE environment variable values as ls.
1286 b2sum is added to support the BLAKE2 digest algorithm with
1287 a similar interface to the existing md5sum and sha1sum, etc. commands.
1291 comm now accepts the --total option to output a summary at the end.
1293 date now accepts the --debug option, to annotate the parsed date string,
1294 display timezone information, and warn about potential misuse.
1296 date now accepts the %q format to output the quarter of the year.
1299 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.25 (2016-01-20) [stable]
1303 cp now correctly copies files with a hole at the end of the file,
1304 and extents allocated beyond the apparent size of the file.
1305 That combination resulted in the trailing hole not being reproduced.
1306 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1308 cut --fields no longer outputs extraneous characters on some uClibc configs.
1309 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
1311 install -D again copies relative file names when absolute file names
1312 are also specified along with an absolute destination directory name.
1313 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.2]
1315 ls no longer prematurely wraps lines when printing short file names.
1316 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
1318 mv no longer causes data loss due to removing a source directory specified
1319 multiple times, when that directory is also specified as the destination.
1320 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.24]
1322 shred again uses defined patterns for all iteration counts.
1323 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.93]
1325 sort --debug -b now correctly marks the matching extents for keys
1326 that specify an offset for the first field.
1327 [bug introduced with the --debug feature in coreutils-8.6]
1329 tail -F now works with initially non existent files on a remote file system.
1330 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1334 base32 is added to complement the existing base64 command,
1335 and encodes and decodes printable text as per RFC 4648.
1339 comm,cut,head,numfmt,paste,tail now have the -z,--zero-terminated option, and
1340 tac --separator accepts an empty argument, to work with NUL delimited items.
1342 dd now summarizes sizes in --human-readable format too, not just --si.
1343 E.g., "3441325000 bytes (3.4 GB, 3.2 GiB) copied". It omits the summaries
1344 if they would not provide useful information, e.g., "3 bytes copied".
1345 Its status=progress output now uses the same format as ordinary status,
1346 perhaps with trailing spaces to erase previous progress output.
1348 md5sum now supports the --ignore-missing option to allow
1349 verifying a subset of files given a larger list of checksums.
1350 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1352 printf now supports the '%q' format to print arguments in a form that
1353 is reusable by most shells, with non-printable characters escaped
1354 with the POSIX proposed $'...' syntax.
1356 stty now supports the "[-]drain" setting to control whether to wait
1357 for transmission of pending output before application of settings.
1359 ** Changes in behavior
1361 base64 no longer supports hex or oct --wrap parameters,
1362 thus better supporting decimals with leading zeros.
1364 date --iso-8601 now uses +00:00 timezone format rather than +0000.
1365 The standard states to use this "extended" format throughout a timestamp.
1367 df now prefers sources towards the root of a device when
1368 eliding duplicate bind mounted entries.
1370 ls now quotes file names unambiguously and appropriate for use in a shell,
1371 when outputting to a terminal.
1373 join, sort, uniq with --zero-terminated, now treat '\n' as a field delimiter.
1377 All utilities now quote user supplied arguments in error strings,
1378 which avoids confusing error messages in the presence of '\r' chars etc.
1380 Utilities that traverse directories, like chmod, cp, and rm etc., will operate
1381 more efficiently on XFS through the use of "leaf optimization".
1383 md5sum now ensures a single line per file for status on standard output,
1384 by using a '\' at the start of the line, and replacing any newlines with '\n'.
1385 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1387 dircolors now supports globbing of TERM entries in its database.
1388 For example "TERM *256color*" is now supported.
1390 du no longer stats all mount points at startup, only doing so
1391 upon detection of a directory cycle.
1392 [issue introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1394 ls -w0 is now interpreted as no limit on the length of the outputted line.
1396 stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type for new Linux
1397 pseudo file systems "bpf_fs", "btrfs_test", "nsfs", "overlayfs"
1398 and "tracefs", and remote file system "acfs".
1400 wc now ensures a single line per file for counts on standard output,
1401 by quoting names containing '\n' characters; appropriate for use in a shell.
1404 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.24 (2015-07-03) [stable]
1408 dd supports more robust SIGINFO/SIGUSR1 handling for outputting statistics.
1409 Previously those signals may have inadvertently terminated the process.
1411 df --local no longer hangs with inaccessible remote mounts.
1412 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1414 du now silently ignores all directory cycles due to bind mounts.
1415 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1416 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1 and partially fixed in coreutils-8.23]
1418 chroot again calls chroot(DIR) and chdir("/"), even if DIR is "/".
1419 This handles separate bind mounted "/" trees, and environments
1420 depending on the implicit chdir("/").
1421 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.23]
1423 cp no longer issues an incorrect warning about directory hardlinks when a
1424 source directory is specified multiple times. Now, consistent with other
1425 file types, a warning is issued for source directories with duplicate names,
1426 or with -H the directory is copied again using the symlink name.
1428 factor avoids writing partial lines, thus supporting parallel operation.
1429 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1431 head, od, split, tac, tail, and wc no longer mishandle input from files in
1432 /proc and /sys file systems that report somewhat-incorrect file sizes.
1434 mkdir --parents -Z now correctly sets the context for the last component,
1435 even if the parent directory exists and has a different default context.
1436 [bug introduced with the -Z restorecon functionality in coreutils-8.22]
1438 numfmt no longer outputs incorrect overflowed values seen with certain
1439 large numbers, or with numbers with increased precision.
1440 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1442 numfmt now handles leading zeros correctly, not counting them when
1443 settings processing limits, and making them optional with floating point.
1444 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1446 paste no longer truncates output for large input files. This would happen
1447 for example with files larger than 4GiB on 32 bit systems with a '\n'
1448 character at the 4GiB position.
1449 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1451 rm indicates the correct number of arguments in its confirmation prompt,
1452 on all platforms. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1454 shuf -i with a single redundant operand, would crash instead of issuing
1455 a diagnostic. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1457 tail releases inotify resources when unused. Previously it could exhaust
1458 resources with many files, or with -F if files were replaced many times.
1459 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1461 tail -f again follows changes to a file after it's renamed.
1462 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1464 tail --follow no longer misses changes to files if those files were
1465 replaced before inotify watches were created.
1466 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1468 tail --follow consistently outputs all data for a truncated file.
1469 [bug introduced in the beginning]
1471 tail --follow=name correctly outputs headers for multiple files
1472 when those files are being created or renamed.
1473 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
1477 chroot accepts the new --skip-chdir option to not change the working directory
1478 to "/" after changing into the chroot(2) jail, thus retaining the current wor-
1479 king directory. The new option is only permitted if the new root directory is
1480 the old "/", and therefore is useful with the --group and --userspec options.
1482 dd accepts a new status=progress level to print data transfer statistics
1483 on stderr approximately every second.
1485 numfmt can now process multiple fields with field range specifications similar
1486 to cut, and supports setting the output precision with the --format option.
1488 split accepts a new --separator option to select a record separator character
1489 other than the default newline character.
1491 stty allows setting the "extproc" option where supported, which is
1492 a useful setting with high latency links.
1494 sync no longer ignores arguments, and syncs each specified file, or with the
1495 --file-system option, the file systems associated with each specified file.
1497 tee accepts a new --output-error option to control operation with pipes
1498 and output errors in general.
1500 ** Changes in behavior
1502 df no longer suppresses separate exports of the same remote device, as
1503 these are generally explicitly mounted. The --total option does still
1504 suppress duplicate remote file systems.
1505 [suppression was introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1507 mv no longer supports moving a file to a hardlink, instead issuing an error.
1508 The implementation was susceptible to races in the presence of multiple mv
1509 instances, which could result in both hardlinks being deleted. Also on case
1510 insensitive file systems like HFS, mv would just remove a hardlinked 'file'
1511 if called like `mv file File`. The feature was added in coreutils-5.0.1.
1513 numfmt --from-unit and --to-unit options now interpret suffixes as SI units,
1514 and IEC (power of 2) units are now specified by appending 'i'.
1516 tee will exit early if there are no more writable outputs.
1518 tee does not treat the file operand '-' as meaning standard output any longer,
1519 for better conformance to POSIX. This feature was added in coreutils-5.3.0.
1521 timeout --foreground no longer sends SIGCONT to the monitored process,
1522 which was seen to cause intermittent issues with GDB for example.
1526 cp,install,mv will convert smaller runs of NULs in the input to holes,
1527 and cp --sparse=always avoids speculative preallocation on XFS for example.
1529 cp will read sparse files more efficiently when the destination is a
1530 non regular file. For example when copying a disk image to a device node.
1532 mv will try a reflink before falling back to a standard copy, which is
1533 more efficient when moving files across BTRFS subvolume boundaries.
1535 stat and tail now know about IBRIX. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1536 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on IBRIX file systems.
1538 wc -l processes short lines much more efficiently.
1540 References from --help and the man pages of utilities have been corrected
1541 in various cases, and more direct links to the corresponding online
1542 documentation are provided.
1545 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.23 (2014-07-18) [stable]
1549 chmod -Rc no longer issues erroneous warnings for files with special bits set.
1550 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1552 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, once again set the correct SELinux
1553 context for existing directories in the destination. Previously they set
1554 the context of an existing directory to that of its last copied descendant.
1555 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1557 cp -a, mv, and install --preserve-context, no longer seg fault when running
1558 with SELinux enabled, when copying from file systems that return an error
1559 when reading the SELinux context for a file.
1560 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1562 cp -a and mv now preserve xattrs of symlinks copied across file systems.
1563 [bug introduced with extended attribute preservation feature in coreutils-7.1]
1565 date could crash or go into an infinite loop when parsing a malformed TZ="".
1566 [bug introduced with the --date='TZ="" ..' parsing feature in coreutils-5.3.0]
1568 dd's ASCII and EBCDIC conversions were incompatible with common practice and
1569 with POSIX, and have been corrected as follows. First, conv=ascii now
1570 implies conv=unblock, and conv=ebcdic and conv=ibm now imply conv=block.
1571 Second, the translation tables for dd conv=ascii and conv=ebcdic have been
1572 corrected as shown in the following table, where A is the ASCII value, W is
1573 the old, wrong EBCDIC value, and E is the new, corrected EBCDIC value; all
1574 values are in octal.
1587 [These dd bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1589 df has more fixes related to the newer dynamic representation of file systems:
1590 Duplicates are elided for virtual file systems like tmpfs.
1591 Details for the correct device are output for points mounted multiple times.
1592 Placeholder values are output for inaccessible file systems, rather than
1593 than error messages or values for the wrong file system.
1594 [These bugs were present in "the beginning".]
1596 df now outputs all appropriate entries in the presence of bind mounts.
1597 On some systems, entries would have been incorrectly elided due to
1598 them being considered "dummy" mounts.
1599 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
1601 du now silently ignores directory cycles introduced with bind mounts.
1602 Previously it would issue a warning and exit with a failure status.
1603 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1605 head --bytes=-N and --lines=-N now handles devices more
1606 consistently, not ignoring data from virtual devices like /dev/zero,
1607 or on BSD systems data from tty devices.
1608 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0.1]
1610 head --bytes=-N - no longer fails with a bogus diagnostic when stdin's
1611 seek pointer is not at the beginning.
1612 [bug introduced with the --bytes=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1614 head --lines=-0, when the input does not contain a trailing '\n',
1615 now copies all input to stdout. Previously nothing was output in this case.
1616 [bug introduced with the --lines=-N feature in coreutils-5.0.1]
1618 id, when invoked with no user name argument, now prints the correct group ID.
1619 Previously, in the default output format, it would print the default group ID
1620 in the password database, which may be neither real nor effective. For e.g.,
1621 when run set-GID, or when the database changes outside the current session.
1622 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
1624 ln -sf now replaces symbolic links whose targets can't exist. Previously
1625 it would display an error, requiring --no-dereference to avoid the issue.
1626 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1628 ln -sr '' F no longer segfaults. Now works as expected.
1629 [bug introduced with the --relative feature in coreutils-8.16]
1631 numfmt now handles blanks correctly in all unibyte locales. Previously
1632 in locales where character 0xA0 is a blank, numfmt would mishandle it.
1633 [bug introduced when numfmt was added in coreutils-8.21]
1635 ptx --format long option parsing no longer falls through into the --help case.
1636 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1638 ptx now consistently trims whitespace when processing multiple files.
1639 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1641 seq again generates correct output with start or end values = -0.
1642 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20.]
1644 shuf --repeat no longer dumps core if the input is empty.
1645 [bug introduced with the --repeat feature in coreutils-8.22]
1647 sort when using multiple threads now avoids undefined behavior with mutex
1648 destruction, which could cause deadlocks on some implementations.
1649 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
1651 tail -f now uses polling mode for VXFS to cater for its clustered mode.
1652 [bug introduced with inotify support added in coreutils-7.5]
1656 od accepts a new option: --endian=TYPE to handle inputs with different byte
1657 orders, or to provide consistent output on systems with disparate endianness.
1659 configure accepts the new option --enable-single-binary to build all the
1660 selected programs in a single binary called "coreutils". The selected
1661 programs can still be called directly using symlinks to "coreutils" or
1662 shebangs with the option --coreutils-prog= passed to this program. The
1663 install behavior is determined by the option --enable-single-binary=symlinks
1664 or --enable-single-binary=shebangs (the default). With the symlinks option,
1665 you can't make a second symlink to any program because that will change the
1666 name of the called program, which is used by coreutils to determine the
1667 desired program. The shebangs option doesn't suffer from this problem, but
1668 the /proc/$pid/cmdline file might not be updated on all the platforms. The
1669 functionality of each program is not affected but this single binary will
1670 depend on all the required dynamic libraries even to run simple programs.
1671 If you desire to build some tools outside the single binary file, you can
1672 pass the option --enable-single-binary-exceptions=PROG_LIST with the comma
1673 separated list of programs you want to build separately. This flag
1674 considerably reduces the overall size of the installed binaries which makes
1675 it suitable for embedded system.
1677 ** Changes in behavior
1679 chroot with an argument of "/" no longer implicitly changes the current
1680 directory to "/", allowing changing only user credentials for a command.
1682 chroot --userspec will now unset supplemental groups associated with root,
1683 and instead use the supplemental groups of the specified user.
1685 cut -d$'\n' again outputs lines identified in the --fields list, having
1686 not done so in v8.21 and v8.22. Note using this non portable functionality
1687 will result in the delayed output of lines.
1689 ls with none of LS_COLORS or COLORTERM environment variables set,
1690 will now honor an empty or unknown TERM environment variable,
1691 and not output colors even with --colors=always.
1695 chroot has better --userspec and --group look-ups, with numeric IDs never
1696 causing name look-up errors. Also look-ups are first done outside the chroot,
1697 in case the look-up within the chroot fails due to library conflicts etc.
1699 install now allows the combination of the -D and -t options.
1701 numfmt supports zero padding of numbers using the standard printf
1702 syntax of a leading zero, for example --format="%010f".
1703 Also throughput was improved by up to 800% by avoiding redundant processing.
1705 shred now supports multiple passes on GNU/Linux tape devices by rewinding
1706 the tape before each pass, avoids redundant writes to empty files,
1707 uses direct I/O for all passes where possible, and attempts to clear
1708 inode storage used for small files on some file systems.
1710 split avoids unnecessary input buffering, immediately writing input to output
1711 which is significant with --filter or when writing to fifos or stdout etc.
1713 stat and tail work better with HFS+, HFSX, LogFS and ConfigFS. stat -f
1714 --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify,
1715 rather than the default of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1718 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.22 (2013-12-13) [stable]
1722 df now processes the mount list correctly in the presence of unstatable
1723 mount points. Previously it may have failed to output some mount points.
1724 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.21]
1726 df now processes symbolic links and relative paths to special files containing
1727 a mounted file system correctly. Previously df displayed the statistics about
1728 the file system the file is stored on rather than the one inside.
1729 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1731 df now processes disk device nodes correctly in the presence of bind mounts.
1732 Now df shows the base mounted file system rather than the last one mounted.
1733 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1735 install now removes the target file if the strip program failed for any
1736 reason. Before, that file was left behind, sometimes even with wrong
1738 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1740 ln --relative now updates existing symlinks correctly. Previously it based
1741 the relative link on the dereferenced path of an existing link.
1742 [This bug was introduced when --relative was added in coreutils-8.16.]
1744 ls --recursive will no longer exit with "serious" exit code (2), if there
1745 is an error reading a directory not specified on the command line.
1746 [Bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
1748 mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod now work better when creating a file in a directory
1749 with a default ACL whose umask disagrees with the process's umask, on a
1750 system such as GNU/Linux where directory ACL umasks override process umasks.
1751 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1753 mv will now replace empty directories in the destination with directories
1754 from the source, when copying across file systems.
1755 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1757 od -wN with N larger than 64K on a system with 32-bit size_t would
1758 print approximately 2*N bytes of extraneous padding.
1759 [Bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
1761 rm -I now prompts for confirmation before removing a write protected file.
1762 [Bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
1764 shred once again uses direct I/O on systems requiring aligned buffers.
1765 Also direct I/O failures for odd sized writes at end of file are now handled.
1766 [The "last write" bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0 but masked
1767 by the alignment bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
1769 tail --retry -f now waits for the files specified to appear. Before, tail
1770 would immediately exit when such a file is initially inaccessible.
1771 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1773 tail -F has improved handling of symlinks. Previously tail didn't respond
1774 to the symlink target (re)appearing after being (re)created.
1775 [This bug was introduced when inotify support was added in coreutils-7.5]
1779 cp, install, mkdir, mknod, mkfifo and mv now support "restorecon"
1780 functionality through the -Z option, to set the SELinux context
1781 appropriate for the new item location in the file system.
1783 csplit accepts a new option: --suppressed-matched, to elide the lines
1784 used to identify the split points.
1786 df --output now accepts a 'file' field, to propagate a specified
1787 command line argument through to the output.
1789 du accepts a new option: --inodes to show the number of inodes instead
1792 id accepts a new option: --zero (-z) to delimit the output entries by
1793 a NUL instead of a white space character.
1795 id and ls with -Z report the SMACK security context where available.
1796 mkdir, mkfifo and mknod with --context set the SMACK context where available.
1798 id can now lookup by user ID, in addition to the existing name lookup.
1800 join accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort,uniq
1801 option of the same name, this makes join consume and produce NUL-terminated
1802 lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
1804 uniq accepts a new option: --group to print all items, while separating
1805 unique groups with empty lines.
1807 shred accepts new parameters to the --remove option to give greater
1808 control over that operation, which can greatly reduce sync overhead.
1810 shuf accepts a new option: --repeat (-r), which can repeat items in
1813 ** Changes in behavior
1815 cp --link now dereferences a symbolic link as source before creating the
1816 hard link in the destination unless the -P,--no-deref option is specified.
1817 Previously, it would create a hard link of the symbolic link, even when
1818 the dereferencing options -L or -H were specified.
1820 cp, install, mkdir, mknod and mkfifo no longer accept an argument to the
1821 short -Z option. The --context equivalent still takes an optional argument.
1823 dd status=none now suppresses all non fatal diagnostic messages,
1824 not just the transfer counts.
1826 df no longer accepts the long-obsolescent --megabytes option.
1828 stdbuf now requires at least one buffering mode option to be specified,
1829 as per the documented interface.
1833 base64 encoding throughput for bulk data is increased by about 60%.
1835 md5sum can use libcrypto hash routines where allowed to potentially
1836 get better performance through using more system specific logic.
1837 sha1sum for example has improved throughput by 40% on an i3-2310M.
1838 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
1840 stat and tail work better with EFIVARFS, EXOFS, F2FS, HOSTFS, SMACKFS, SNFS
1841 and UBIFS. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file system type, and tail -f
1842 now uses inotify for files on all those except SNFS, rather than the default
1843 (for unknown file system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling.
1845 shuf outputs subsets of large inputs much more efficiently.
1846 Reservoir sampling is used to limit memory usage based on the number of
1847 outputs, rather than the number of inputs.
1849 shred increases the default write block size from 12KiB to 64KiB
1850 to align with other utilities and reduce the system call overhead.
1852 split --line-bytes=SIZE, now only allocates memory as needed rather
1853 than allocating SIZE bytes at program start.
1855 stty now supports configuring "stick" (mark/space) parity where available.
1859 factor now builds on aarch64 based systems [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1862 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.21 (2013-02-14) [stable]
1866 numfmt: reformat numbers
1870 df now accepts the --output[=FIELD_LIST] option to define the list of columns
1871 to include in the output, or all available columns if the FIELD_LIST is
1872 omitted. Note this enables df to output both block and inode fields together.
1874 du now accepts the --threshold=SIZE option to restrict the output to entries
1875 with such a minimum SIZE (or a maximum SIZE if it is negative).
1876 du recognizes -t SIZE as equivalent, for compatibility with FreeBSD.
1878 timeout now accepts the --preserve-status option to always propagate the exit
1879 status, useful for commands that can run for an indeterminate amount of time.
1883 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer exits non-zero.
1884 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1886 cut with a range like "N-" no longer allocates N/8 bytes. That buffer
1887 would never be used, and allocation failure could cause cut to fail.
1888 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
1890 cut no longer accepts the invalid range 0-, which made it print empty lines.
1891 Instead, cut now fails and emits an appropriate diagnostic.
1892 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1894 cut now handles overlapping to-EOL ranges properly. Before, it would
1895 interpret "-b2-,3-" like "-b3-". Now it's treated like "-b2-".
1896 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1898 cut no longer prints extraneous delimiters when a to-EOL range subsumes
1899 another range. Before, "echo 123|cut --output-delim=: -b2-,3" would print
1900 "2:3". Now it prints "23". [bug introduced in 5.3.0]
1902 cut -f no longer inspects input line N+1 before fully outputting line N,
1903 which avoids delayed output for intermittent input.
1904 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_8b]
1906 factor no longer loops infinitely on 32 bit powerpc or sparc systems.
1907 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1909 install -m M SOURCE DEST no longer has a race condition where DEST's
1910 permissions are temporarily derived from SOURCE instead of from M.
1912 pr -n no longer crashes when passed values >= 32. Also, line numbers are
1913 consistently padded with spaces, rather than with zeros for certain widths.
1914 [bug introduced in TEXTUTILS-1_22i]
1916 seq -w ensures that for numbers input in scientific notation,
1917 the output numbers are properly aligned and of the correct width.
1918 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1920 seq -w ensures correct alignment when the step value includes a precision
1921 while the start value does not, and the number sequence narrows.
1922 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
1924 seq -s no longer prints an erroneous newline after the first number, and
1925 outputs a newline after the last number rather than a trailing separator.
1926 Also seq no longer ignores a specified step value when the end value is 1.
1927 [bugs introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1929 timeout now ensures that blocking of ALRM signals is not inherited from
1930 its parent, which would cause timeouts to be ignored.
1931 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
1933 ** Changes in behavior
1935 df --total now prints '-' into the target column (mount point) of the
1936 summary line, accommodating the --output option where the target field
1937 can be in any column. If there is no source column, then df prints
1938 'total' in the target column.
1940 df now properly outputs file system information with bind mounts present on
1941 the system by skipping duplicate entries (identified by the device number).
1942 Consequently, df also elides the early-boot pseudo file system type "rootfs".
1944 cut -d$'\n' no longer outputs lines identified in the --fields list,
1945 to align with other implementations and to avoid delayed output of lines.
1947 nl no longer supports the --page-increment option, which has been
1948 deprecated since coreutils-7.5. Use --line-increment instead.
1952 readlink now supports multiple arguments, and a complementary
1953 -z, --zero option to delimit output items with the NUL character.
1955 stat and tail now know about CEPH. stat -f --format=%T now reports the file
1956 system type, and tail -f uses polling for files on CEPH file systems.
1958 stty now supports configuring DTR/DSR hardware flow control where available.
1962 Perl is now more of a prerequisite. It has long been required in order
1963 to run (not skip) a significant percentage of the tests. Now, it is
1964 also required in order to generate proper man pages, via help2man. The
1965 generated man/*.1 man pages are no longer distributed. Building without
1966 perl, you would create stub man pages. Thus, while perl is not an
1967 official prerequisite (build and "make check" will still succeed), any
1968 resulting man pages would be inferior. In addition, this fixes a bug
1969 in distributed (not from clone) Makefile.in that could cause parallel
1970 build failure when building from modified sources, as is common practice
1971 for a patched distribution package.
1973 factor now builds on x86_64 with x32 ABI, 32 bit MIPS, and all HPPA systems,
1974 by avoiding incompatible asm. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1976 A root-only test predicate would always fail. Its job was to determine
1977 whether our dummy user, $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, was able to run binaries from
1978 the build directory. As a result, all dependent tests were always skipped.
1979 Now, those tests may be run once again. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.20]
1982 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.20 (2012-10-23) [stable]
1986 dd now accepts 'status=none' to suppress all informational output.
1988 md5sum now accepts the --tag option to print BSD-style output with GNU
1989 file name escaping. This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha256sum,
1990 sha384sum and sha512sum.
1994 cp could read from freed memory and could even make corrupt copies.
1995 This could happen with a very fragmented and sparse input file,
1996 on GNU/Linux file systems supporting fiemap extent scanning.
1997 This bug also affects mv when it resorts to copying, and install.
1998 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.11]
2000 cp --no-preserve=mode now no longer preserves the original file's
2001 permissions but correctly sets mode specified by 0666 & ~umask
2003 du no longer emits a "disk-corrupted"-style diagnostic when it detects
2004 a directory cycle that is due to a bind-mounted directory. Instead,
2005 it detects this precise type of cycle, diagnoses it as such and
2006 eventually exits nonzero.
2008 factor (when using gmp) would mistakenly declare some composite numbers
2009 to be prime, e.g., 465658903, 2242724851, 6635692801 and many more.
2010 The fix makes factor somewhat slower (~25%) for ranges of consecutive
2011 numbers, and up to 8 times slower for some worst-case individual numbers.
2012 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0, with GNU MP support]
2014 ls now correctly colors dangling symlinks when listing their containing
2015 directories, with orphaned symlink coloring disabled in LS_COLORS.
2016 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.14]
2018 rm -i -d now prompts the user then removes an empty directory, rather
2019 than ignoring the -d option and failing with an 'Is a directory' error.
2020 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.19, with the addition of --dir (-d)]
2022 rm -r S/ (where S is a symlink-to-directory) no longer gives the invalid
2023 "Too many levels of symbolic links" diagnostic.
2024 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2026 seq now handles arbitrarily long non-negative whole numbers when the
2027 increment is 1 and when no format-changing option is specified.
2028 Before, this would infloop:
2029 b=100000000000000000000; seq $b $b
2030 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2032 ** Changes in behavior
2034 nproc now diagnoses with an error, non option command line parameters.
2038 factor's core has been rewritten for speed and increased range.
2039 It can now factor numbers up to 2^128, even without GMP support.
2040 Its speed is from a few times better (for small numbers) to over
2041 10,000 times better (just below 2^64). The new code also runs a
2042 deterministic primality test for each prime factor, not just a
2045 seq is now up to 70 times faster than it was in coreutils-8.19 and prior,
2046 but only with non-negative whole numbers, an increment of 1, and no
2047 format-changing options.
2049 stat and tail know about ZFS, VZFS and VMHGFS. stat -f --format=%T now
2050 reports the file system type, and tail -f now uses inotify for files on
2051 ZFS and VZFS file systems, rather than the default (for unknown file
2052 system types) of issuing a warning and reverting to polling. tail -f
2053 still uses polling for files on VMHGFS file systems.
2057 root-only tests now check for permissions of our dummy user,
2058 $NON_ROOT_USERNAME, before trying to run binaries from the build directory.
2059 Before, we would get hard-to-diagnose reports of failing root-only tests.
2060 Now, those tests are skipped with a useful diagnostic when the root tests
2061 are run without following the instructions in README.
2063 We now build most directories using non-recursive make rules. I.e.,
2064 rather than running make in man/, lib/, src/, tests/, instead, the top
2065 level Makefile.am includes a $dir/local.mk that describes how to build
2066 the targets in the corresponding directory. Two directories remain
2067 unconverted: po/, gnulib-tests/. One nice side-effect is that the more
2068 accurate dependencies have eliminated a nagging occasional failure that
2069 was seen when running parallel "make syntax-check".
2072 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.19 (2012-08-20) [stable]
2076 df now fails when the list of mounted file systems (/etc/mtab) cannot
2077 be read, yet the file system type information is needed to process
2078 certain options like -a, -l, -t and -x.
2079 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2081 sort -u could fail to output one or more result lines.
2082 For example, this command would fail to print "1":
2083 (yes 7 | head -11; echo 1) | sort --p=1 -S32b -u
2084 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2086 sort -u could read freed memory.
2087 For example, this evokes a read from freed memory:
2088 perl -le 'print "a\n"."0"x900'|valgrind sort --p=1 -S32b -u>/dev/null
2089 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2093 rm now accepts the --dir (-d) option which makes it remove empty directories.
2094 Since removing empty directories is relatively safe, this option can be
2095 used as a part of the alias rm='rm --dir'. This improves compatibility
2096 with Mac OS X and BSD systems which also honor the -d option.
2099 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.18 (2012-08-12) [stable]
2103 cksum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2104 processes will not intersperse their output.
2105 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2107 date -d "$(printf '\xb0')" would print 00:00:00 with today's date
2108 rather than diagnosing the invalid input. Now it reports this:
2109 date: invalid date '\260'
2110 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2112 df no longer outputs control characters present in the mount point name.
2113 Such characters are replaced with '?', so for example, scripts consuming
2114 lines output by df, can work reliably.
2115 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2117 df --total now exits with an appropriate diagnostic and error code, when
2118 file system --type options do not lead to a processed file system.
2119 [This bug dates back to when --total was added in coreutils-7.0]
2121 head --lines=-N (-n-N) now resets the read pointer of a seekable input file.
2122 This means that "head -n-3" no longer consumes all of its input, and lines
2123 not output by head may be processed by other programs. For example, this
2124 command now prints the final line, 2, while before it would print nothing:
2125 seq 2 > k; (head -n-1 > /dev/null; cat) < k
2126 [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2128 ls --color would mis-color relative-named symlinks in /
2129 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
2131 split now ensures it doesn't overwrite the input file with generated output.
2132 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2134 stat and df now report the correct file system usage,
2135 in all situations on GNU/Linux, by correctly determining the block size.
2136 [df bug since coreutils-5.0.91, stat bug since the initial implementation]
2138 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on AUFS or PanFS file systems
2139 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2140 support, but even now, its magic number isn't in the usual place.]
2144 stat -f recognizes the new remote file system types: aufs, panfs.
2146 ** Changes in behavior
2148 su: this program has been removed. We stopped installing "su" by
2149 default with the release of coreutils-6.9.90 on 2007-12-01. Now,
2150 that the util-linux package has the union of the Suse and Fedora
2151 patches as well as enough support to build on the Hurd, we no longer
2152 have any reason to include it here.
2156 sort avoids redundant processing in the presence of inaccessible inputs,
2157 or unwritable output. Sort now diagnoses certain errors at start-up,
2158 rather than after potentially expensive processing.
2160 sort now allocates no more than 75% of physical memory by default,
2161 to better share system resources, and thus operate more efficiently.
2162 [The default max memory usage changed from 50% to 100% in coreutils-8.16]
2165 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]
2169 id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
2170 the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
2171 that ID would be neither real nor effective. For example, when run
2172 set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
2173 changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
2174 yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2176 cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
2177 between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
2178 fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
2179 found. Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
2180 and hence usually succeeds. With NFS attribute caching, the condition
2181 was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
2182 precede the initial stat. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
2184 split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
2185 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2187 stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
2188 [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]
2192 split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
2193 the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.
2195 fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.
2197 stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6
2199 ** Changes in behavior
2201 cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
2202 This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
2203 throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.
2205 cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
2206 allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.
2209 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.16 (2012-03-26) [stable]
2213 As a GNU extension, 'chmod', 'mkdir', and 'install' now accept operators
2214 '-', '+', '=' followed by octal modes; for example, 'chmod +40 FOO' enables
2215 and 'chmod -40 FOO' disables FOO's group-read permissions. Operator
2216 numeric modes can be combined with symbolic modes by separating them with
2217 commas; for example, =0,u+r clears all permissions except for enabling
2218 user-read permissions. Unlike ordinary numeric modes, operator numeric
2219 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits; for example,
2220 'chmod =0 FOO' clears all of FOO's permissions, including setuid and setgid.
2222 Also, ordinary numeric modes with five or more digits no longer preserve
2223 setuid and setgid bits, so that 'chmod 00755 FOO' now clears FOO's setuid
2224 and setgid bits. This allows scripts to be portable to other systems which
2225 lack the GNU extension mentioned previously, and where ordinary numeric
2226 modes do not preserve directory setuid and setgid bits.
2228 dd now accepts the count_bytes, skip_bytes iflags and the seek_bytes
2229 oflag, to more easily allow processing portions of a file.
2231 dd now accepts the conv=sparse flag to attempt to create sparse
2232 output, by seeking rather than writing to the output file.
2234 ln now accepts the --relative option, to generate a relative
2235 symbolic link to a target, irrespective of how the target is specified.
2237 split now accepts an optional "from" argument to --numeric-suffixes,
2238 which changes the start number from the default of 0.
2240 split now accepts the --additional-suffix option, to append an
2241 additional static suffix to output file names.
2243 basename now supports the -a and -s options, which allow processing
2244 of more than one argument at a time. Also the complementary
2245 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2247 dirname now supports more than one argument. Also the complementary
2248 -z option was added to delimit output items with the NUL character.
2252 du --one-file-system (-x) would ignore any non-directory specified on
2253 the command line. For example, "touch f; du -x f" would print nothing.
2254 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.15]
2256 mv now lets you move a symlink onto a same-inode destination file that
2257 has two or more hard links. Before, it would reject that, saying that
2258 they are the same, implicitly warning you that the move would result in
2259 data loss. In this unusual case, when not moving the symlink onto its
2260 referent, there is no risk of data loss, since the symlink will
2261 typically still point to one of the hard links.
2263 "mv A B" could succeed, yet A would remain. This would happen only when
2264 both A and B were hard links to the same symlink, and with a kernel for
2265 which rename("A","B") does nothing and returns 0 (POSIX mandates this
2266 surprising rename no-op behavior). Now, mv handles this case by skipping
2267 the usually-useless rename and simply unlinking A.
2269 realpath no longer mishandles a root directory. This was most
2270 noticeable on platforms where // is a different directory than /,
2271 but could also be observed with --relative-base=/ or
2272 --relative-to=/. [bug since the beginning, in 8.15]
2276 ls can be much more efficient, especially with large directories on file
2277 systems for which getfilecon-, ACL-check- and XATTR-check-induced syscalls
2278 fail with ENOTSUP or similar.
2280 'realpath --relative-base=dir' in isolation now implies '--relative-to=dir'
2281 instead of causing a usage failure.
2283 split now supports an unlimited number of split files as default behavior.
2286 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.15 (2012-01-06) [stable]
2290 realpath: print resolved file names.
2294 du -x no longer counts root directories of other file systems.
2295 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2297 ls --color many-entry-directory was uninterruptible for too long
2298 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.2.1]
2300 ls's -k option no longer affects how ls -l outputs file sizes.
2301 It now affects only the per-directory block counts written by -l,
2302 and the sizes written by -s. This is for compatibility with BSD
2303 and with POSIX 2008. Because -k is no longer equivalent to
2304 --block-size=1KiB, a new long option --kibibyte stands for -k.
2305 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.4]
2307 ls -l would leak a little memory (security context string) for each
2308 nonempty directory listed on the command line, when using SELinux.
2309 [bug probably introduced in coreutils-6.10 with SELinux support]
2311 rm -rf DIR would fail with "Device or resource busy" on Cygwin with NWFS
2312 and NcFsd file systems. This did not affect Unix/Linux-based kernels.
2313 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0, when rm began using fts]
2315 split -n 1/2 FILE no longer fails when operating on a growing file, or
2316 (on some systems) when operating on a non-regular file like /dev/zero.
2317 It would report "/dev/zero: No such file or directory" even though
2318 the file obviously exists. Same for -n l/2.
2319 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8, with the addition of the -n option]
2321 stat -f now recognizes the FhGFS and PipeFS file system types.
2323 tac no longer fails to handle two or more non-seekable inputs
2324 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2326 tail -f no longer tries to use inotify on GPFS or FhGFS file systems
2327 [you might say this was introduced in coreutils-7.5, along with inotify
2328 support, but the new magic numbers weren't in the usual places then.]
2330 ** Changes in behavior
2332 df avoids long UUID-including file system names in the default listing.
2333 With recent enough kernel/tools, these long names would be used, pushing
2334 second and subsequent columns far to the right. Now, when a long name
2335 refers to a symlink, and no file systems are specified, df prints the
2336 usually-short referent instead.
2338 tail -f now uses polling (not inotify) when any of its file arguments
2339 resides on a file system of unknown type. In addition, for each such
2340 argument, tail -f prints a warning with the FS type magic number and a
2341 request to report it to the bug-reporting address.
2344 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.14 (2011-10-12) [stable]
2348 ls --dereference no longer outputs erroneous "argetm" strings for
2349 dangling symlinks when an 'ln=target' entry is in $LS_COLORS.
2350 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2352 ls -lL symlink once again properly prints "+" when the referent has an ACL.
2353 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.13]
2355 sort -g no longer infloops for certain inputs containing NaNs
2356 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2360 md5sum --check now supports the -r format from the corresponding BSD tool.
2361 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2363 pwd now works also on systems without openat. On such systems, pwd
2364 would fail when run from a directory whose absolute name contained
2365 more than PATH_MAX / 3 components. The df, stat and readlink programs
2366 are also affected due to their use of the canonicalize_* functions.
2368 ** Changes in behavior
2370 timeout now only processes the first signal received from the set
2371 it is handling (SIGTERM, SIGINT, ...). This is to support systems that
2372 implicitly create threads for some timer functions (like GNU/kFreeBSD).
2376 "make dist" no longer builds .tar.gz files.
2377 xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
2378 only .tar.xz files is enough.
2381 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.13 (2011-09-08) [stable]
2385 chown and chgrp with the -v --from= options, now output the correct owner.
2386 I.e., for skipped files, the original ownership is output, not the new one.
2387 [bug introduced in sh-utils-2.0g]
2389 cp -r could mistakenly change the permissions of an existing destination
2390 directory. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.8]
2392 cp -u -p would fail to preserve one hard link for each up-to-date copy
2393 of a src-hard-linked name in the destination tree. I.e., if s/a and s/b
2394 are hard-linked and dst/s/a is up to date, "cp -up s dst" would copy s/b
2395 to dst/s/b rather than simply linking dst/s/b to dst/s/a.
2396 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
2398 fts-using tools (rm, du, chmod, chgrp, chown, chcon) no longer use memory
2399 proportional to the number of entries in each directory they process.
2400 Before, rm -rf 4-million-entry-directory would consume about 1GiB of memory.
2401 Now, it uses less than 30MB, no matter how many entries there are.
2402 [this bug was inherent in the use of fts: thus, for rm the bug was
2403 introduced in coreutils-8.0. The prior implementation of rm did not use
2404 as much memory. du, chmod, chgrp and chown started using fts in 6.0.
2405 chcon was added in coreutils-6.9.91 with fts support. ]
2407 pr -T no longer ignores a specified LAST_PAGE to stop at.
2408 [bug introduced in textutils-1.19q]
2410 printf '%d' '"' no longer accesses out-of-bounds memory in the diagnostic.
2411 [bug introduced in sh-utils-1.16]
2413 split --number l/... no longer creates extraneous files in certain cases.
2414 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2416 timeout now sends signals to commands that create their own process group.
2417 timeout is no longer confused when starting off with a child process.
2418 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2420 unexpand -a now aligns correctly when there are spaces spanning a tabstop,
2421 followed by a tab. In that case a space was dropped, causing misalignment.
2422 We also now ensure that a space never precedes a tab.
2423 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2425 ** Changes in behavior
2427 chmod, chown and chgrp now output the original attributes in messages,
2428 when -v or -c specified.
2430 cp -au (where --preserve=links is implicit) may now replace newer
2431 files in the destination, to mirror hard links from the source.
2435 date now accepts ISO 8601 date-time strings with "T" as the
2436 separator. It has long parsed dates like "2004-02-29 16:21:42"
2437 with a space between the date and time strings. Now it also parses
2438 "2004-02-29T16:21:42" and fractional-second and time-zone-annotated
2439 variants like "2004-02-29T16:21:42.333-07:00"
2441 md5sum accepts the new --strict option. With --check, it makes the
2442 tool exit non-zero for any invalid input line, rather than just warning.
2443 This also affects sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2445 split accepts a new --filter=CMD option. With it, split filters output
2446 through CMD. CMD may use the $FILE environment variable, which is set to
2447 the nominal output file name for each invocation of CMD. For example, to
2448 split a file into 3 approximately equal parts, which are then compressed:
2449 split -n3 --filter='xz > $FILE.xz' big
2450 Note the use of single quotes, not double quotes.
2451 That creates files named xaa.xz, xab.xz and xac.xz.
2453 timeout accepts a new --foreground option, to support commands not started
2454 directly from a shell prompt, where the command is interactive or needs to
2455 receive signals initiated from the terminal.
2459 cp -p now copies trivial NSFv4 ACLs on Solaris 10. Before, it would
2460 mistakenly apply a non-trivial ACL to the destination file.
2462 cp and ls now support HP-UX 11.11's ACLs, thanks to improved support
2465 df now supports disk partitions larger than 4 TiB on MacOS X 10.5
2466 or newer and on AIX 5.2 or newer.
2468 join --check-order now prints "join: FILE:LINE_NUMBER: bad_line" for an
2469 unsorted input, rather than e.g., "join: file 1 is not in sorted order".
2471 shuf outputs small subsets of large permutations much more efficiently.
2472 For example 'shuf -i1-$((2**32-1)) -n2' no longer exhausts memory.
2474 stat -f now recognizes the GPFS, MQUEUE and PSTOREFS file system types.
2476 timeout now supports sub-second timeouts.
2480 Changes inherited from gnulib address a build failure on HP-UX 11.11
2481 when using /opt/ansic/bin/cc.
2483 Numerous portability and build improvements inherited via gnulib.
2486 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.12 (2011-04-26) [stable]
2490 tail's --follow=name option no longer implies --retry on systems
2491 with inotify support. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2493 ** Changes in behavior
2495 cp's extent-based (FIEMAP) copying code is more reliable in the face
2496 of varying and undocumented file system semantics:
2497 - it no longer treats unwritten extents specially
2498 - a FIEMAP-based extent copy always uses the FIEMAP_FLAG_SYNC flag.
2499 Before, it would incur the performance penalty of that sync only
2500 for 2.6.38 and older kernels. We thought all problems would be
2501 resolved for 2.6.39.
2502 - it now attempts a FIEMAP copy only on a file that appears sparse.
2503 Sparse files are relatively unusual, and the copying code incurs
2504 the performance penalty of the now-mandatory sync only for them.
2508 dd once again compiles on AIX 5.1 and 5.2
2511 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.11 (2011-04-13) [stable]
2515 cp -a --link would not create a hardlink to a symlink, instead
2516 copying the symlink and then not preserving its timestamp.
2517 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2519 cp now avoids FIEMAP issues with BTRFS before Linux 2.6.38,
2520 which could result in corrupt copies of sparse files.
2521 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2523 cut could segfault when invoked with a user-specified output
2524 delimiter and an unbounded range like "-f1234567890-".
2525 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
2527 du would infloop when given --files0-from=DIR
2528 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2530 sort no longer spawns 7 worker threads to sort 16 lines
2531 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2533 touch built on Solaris 9 would segfault when run on Solaris 10
2534 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2536 wc would dereference a NULL pointer upon an early out-of-memory error
2537 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
2541 dd now accepts the 'nocache' flag to the iflag and oflag options,
2542 which will discard any cache associated with the files, or
2543 processed portion thereof.
2545 dd now warns that 'iflag=fullblock' should be used,
2546 in various cases where partial reads can cause issues.
2548 ** Changes in behavior
2550 cp now avoids syncing files when possible, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2551 The sync is only needed on Linux kernels before 2.6.39.
2552 [The sync was introduced in coreutils-8.10]
2554 cp now copies empty extents efficiently, when doing a FIEMAP copy.
2555 It no longer reads the zero bytes from the input, and also can efficiently
2556 create a hole in the output file when --sparse=always is specified.
2558 df now aligns columns consistently, and no longer wraps entries
2559 with longer device identifiers, over two lines.
2561 install now rejects its long-deprecated --preserve_context option.
2562 Use --preserve-context instead.
2564 test now accepts "==" as a synonym for "="
2567 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.10 (2011-02-04) [stable]
2571 du would abort with a failed assertion when two conditions are met:
2572 part of the hierarchy being traversed is moved to a higher level in the
2573 directory tree, and there is at least one more command line directory
2574 argument following the one containing the moved sub-tree.
2575 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
2577 join --header now skips the ordering check for the first line
2578 even if the other file is empty. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.5]
2580 join -v2 now ensures the default output format prints the match field
2581 at the start of the line when it is different to the match field for
2582 the first file. [bug present in "the beginning".]
2584 rm -f no longer fails for EINVAL or EILSEQ on file systems that
2585 reject file names invalid for that file system.
2587 uniq -f NUM no longer tries to process fields after end of line.
2588 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2592 cp now copies sparse files efficiently on file systems with FIEMAP
2593 support (ext4, btrfs, xfs, ocfs2). Before, it had to read 2^20 bytes
2594 when copying a 1MiB sparse file. Now, it copies bytes only for the
2595 non-sparse sections of a file. Similarly, to induce a hole in the
2596 output file, it had to detect a long sequence of zero bytes. Now,
2597 it knows precisely where each hole in an input file is, and can
2598 reproduce them efficiently in the output file. mv also benefits
2599 when it resorts to copying, e.g., between file systems.
2601 join now supports -o 'auto' which will automatically infer the
2602 output format from the first line in each file, to ensure
2603 the same number of fields are output for each line.
2605 ** Changes in behavior
2607 join no longer reports disorder when one of the files is empty.
2608 This allows one to use join as a field extractor like:
2609 join -a1 -o 1.3,1.1 - /dev/null
2612 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.9 (2011-01-04) [stable]
2616 split no longer creates files with a suffix length that
2617 is dependent on the number of bytes or lines per file.
2618 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]
2621 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
2625 cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source
2626 has finer-grained timestamps than the destination.
2628 od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and
2629 it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
2631 sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a
2632 corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2634 sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop
2635 (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to
2636 do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power.
2637 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2639 sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers
2640 into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
2642 sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses,
2643 no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses,
2644 and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
2646 sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
2648 ** Changes in behavior
2650 sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing
2651 performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted
2652 to the number of available processors.
2656 split accepts the --number/-n option to generate a specific number of
2657 files, as well as the --elide-empty-files/-e and --unbuffered/-u
2658 options to fine-tune the resulting output.
2661 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]
2665 cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
2666 on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
2667 latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
2668 bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]
2670 csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
2671 nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
2672 [the bugs were present in the initial implementation]
2674 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
2675 remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2677 ** Changes in behavior
2679 cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
2680 Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.
2682 stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
2683 part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
2684 coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive.
2685 To obtain a nanosecond-precision timestamp for %X use %.X;
2686 if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X.
2687 Likewise for %Y and %Z.
2689 stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
2690 However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
2691 the same way as the others.
2693 stat gained support for several printf-style flags, such as %'s for
2694 listing sizes with the current locale's thousands separator.
2697 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.6 (2010-10-15) [stable]
2701 du no longer multiply counts a file that is a directory or whose
2702 link count is 1, even if the file is reached multiple times by
2703 following symlinks or via multiple arguments.
2705 du -H and -L now consistently count pointed-to files instead of
2706 symbolic links, and correctly diagnose dangling symlinks.
2708 du --ignore=D now ignores directory D even when that directory is
2709 found to be part of a directory cycle. Before, du would issue a
2710 "NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER" diagnostic and fail.
2712 split now diagnoses read errors rather than silently exiting.
2713 [bug introduced in coreutils-4.5.8]
2715 tac would perform a double-free when given an input line longer than 16KiB.
2716 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.3]
2718 tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable directory,
2719 and works around a Linux kernel bug where inotify runs out of resources.
2720 [bugs introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2722 tr now consistently handles case conversion character classes.
2723 In some locales, valid conversion specifications caused tr to abort,
2724 while in all locales, some invalid specifications were undiagnosed.
2725 [bugs introduced in coreutils 6.9.90 and 6.9.92]
2729 cp now accepts the --attributes-only option to not copy file data,
2730 which is useful for efficiently modifying files.
2732 du recognizes -d N as equivalent to --max-depth=N, for compatibility
2735 sort now accepts the --debug option, to highlight the part of the
2736 line significant in the sort, and warn about questionable options.
2738 sort now supports -d, -f, -i, -R, and -V in any combination.
2740 stat now accepts the %m format directive to output the mount point
2741 for a file. It also accepts the %w and %W format directives for
2742 outputting the birth time of a file, if one is available.
2744 ** Changes in behavior
2746 df now consistently prints the device name for a bind mounted file,
2747 rather than its aliased target.
2749 du now uses less than half as much memory when operating on trees
2750 with many hard-linked files. With --count-links (-l), or when
2751 operating on trees with no hard-linked files, there is no change.
2753 ls -l now uses the traditional three field time style rather than
2754 the wider two field numeric ISO style, in locales where a style has
2755 not been specified. The new approach has nicer behavior in some
2756 locales, including English, which was judged to outweigh the disadvantage
2757 of generating less-predictable and often worse output in poorly-configured
2758 locales where there is an onus to specify appropriate non-default styles.
2759 [The old behavior was introduced in coreutils-6.0 and had been removed
2760 for English only using a different method since coreutils-8.1]
2762 rm's -d now evokes an error; before, it was silently ignored.
2764 sort -g now uses long doubles for greater range and precision.
2766 sort -h no longer rejects numbers with leading or trailing ".", and
2767 no longer accepts numbers with multiple ".". It now considers all
2770 sort now uses the number of available processors to parallelize
2771 the sorting operation. The number of sorts run concurrently can be
2772 limited with the --parallel option or with external process
2773 control like taskset for example.
2775 stat now provides translated output when no format is specified.
2777 stat no longer accepts the --context (-Z) option. Initially it was
2778 merely accepted and ignored, for compatibility. Starting two years
2779 ago, with coreutils-7.0, its use evoked a warning. Printing the
2780 SELinux context of a file can be done with the %C format directive,
2781 and the default output when no format is specified now automatically
2782 includes %C when context information is available.
2784 stat no longer accepts the %C directive when the --file-system
2785 option is in effect, since security context is a file attribute
2786 rather than a file system attribute.
2788 stat now outputs the full sub-second resolution for the atime,
2789 mtime, and ctime values since the Epoch, when using the %X, %Y, and
2790 %Z directives of the --format option. This matches the fact that
2791 %x, %y, and %z were already doing so for the human-readable variant.
2793 touch's --file option is no longer recognized. Use --reference=F (-r)
2794 instead. --file has not been documented for 15 years, and its use has
2795 elicited a warning since coreutils-7.1.
2797 truncate now supports setting file sizes relative to a reference file.
2798 Also errors are no longer suppressed for unsupported file types, and
2799 relative sizes are restricted to supported file types.
2802 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]
2806 cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
2807 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]
2809 cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.
2811 ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
2812 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
2814 sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
2815 in the locale database. Also locales with 8 bit characters are
2816 handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
2817 that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.
2819 sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
2820 Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
2821 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2825 join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
2826 file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.
2828 timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
2829 signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
2830 duration after the initial signal was sent.
2832 who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
2833 messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
2834 not accepting messages (mesg no). Before, who would examine only the
2835 permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
2836 Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
2837 that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
2838 of whatever the permission bits might imply. Now, when configured
2839 using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
2840 of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).
2842 ** Changes in behavior
2844 ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
2845 sequence when it would be a no-op.
2847 join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
2848 each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).
2851 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.4 (2010-01-13) [stable]
2855 nproc --all is now guaranteed to be as large as the count
2856 of available processors, which may not have been the case
2857 on GNU/Linux systems with neither /proc nor /sys available.
2858 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2862 Work around a build failure when using buggy <sys/capability.h>.
2863 Alternatively, configure with --disable-libcap.
2865 Compilation would fail on systems using glibc-2.7..2.9 due to changes in
2866 gnulib's wchar.h that tickled a bug in at least those versions of glibc's
2867 own <wchar.h> header. Now, gnulib works around the bug in those older
2868 glibc <wchar.h> headers.
2870 Building would fail with a link error (cp/copy.o) when XATTR headers
2871 were installed without the corresponding library. Now, configure
2872 detects that and disables xattr support, as one would expect.
2875 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.3 (2010-01-07) [stable]
2879 cp -p, install -p, mv, and touch -c could trigger a spurious error
2880 message when using new glibc coupled with an old kernel.
2881 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.12].
2883 ls -l --color no longer prints "argetm" in front of dangling
2884 symlinks when the 'LINK target' directive was given to dircolors.
2885 [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0]
2887 pr's page header was improperly formatted for long file names.
2888 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]
2890 rm -r --one-file-system works once again.
2891 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2892 a command of the above form would fail for all subdirectories.
2893 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2895 stat -f recognizes more file system types: k-afs, fuseblk, gfs/gfs2, ocfs2,
2896 and rpc_pipefs. Also Minix V3 is displayed correctly as minix3, not minux3.
2897 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2899 tail -f (inotify-enabled) once again works with remote files.
2900 The use of inotify with remote files meant that any changes to those
2901 files that was not done from the local system would go unnoticed.
2902 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2904 tail -F (inotify-enabled) would abort when a tailed file is repeatedly
2905 renamed-aside and then recreated.
2906 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2908 tail -F (inotify-enabled) could fail to follow renamed files.
2909 E.g., given a "tail -F a b" process, running "mv a b" would
2910 make tail stop tracking additions to "b".
2911 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
2913 touch -a and touch -m could trigger bugs in some file systems, such
2914 as xfs or ntfs-3g, and fail to update timestamps.
2915 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2917 wc now prints counts atomically so that concurrent
2918 processes will not intersperse their output.
2919 [the issue dates back to the initial implementation]
2922 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.2 (2009-12-11) [stable]
2926 id's use of mgetgroups no longer writes beyond the end of a malloc'd buffer
2927 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2929 id no longer crashes on systems without supplementary group support.
2930 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]
2932 rm once again handles zero-length arguments properly.
2933 The rewrite to make rm use fts introduced a regression whereby
2934 a command like "rm a '' b" would fail to remove "a" and "b", due to
2935 the presence of the empty string argument.
2936 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2938 sort is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2939 Specifically sort now doesn't exit with an error message
2940 if it uses helper processes for compression and its parent
2941 ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
2943 tail without -f no longer accesses uninitialized memory
2944 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2946 timeout is now immune to the signal handling of its parent.
2947 Specifically timeout now doesn't exit with an error message
2948 if its parent ignores CHLD signals. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.6]
2950 a user running "make distcheck" in the coreutils source directory,
2951 with TMPDIR unset or set to the name of a world-writable directory,
2952 and with a malicious user on the same system
2953 was vulnerable to arbitrary code execution
2954 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.0]
2957 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.1 (2009-11-18) [stable]
2961 chcon no longer exits immediately just because SELinux is disabled.
2962 Even then, chcon may still be useful.
2963 [bug introduced in coreutils-8.0]
2965 chcon, chgrp, chmod, chown and du now diagnose an ostensible directory cycle
2966 and arrange to exit nonzero. Before, they would silently ignore the
2967 offending directory and all "contents."
2969 env -u A=B now fails, rather than silently adding A to the
2970 environment. Likewise, printenv A=B silently ignores the invalid
2971 name. [the bugs date back to the initial implementation]
2973 ls --color now handles files with capabilities correctly. Previously
2974 files with capabilities were often not colored, and also sometimes, files
2975 without capabilites were colored in error. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
2977 md5sum now prints checksums atomically so that concurrent
2978 processes will not intersperse their output.
2979 This also affected sum, sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
2980 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2982 mktemp no longer leaves a temporary file behind if it was unable to
2983 output the name of the file to stdout.
2984 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2986 nice -n -1 PROGRAM now runs PROGRAM even when its internal setpriority
2987 call fails with errno == EACCES.
2988 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
2990 nice, nohup, and su now refuse to execute the subsidiary program if
2991 they detect write failure in printing an otherwise non-fatal warning
2994 stat -f recognizes more file system types: afs, cifs, anon-inode FS,
2995 btrfs, cgroupfs, cramfs-wend, debugfs, futexfs, hfs, inotifyfs, minux3,
2996 nilfs, securityfs, selinux, xenfs
2998 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now avoids a race condition.
2999 Before, any data appended in the tiny interval between the initial
3000 read-to-EOF and the inotify watch initialization would be ignored
3001 initially (until more data was appended), or forever, if the file
3002 were first renamed or unlinked or never modified.
3003 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3005 tail -F (inotify-enabled) now consistently tails a file that has been
3006 replaced via renaming. That operation provokes either of two sequences
3007 of inotify events. The less common sequence is now handled as well.
3008 [The bug came with the implementation change in coreutils-7.5]
3010 timeout now doesn't exit unless the command it is monitoring does,
3011 for any specified signal. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0].
3013 ** Changes in behavior
3015 chroot, env, nice, and su fail with status 125, rather than 1, on
3016 internal error such as failure to parse command line arguments; this
3017 is for consistency with stdbuf and timeout, and avoids ambiguity
3018 with the invoked command failing with status 1. Likewise, nohup
3019 fails with status 125 instead of 127.
3021 du (due to a change in gnulib's fts) can now traverse NFSv4 automounted
3022 directories in which the stat'd device number of the mount point differs
3023 during a traversal. Before, it would fail, because such a mismatch would
3024 usually represent a serious error or a subversion attempt.
3026 echo and printf now interpret \e as the Escape character (0x1B).
3028 rm -f /read-only-fs/nonexistent now succeeds and prints no diagnostic
3029 on systems with an unlinkat syscall that sets errno to EROFS in that case.
3030 Before, it would fail with a "Read-only file system" diagnostic.
3031 Also, "rm /read-only-fs/nonexistent" now reports "file not found" rather
3032 than the less precise "Read-only file system" error.
3036 nproc: Print the number of processing units available to a process.
3040 env and printenv now accept the option --null (-0), as a means to
3041 avoid ambiguity with newlines embedded in the environment.
3043 md5sum --check now also accepts openssl-style checksums.
3044 So do sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum and sha512sum.
3046 mktemp now accepts the option --suffix to provide a known suffix
3047 after the substitution in the template. Additionally, uses such as
3048 "mktemp fileXXXXXX.txt" are able to infer an appropriate --suffix.
3050 touch now accepts the option --no-dereference (-h), as a means to
3051 change symlink timestamps on platforms with enough support.
3054 * Noteworthy changes in release 8.0 (2009-10-06) [beta]
3058 cp --preserve=xattr and --archive now preserve extended attributes even
3059 when the source file doesn't have write access.
3060 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3062 touch -t [[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.ss] now accepts a timestamp string ending in .60,
3063 to accommodate leap seconds.
3064 [the bug dates back to the initial implementation]
3066 ls --color now reverts to the color of a base file type consistently
3067 when the color of a more specific type is disabled.
3068 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3070 ls -LR exits with status 2, not 0, when it encounters a cycle
3072 "ls -is" is now consistent with ls -lis in ignoring values returned
3073 from a failed stat/lstat. For example ls -Lis now prints "?", not "0",
3074 for the inode number and allocated size of a dereferenced dangling symlink.
3076 tail --follow --pid now avoids a race condition where data written
3077 just before the process dies might not have been output by tail.
3078 Also, tail no longer delays at all when the specified pid is not live.
3079 [The race was introduced in coreutils-7.5,
3080 and the unnecessary delay was present since textutils-1.22o]
3084 On Solaris 9, many commands would mistakenly treat file/ the same as
3085 file. Now, even on such a system, path resolution obeys the POSIX
3086 rules that a trailing slash ensures that the preceding name is a
3087 directory or a symlink to a directory.
3089 ** Changes in behavior
3091 id no longer prints SELinux " context=..." when the POSIXLY_CORRECT
3092 environment variable is set.
3094 readlink -f now ignores a trailing slash when deciding if the
3095 last component (possibly via a dangling symlink) can be created,
3096 since mkdir will succeed in that case.
3100 ln now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P),
3101 added by POSIX 2008. The default behavior is -P on systems like
3102 GNU/Linux where link(2) creates hard links to symlinks, and -L on
3103 BSD systems where link(2) follows symlinks.
3105 stat: without -f, a command-line argument of "-" now means standard input.
3106 With --file-system (-f), an argument of "-" is now rejected.
3107 If you really must operate on a file named "-", specify it as
3108 "./-" or use "--" to separate options from arguments.
3112 rm: rewrite to use gnulib's fts
3113 This makes rm -rf significantly faster (400-500%) in some pathological
3114 cases, and slightly slower (20%) in at least one pathological case.
3116 rm -r deletes deep hierarchies more efficiently. Before, execution time
3117 was quadratic in the depth of the hierarchy, now it is merely linear.
3118 However, this improvement is not as pronounced as might be expected for
3119 very deep trees, because prior to this change, for any relative name
3120 length longer than 8KiB, rm -r would sacrifice official conformance to
3121 avoid the disproportionate quadratic performance penalty. Leading to
3122 another improvement:
3124 rm -r is now slightly more standards-conformant when operating on
3125 write-protected files with relative names longer than 8KiB.
3128 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.6 (2009-09-11) [stable]
3132 cp, mv now ignore failure to preserve a symlink timestamp, when it is
3133 due to their running on a kernel older than what was implied by headers
3134 and libraries tested at configure time.
3135 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3137 cp --reflink --preserve now preserves attributes when cloning a file.
3138 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3140 cp --preserve=xattr no longer leaks resources on each preservation failure.
3141 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3143 dd now exits with non-zero status when it encounters a write error while
3144 printing a summary to stderr.
3145 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3147 dd cbs=N conv=unblock would fail to print a final newline when the size
3148 of the input was not a multiple of N bytes.
3149 [the non-conforming behavior dates back to the initial implementation]
3151 df no longer requires that each command-line argument be readable
3152 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.3]
3154 ls -i now prints consistent inode numbers also for mount points.
3155 This makes ls -i DIR less efficient on systems with dysfunctional readdir,
3156 because ls must stat every file in order to obtain a guaranteed-valid
3157 inode number. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3159 tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
3160 Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
3161 Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
3162 which is relatively unusual.
3163 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3165 tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
3166 would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
3167 would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
3168 relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
3169 offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
3170 (i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
3171 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
3175 ln, link: link f z/ would mistakenly succeed on Solaris 10, given an
3176 existing file, f, and nothing named "z". ln -T f z/ has the same problem.
3177 Each would mistakenly create "z" as a link to "f". Now, even on such a
3178 system, each command reports the error, e.g.,
3179 link: cannot create link `z/' to `f': Not a directory
3183 cp --reflink accepts a new "auto" parameter which falls back to
3184 a standard copy if creating a copy-on-write clone is not possible.
3186 ** Changes in behavior
3188 tail -f now ignores "-" when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3189 tail-with-no-args now ignores -f unconditionally when stdin is a pipe or FIFO.
3190 Before, it would ignore -f only when no file argument was specified,
3191 and then only when POSIXLY_CORRECT was set. Now, :|tail -f - terminates
3192 immediately. Before, it would block indefinitely.
3195 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.5 (2009-08-20) [stable]
3199 dd's oflag=direct option now works even when the size of the input
3200 is not a multiple of e.g., 512 bytes.
3202 dd now handles signals consistently even when they're received
3203 before data copying has started.
3205 install runs faster again with SELinux enabled
3206 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3208 ls -1U (with two or more arguments, at least one a nonempty directory)
3209 would print entry names *before* the name of the containing directory.
3210 Also fixed incorrect output of ls -1RU and ls -1sU.
3211 [introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3213 sort now correctly ignores fields whose ending position is specified
3214 before the start position. Previously in numeric mode the remaining
3215 part of the line after the start position was used as the sort key.
3216 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning".]
3218 truncate -s failed to skip all whitespace in the option argument in
3223 stdbuf: A new program to run a command with modified stdio buffering
3224 for its standard streams.
3226 ** Changes in behavior
3228 ls --color: files with multiple hard links are no longer colored differently
3229 by default. That can be enabled by changing the LS_COLORS environment
3230 variable. You can control that using the MULTIHARDLINK dircolors input
3231 variable which corresponds to the 'mh' LS_COLORS item. Note these variables
3232 were renamed from 'HARDLINK' and 'hl' which were available since
3233 coreutils-7.1 when this feature was introduced.
3235 ** Deprecated options
3237 nl --page-increment: deprecated in favor of --line-increment, the new option
3238 maintains the previous semantics and the same short option, -i.
3242 chroot now accepts the options --userspec and --groups.
3244 cp accepts a new option, --reflink: create a lightweight copy
3245 using copy-on-write (COW). This is currently only supported within
3246 a btrfs file system.
3248 cp now preserves timestamps on symbolic links, when possible
3250 sort accepts a new option, --human-numeric-sort (-h): sort numbers
3251 while honoring human readable suffixes like KiB and MB etc.
3253 tail --follow now uses inotify when possible, to be more responsive
3254 to file changes and more efficient when monitoring many files.
3257 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.4 (2009-05-07) [stable]
3261 date -d 'next mon', when run on a Monday, now prints the date
3262 7 days in the future rather than the current day. Same for any other
3263 day-of-the-week name, when run on that same day of the week.
3264 [This bug appears to have been present in "the beginning". ]
3266 date -d tuesday, when run on a Tuesday -- using date built from the 7.3
3267 release tarball, not from git -- would print the date 7 days in the future.
3268 Now, it works properly and prints the current date. That was due to
3269 human error (including not-committed changes in a release tarball)
3270 and the fact that there is no check to detect when the gnulib/ git
3275 make check: two tests have been corrected
3279 There have been some ACL-related portability fixes for *BSD,
3280 inherited from gnulib.
3283 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.3 (2009-05-01) [stable]
3287 cp now diagnoses failure to preserve selinux/xattr attributes when
3288 --preserve=context,xattr is specified in combination with -a.
3289 Also, cp no longer suppresses attribute-preservation diagnostics
3290 when preserving SELinux context was explicitly requested.
3292 ls now aligns output correctly in the presence of abbreviated month
3293 names from the locale database that have differing widths.
3295 ls -v and sort -V now order names like "#.b#" properly
3297 mv: do not print diagnostics when failing to preserve xattr's on file
3298 systems without xattr support.
3300 sort -m no longer segfaults when its output file is also an input file.
3301 E.g., with this, touch 1; sort -m -o 1 1, sort would segfault.
3302 [introduced in coreutils-7.2]
3304 ** Changes in behavior
3306 shred, sort, shuf: now use an internal pseudorandom generator by default.
3307 This is mainly noticeable in shred where the 3 random passes it does by
3308 default should proceed at the speed of the disk. Previously /dev/urandom
3309 was used if available, which is relatively slow on GNU/Linux systems.
3311 ** Improved robustness
3313 cp would exit successfully after copying less than the full contents
3314 of a file larger than ~4000 bytes from a linux-/proc file system to a
3315 destination file system with a fundamental block size of 4KiB or greater.
3316 Reading into a 4KiB-or-larger buffer, cp's "read" syscall would return
3317 a value smaller than 4096, and cp would interpret that as EOF (POSIX
3318 allows this). This optimization, now removed, saved 50% of cp's read
3319 syscalls when copying small files. Affected linux kernels: at least
3320 2.6.9 through 2.6.29.
3321 [the optimization was introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3325 df now pre-mounts automountable directories even with automounters for
3326 which stat-like syscalls no longer provoke mounting. Now, df uses open.
3328 'id -G $USER' now works correctly even on Darwin and NetBSD. Previously it
3329 would either truncate the group list to 10, or go into an infinite loop,
3330 due to their non-standard getgrouplist implementations.
3331 [truncation introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3332 [infinite loop introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3335 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.2 (2009-03-31) [stable]
3339 pwd now accepts the options --logical (-L) and --physical (-P). For
3340 compatibility with existing scripts, -P is the default behavior
3341 unless POSIXLY_CORRECT is requested.
3345 cat once again immediately outputs data it has processed.
3346 Previously it would have been buffered and only output if enough
3347 data was read, or on process exit.
3348 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3350 comm's new --check-order option would fail to detect disorder on any pair
3351 of lines where one was a prefix of the other. For example, this would
3352 fail to report the disorder: printf 'Xb\nX\n'>k; comm --check-order k k
3353 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
3355 cp once again diagnoses the invalid "cp -rl dir dir" right away,
3356 rather than after creating a very deep dir/dir/dir/... hierarchy.
3357 The bug strikes only with both --recursive (-r, -R) and --link (-l).
3358 [bug introduced in coreutils-7.1]
3360 ls --sort=version (-v) sorted names beginning with "." inconsistently.
3361 Now, names that start with "." are always listed before those that don't.
3363 pr: fix the bug whereby --indent=N (-o) did not indent header lines
3364 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3366 sort now handles specified key ends correctly.
3367 Previously -k1,1b would have caused leading space from field 2 to be
3368 included in the sort while -k2,3.0 would have not included field 3.
3370 ** Changes in behavior
3372 cat,cp,install,mv,split: these programs now read and write a minimum
3373 of 32KiB at a time. This was seen to double throughput when reading
3374 cached files on GNU/Linux-based systems.
3376 cp -a now tries to preserve extended attributes (xattr), but does not
3377 diagnose xattr-preservation failure. However, cp --preserve=all still does.
3379 ls --color: hard link highlighting can be now disabled by changing the
3380 LS_COLORS environment variable. To disable it you can add something like
3381 this to your profile: eval `dircolors | sed s/hl=[^:]*:/hl=:/`
3384 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.1 (2009-02-21) [stable]
3388 Add extended attribute support available on certain filesystems like ext2
3390 cp: Tries to copy xattrs when --preserve=xattr or --preserve=all specified
3391 mv: Always tries to copy xattrs
3392 install: Never copies xattrs
3394 cp and mv accept a new option, --no-clobber (-n): silently refrain
3395 from overwriting any existing destination file
3397 dd accepts iflag=cio and oflag=cio to open the file in CIO (concurrent I/O)
3398 mode where this feature is available.
3400 install accepts a new option, --compare (-C): compare each pair of source
3401 and destination files, and if the destination has identical content and
3402 any specified owner, group, permissions, and possibly SELinux context, then
3403 do not modify the destination at all.
3405 ls --color now highlights hard linked files, too
3407 stat -f recognizes the Lustre file system type
3411 chgrp, chmod, chown --silent (--quiet, -f) no longer print some diagnostics
3412 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1]
3414 cp uses much less memory in some situations
3416 cp -a now correctly tries to preserve SELinux context (announced in 6.9.90),
3417 doesn't inform about failure, unlike with --preserve=all
3419 du --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM before
3420 processing the first file name
3422 seq 9223372036854775807 9223372036854775808 now prints only two numbers
3423 on systems with extended long double support and good library support.
3424 Even with this patch, on some systems, it still produces invalid output,
3425 from 3 to at least 1026 lines long. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]
3427 seq -w now accounts for a decimal point added to the last number
3428 to correctly print all numbers to the same width.
3430 wc --files0-from=FILE no longer reads all of FILE into RAM, before
3431 processing the first file name, unless the list of names is known
3434 ** Changes in behavior
3436 cp and mv: the --reply={yes,no,query} option has been removed.
3437 Using it has elicited a warning for the last three years.
3439 dd: user specified offsets that are too big are handled better.
3440 Previously, erroneous parameters to skip and seek could result
3441 in redundant reading of the file with no warnings or errors.
3443 du: -H (initially equivalent to --si) is now equivalent to
3444 --dereference-args, and thus works as POSIX requires
3446 shred: now does 3 overwrite passes by default rather than 25.
3448 ls -l now marks SELinux-only files with the less obtrusive '.',
3449 rather than '+'. A file with any other combination of MAC and ACL
3450 is still marked with a '+'.
3453 * Noteworthy changes in release 7.0 (2008-10-05) [beta]
3457 timeout: Run a command with bounded time.
3458 truncate: Set the size of a file to a specified size.
3462 chgrp, chmod, chown, chcon, du, rm: now all display linear performance,
3463 even when operating on million-entry directories on ext3 and ext4 file
3464 systems. Before, they would exhibit O(N^2) performance, due to linear
3465 per-entry seek time cost when operating on entries in readdir order.
3466 Rm was improved directly, while the others inherit the improvement
3467 from the newer version of fts in gnulib.
3469 comm now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3470 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3472 comm accepts new option, --output-delimiter=STR, that allows specification
3473 of an output delimiter other than the default single TAB.
3475 cp and mv: the deprecated --reply=X option is now also undocumented.
3477 dd accepts iflag=fullblock to make it accumulate full input blocks.
3478 With this new option, after a short read, dd repeatedly calls read,
3479 until it fills the incomplete block, reaches EOF, or encounters an error.
3481 df accepts a new option --total, which produces a grand total of all
3482 arguments after all arguments have been processed.
3484 If the GNU MP library is available at configure time, factor and
3485 expr support arbitrarily large numbers. Pollard's rho algorithm is
3486 used to factor large numbers.
3488 install accepts a new option --strip-program to specify the program used to
3491 ls now colors names of files with capabilities if libcap is available.
3493 ls -v now uses filevercmp function as sort predicate (instead of strverscmp)
3495 md5sum now accepts the new option, --quiet, to suppress the printing of
3496 'OK' messages. sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum accept it, too.
3498 sort accepts a new option, --files0-from=F, that specifies a file
3499 containing a null-separated list of files to sort. This list is used
3500 instead of filenames passed on the command-line to avoid problems with
3501 maximum command-line (argv) length.
3503 sort accepts a new option --batch-size=NMERGE, where NMERGE
3504 represents the maximum number of inputs that will be merged at once.
3505 When processing more than NMERGE inputs, sort uses temporary files.
3507 sort accepts a new option --version-sort (-V, --sort=version),
3508 specifying that ordering is to be based on filevercmp.
3512 chcon --verbose now prints a newline after each message
3514 od no longer suffers from platform bugs in printf(3). This is
3515 probably most noticeable when using 'od -tfL' to print long doubles.
3517 seq -0.1 0.1 2 now prints 2,0 when locale's decimal point is ",".
3518 Before, it would mistakenly omit the final number in that example.
3520 shuf honors the --zero-terminated (-z) option, even with --input-range=LO-HI
3522 shuf --head-count is now correctly documented. The documentation
3523 previously claimed it was called --head-lines.
3527 Improved support for access control lists (ACLs): On MacOS X, Solaris 7..10,
3528 HP-UX 11, Tru64, AIX, IRIX 6.5, and Cygwin, "ls -l" now displays the presence
3529 of an ACL on a file via a '+' sign after the mode, and "cp -p" copies ACLs.
3531 join has significantly better performance due to better memory management
3533 ls now uses constant memory when not sorting and using one_per_line format,
3534 no matter how many files are in a given directory. I.e., to list a directory
3535 with very many files, ls -1U is much more efficient.
3537 od now aligns fields across lines when printing multiple -t
3538 specifiers, and no longer prints fields that resulted entirely from
3539 padding the input out to the least common multiple width.
3541 ** Changes in behavior
3543 stat's --context (-Z) option has always been a no-op.
3544 Now it evokes a warning that it is obsolete and will be removed.
3547 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.12 (2008-05-31) [stable]
3551 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve nanosecond resolution on
3552 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimensat' and
3553 'futimens' system calls.
3557 chcon, runcon: --help output now includes the bug-reporting address
3559 cp -p copies permissions more portably. For example, on MacOS X 10.5,
3560 "cp -p some-fifo some-file" no longer fails while trying to copy the
3561 permissions from the some-fifo argument.
3563 id with no options now prints the SELinux context only when invoked
3564 with no USERNAME argument.
3566 id and groups once again print the AFS-specific nameless group-ID (PAG).
3567 Printing of such large-numbered, kernel-only (not in /etc/group) group-IDs
3568 was suppressed in 6.11 due to ignorance that they are useful.
3570 uniq: avoid subtle field-skipping malfunction due to isblank misuse.
3571 In some locales on some systems, isblank(240) (aka  ) is nonzero.
3572 On such systems, uniq --skip-fields=N would fail to skip the proper
3573 number of fields for some inputs.
3575 tac: avoid segfault with --regex (-r) and multiple files, e.g.,
3576 "echo > x; tac -r x x". [bug present at least in textutils-1.8b, from 1992]
3578 ** Changes in behavior
3580 install once again sets SELinux context, when possible
3581 [it was deliberately disabled in 6.9.90]
3584 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]
3588 configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.
3590 "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E. Before this fix, using
3591 -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
3592 with EEXIST. Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
3593 to create the destination file. [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]
3595 dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
3596 of=/dev/stdout. [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]
3598 id now uses getgrouplist, when possible. This results in
3599 much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.
3601 ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
3602 of libselinux. E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.
3604 md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
3605 echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c - Now, md5sum ignores that line.
3606 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3607 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3609 md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
3610 and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
3611 and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
3612 Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
3613 sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
3614 [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]
3616 "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
3617 mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly. Now they're fixed.
3619 mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
3620 when the destination had two or more hard links. It no longer does that.
3621 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]
3623 "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
3624 stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3626 "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
3627 [bug present in the original version, in 1992]
3629 "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
3630 the heap. That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
3631 at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
3632 --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).
3634 "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
3635 prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).
3637 "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
3638 in more cases when a directory is empty.
3640 "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
3641 rather than reporting the invalid string format.
3642 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3646 join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order. This check can
3647 be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.
3649 sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
3650 general-numeric, month, numeric or random. These are equivalent to the
3651 options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
3652 and --random-sort/-R, resp.
3656 id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
3657 would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.
3659 ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences
3661 seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.
3665 rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
3666 which have negative errno values.
3670 install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
3674 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]
3678 Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
3679 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]
3682 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]
3686 cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
3687 permissions of a just-created destination directory.
3688 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3690 tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
3691 of lower case and upper case characters. E.g., this would fail:
3692 env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
3693 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]
3697 "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
3698 whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
3699 Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
3700 fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".
3703 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.91 (2007-12-15) [beta]
3707 "ls -l" would not output "+" on SELinux hosts unless -Z was also given.
3709 "rm" would fail to unlink a non-directory when run in an environment
3710 in which the user running rm is capable of unlinking a directory.
3711 [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9]
3714 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.90 (2007-12-01) [beta]
3718 arch: equivalent to uname -m, not installed by default
3719 But don't install this program on Solaris systems.
3721 chcon: change the SELinux security context of a file
3723 mktemp: create a temporary file or directory (or names)
3725 runcon: run a program in a different SELinux security context
3727 ** Programs no longer installed by default
3731 ** Changes in behavior
3733 cp, by default, refuses to copy through a dangling destination symlink
3734 Set POSIXLY_CORRECT if you require the old, risk-prone behavior.
3736 pr -F no longer suppresses the footer or the first two blank lines in
3737 the header. This is for compatibility with BSD and POSIX.
3739 tr now warns about an unescaped backslash at end of string.
3740 The tr from coreutils-5.2.1 and earlier would fail for such usage,
3741 and Solaris' tr ignores that final byte.
3745 Add SELinux support, based on the patch from Fedora:
3746 * cp accepts new --preserve=context option.
3747 * "cp -a" works with SELinux:
3748 Now, cp -a attempts to preserve context, but failure to do so does
3749 not change cp's exit status. However "cp --preserve=context" is
3750 similar, but failure *does* cause cp to exit with nonzero status.
3751 * install accepts new "-Z, --context=C" option.
3752 * id accepts new "-Z" option.
3753 * stat honors the new %C format directive: SELinux security context string
3754 * ls accepts a slightly modified -Z option.
3755 * ls: contrary to Fedora version, does not accept --lcontext and --scontext
3757 The following commands and options now support the standard size
3758 suffixes kB, M, MB, G, GB, and so on for T, P, Y, Z, and Y:
3759 head -c, head -n, od -j, od -N, od -S, split -b, split -C,
3762 cp -p tries to preserve the GID of a file even if preserving the UID
3765 uniq accepts a new option: --zero-terminated (-z). As with the sort
3766 option of the same name, this makes uniq consume and produce
3767 NUL-terminated lines rather than newline-terminated lines.
3769 wc no longer warns about character decoding errors in multibyte locales.
3770 This means for example that "wc /bin/sh" now produces normal output
3771 (though the word count will have no real meaning) rather than many
3774 ** New build options
3776 By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
3777 To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
3778 If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
3779 ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.
3781 You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
3782 at configure time. For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
3783 "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
3784 Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
3785 built (that's the new default). However, if you inhibit the building
3786 and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
3787 of "make check" fail.
3789 ** Remove deprecated options
3791 df no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3792 du no longer accepts the --kilobytes or --megabytes options.
3793 ls no longer accepts the --kilobytes option.
3794 ptx longer accepts the --copyright option.
3795 who no longer accepts -i or --idle.
3797 ** Improved robustness
3799 ln -f can no longer silently clobber a just-created hard link.
3800 In some cases, ln could be seen as being responsible for data loss.
3801 For example, given directories a, b, c, and files a/f and b/f, we
3802 should be able to do this safely: ln -f a/f b/f c && rm -f a/f b/f
3803 However, before this change, ln would succeed, and thus cause the
3804 loss of the contents of a/f.
3806 stty no longer silently accepts certain invalid hex values
3807 in its 35-colon command-line argument
3811 chmod no longer ignores a dangling symlink. Now, chmod fails
3812 with a diagnostic saying that it cannot operate on such a file.
3813 [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]
3815 cp attempts to read a regular file, even if stat says it is empty.
3816 Before, "cp /proc/cpuinfo c" would create an empty file when the kernel
3817 reports stat.st_size == 0, while "cat /proc/cpuinfo > c" would "work",
3818 and create a nonempty one. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3820 cp --parents no longer mishandles symlinks to directories in file
3821 name components in the source, e.g., "cp --parents symlink/a/b d"
3822 no longer fails. Also, 'cp' no longer considers a destination
3823 symlink to be the same as the referenced file when copying links
3824 or making backups. For example, if SYM is a symlink to FILE,
3825 "cp -l FILE SYM" now reports an error instead of silently doing
3826 nothing. The behavior of 'cp' is now better documented when the
3827 destination is a symlink.
3829 "cp -i --update older newer" no longer prompts; same for mv
3831 "cp -i" now detects read errors on standard input, and no longer consumes
3832 too much seekable input; same for ln, install, mv, and rm.
3834 cut now diagnoses a range starting with zero (e.g., -f 0-2) as invalid;
3835 before, it would treat it as if it started with 1 (-f 1-2).
3837 "cut -f 2-0" now fails; before, it was equivalent to "cut -f 2-"
3839 cut now diagnoses the '-' in "cut -f -" as an invalid range, rather
3840 than interpreting it as the unlimited range, "1-".
3842 date -d now accepts strings of the form e.g., 'YYYYMMDD +N days',
3843 in addition to the usual 'YYYYMMDD N days'.
3845 du -s now includes the size of any stat'able-but-inaccessible directory
3848 du (without -s) prints whatever it knows of the size of an inaccessible
3849 directory. Before, du would print nothing for such a directory.
3851 ls -x DIR would sometimes output the wrong string in place of the
3852 first entry. [introduced in coreutils-6.8]
3854 ls --color would mistakenly color a dangling symlink as if it were
3855 a regular symlink. This would happen only when the dangling symlink
3856 was not a command-line argument and in a directory with d_type support.
3857 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3859 ls --color, (with a custom LS_COLORS envvar value including the
3860 ln=target attribute) would mistakenly output the string "target"
3861 before the name of each symlink. [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
3863 od's --skip (-j) option now works even when the kernel says that a
3864 nonempty regular file has stat.st_size = 0. This happens at least
3865 with files in /proc and linux-2.6.22.
3867 "od -j L FILE" had a bug: when the number of bytes to skip, L, is exactly
3868 the same as the length of FILE, od would skip *no* bytes. When the number
3869 of bytes to skip is exactly the sum of the lengths of the first N files,
3870 od would skip only the first N-1 files. [introduced in textutils-2.0.9]
3872 ./printf %.10000000f 1 could get an internal ENOMEM error and generate
3873 no output, yet erroneously exit with status 0. Now it diagnoses the error
3874 and exits with nonzero status. [present in initial implementation]
3876 seq no longer mishandles obvious cases like "seq 0 0.000001 0.000003",
3877 so workarounds like "seq 0 0.000001 0.0000031" are no longer needed.
3879 seq would mistakenly reject some valid format strings containing %%,
3880 and would mistakenly accept some invalid ones. e.g., %g%% and %%g, resp.
3882 "seq .1 .1" would mistakenly generate no output on some systems
3884 Obsolete sort usage with an invalid ordering-option character, e.g.,
3885 "env _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 sort +1x" no longer makes sort free an
3886 invalid pointer [introduced in coreutils-6.5]
3888 sorting very long lines (relative to the amount of available memory)
3889 no longer provokes unaligned memory access
3891 split --line-bytes=N (-C N) no longer creates an empty file
3892 [this bug is present at least as far back as textutils-1.22 (Jan, 1997)]
3894 tr -c no longer aborts when translating with Set2 larger than the
3895 complement of Set1. [present in the original version, in 1992]
3897 tr no longer rejects an unmatched [:lower:] or [:upper:] in SET1.
3898 [present in the original version]
3901 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.9 (2007-03-22) [stable]
3905 cp -x (--one-file-system) would fail to set mount point permissions
3907 The default block size and output format for df -P are now unaffected by
3908 the DF_BLOCK_SIZE, BLOCK_SIZE, and BLOCKSIZE environment variables. It
3909 is still affected by POSIXLY_CORRECT, though.
3911 Using pr -m -s (i.e., merging files, with TAB as the output separator)
3912 no longer inserts extraneous spaces between output columns.
3914 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.8 (2007-02-24) [not-unstable]
3918 chgrp, chmod, and chown now honor the --preserve-root option.
3919 Before, they would warn, yet continuing traversing and operating on /.
3921 chmod no longer fails in an environment (e.g., a chroot) with openat
3922 support but with insufficient /proc support.
3924 "cp --parents F/G D" no longer creates a directory D/F when F is not
3925 a directory (and F/G is therefore invalid).
3927 "cp --preserve=mode" would create directories that briefly had
3928 too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when copying a
3929 directory with permissions 777 the destination directory might
3930 temporarily be setgid on some file systems, which would allow other
3931 users to create subfiles with the same group as the directory. Fix
3932 similar problems with 'install' and 'mv'.
3934 cut no longer dumps core for usage like "cut -f2- f1 f2" with two or
3935 more file arguments. This was due to a double-free bug, introduced
3938 dd bs= operands now silently override any later ibs= and obs=
3939 operands, as POSIX and tradition require.
3941 "ls -FRL" always follows symbolic links on Linux. Introduced in
3944 A cross-partition "mv /etc/passwd ~" (by non-root) now prints
3945 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, it would print this:
3946 "mv: cannot remove `/etc/passwd': Not a directory".
3948 pwd and "readlink -e ." no longer fail unnecessarily when a parent
3949 directory is unreadable.
3951 rm (without -f) could prompt when it shouldn't, or fail to prompt
3952 when it should, when operating on a full name longer than 511 bytes
3953 and getting an ENOMEM error while trying to form the long name.
3955 rm could mistakenly traverse into the wrong directory under unusual
3956 conditions: when a full name longer than 511 bytes specifies a search-only
3957 directory, and when forming that name fails with ENOMEM, rm would attempt
3958 to open a truncated-to-511-byte name with the first five bytes replaced
3959 with "[...]". If such a directory were to actually exist, rm would attempt
3962 "rm -rf /etc/passwd" (run by non-root) now prints a diagnostic.
3963 Before it would print nothing.
3965 "rm --interactive=never F" no longer prompts for an unwritable F
3967 "rm -rf D" would emit a misleading diagnostic when failing to
3968 remove a symbolic link within the unwritable directory, D.
3969 Introduced in coreutils-6.0. Similarly, when a cross-partition
3970 "mv" fails because the source directory is unwritable, it now gives
3971 a reasonable diagnostic. Before, this would print
3972 $ mkdir /tmp/x; touch /tmp/x/y; chmod -w /tmp/x;
3973 $ test $(stat -c %d /tmp/x) -ne $(stat -c %d .) && mv /tmp/x/y .
3974 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Not a directory
3976 mv: cannot remove `/tmp/x/y': Permission denied.
3980 sort's new --compress-program=PROG option specifies a compression
3981 program to use when writing and reading temporary files.
3982 This can help save both time and disk space when sorting large inputs.
3984 sort accepts the new option -C, which acts like -c except no diagnostic
3985 is printed. Its --check option now accepts an optional argument, and
3986 --check=quiet and --check=silent are now aliases for -C, while
3987 --check=diagnose-first is an alias for -c or plain --check.
3990 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.7 (2006-12-08) [stable]
3994 When cp -p copied a file with special mode bits set, the same bits
3995 were set on the copy even when ownership could not be preserved.
3996 This could result in files that were setuid to the wrong user.
3997 To fix this, special mode bits are now set in the copy only if its
3998 ownership is successfully preserved. Similar problems were fixed
3999 with mv when copying across file system boundaries. This problem
4000 affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
4002 cp --preserve=ownership would create output files that temporarily
4003 had too-generous permissions in some cases. For example, when
4004 copying a file with group A and mode 644 into a group-B sticky
4005 directory, the output file was briefly readable by group B.
4006 Fix similar problems with cp options like -p that imply
4007 --preserve=ownership, with install -d when combined with either -o
4008 or -g, and with mv when copying across file system boundaries.
4009 This bug affects all versions of coreutils through 6.6.
4011 du --one-file-system (-x) would skip subdirectories of any directory
4012 listed as second or subsequent command line argument. This bug affects
4013 coreutils-6.4, 6.5 and 6.6.
4016 * Noteworthy changes in release 6.6 (2006-11-22) [stable]
4020 ls would segfault (dereference a NULL pointer) for a file with a
4021 nameless group or owner. This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.5.
4023 A bug in the latest official m4/gettext.m4 (from gettext-0.15)
4024 made configure fail to detect gettext support, due to the unusual
4025 way in which coreutils uses AM_GNU_GETTEXT.
4027 ** Improved robustness
4029 Now, du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) honor a
4030 trailing slash in the name of a symlink-to-directory even on
4031 Solaris 9, by working around its buggy fstatat implementation.
4034 * Major changes in release 6.5 (2006-11-19) [stable]
4038 du (and the other fts clients: chmod, chgrp, chown) would exit early
4039 when encountering an inaccessible directory on a system with native
4040 openat support (i.e., linux-2.6.16 or newer along with glibc-2.4
4041 or newer). This bug was introduced with the switch to gnulib's
4042 openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
4044 "ln --backup f f" now produces a sensible diagnostic
4048 rm accepts a new option: --one-file-system
4051 * Major changes in release 6.4 (2006-10-22) [stable]
4055 chgrp and chown would malfunction when invoked with both -R and -H and
4056 with one or more of the following: --preserve-root, --verbose, --changes,
4057 --from=o:g (chown only). This bug was introduced with the switch to
4058 gnulib's openat-based variant of fts, for coreutils-6.0.
4060 cp --backup dir1 dir2, would rename an existing dir2/dir1 to dir2/dir1~.
4061 This bug was introduced in coreutils-6.0.
4063 With --force (-f), rm no longer fails for ENOTDIR.
4064 For example, "rm -f existing-non-directory/anything" now exits
4065 successfully, ignoring the error about a nonexistent file.
4068 * Major changes in release 6.3 (2006-09-30) [stable]
4070 ** Improved robustness
4072 pinky no longer segfaults on Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) due to a
4073 buggy native getaddrinfo function.
4075 rm works around a bug in Darwin 7.9.0 (MacOS X 10.3.9) that would
4076 sometimes keep it from removing all entries in a directory on an HFS+
4077 or NFS-mounted partition.
4079 sort would fail to handle very large input (around 40GB) on systems with a
4080 mkstemp function that returns a file descriptor limited to 32-bit offsets.
4084 chmod would fail unnecessarily in an unusual case: when an initially-
4085 inaccessible argument is rendered accessible by chmod's action on a
4086 preceding command line argument. This bug also affects chgrp, but
4087 it is harder to demonstrate. It does not affect chown. The bug was
4088 introduced with the switch from explicit recursion to the use of fts
4089 in coreutils-5.1.0 (2003-10-15).
4091 cp -i and mv -i occasionally neglected to prompt when the copy or move
4092 action was bound to fail. This bug dates back to before fileutils-4.0.
4094 With --verbose (-v), cp and mv would sometimes generate no output,
4095 or neglect to report file removal.
4097 For the "groups" command:
4099 "groups" no longer prefixes the output with "user :" unless more
4100 than one user is specified; this is for compatibility with BSD.
4102 "groups user" now exits nonzero when it gets a write error.
4104 "groups" now processes options like --help more compatibly.
4106 shuf would infloop, given 8KB or more of piped input
4110 Versions of chmod, chown, chgrp, du, and rm (tools that use openat etc.)
4111 compiled for Solaris 8 now also work when run on Solaris 10.
4114 * Major changes in release 6.2 (2006-09-18) [stable candidate]
4116 ** Changes in behavior
4118 mkdir -p and install -d (or -D) now use a method that forks a child
4119 process if the working directory is unreadable and a later argument
4120 uses a relative file name. This avoids some race conditions, but it
4121 means you may need to kill two processes to stop these programs.
4123 rm now rejects attempts to remove the root directory, e.g., 'rm -fr /'
4124 now fails without removing anything. Likewise for any file name with
4125 a final './' or '../' component.
4127 tail now ignores the -f option if POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, no file
4128 operand is given, and standard input is any FIFO; formerly it did
4129 this only for pipes.
4131 ** Infrastructure changes
4133 Coreutils now uses gnulib via the gnulib-tool script.
4134 If you check the source out from CVS, then follow the instructions
4135 in README-cvs. Although this represents a large change to the
4136 infrastructure, it should cause no change in how the tools work.
4140 cp --backup no longer fails when the last component of a source file
4141 name is "." or "..".
4143 "ls --color" would highlight other-writable and sticky directories
4144 no differently than regular directories on a file system with
4145 dirent.d_type support.
4147 "mv -T --verbose --backup=t A B" now prints the " (backup: B.~1~)"
4148 suffix when A and B are directories as well as when they are not.
4150 mv and "cp -r" no longer fail when invoked with two arguments
4151 where the first one names a directory and the second name ends in
4152 a slash and doesn't exist. E.g., "mv dir B/", for nonexistent B,
4153 now succeeds, once more. This bug was introduced in coreutils-5.3.0.
4156 * Major changes in release 6.1 (2006-08-19) [unstable]
4158 ** Changes in behavior
4160 df now considers BSD "kernfs" file systems to be dummies
4164 printf now supports the 'I' flag on hosts whose underlying printf
4165 implementations support 'I', e.g., "printf %Id 2".
4169 cp --sparse preserves sparseness at the end of a file, even when
4170 the file's apparent size is not a multiple of its block size.
4171 [introduced with the original design, in fileutils-4.0r, 2000-04-29]
4173 df (with a command line argument) once again prints its header
4174 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4176 ls -CF would misalign columns in some cases involving non-stat'able files
4177 [introduced in coreutils-6.0]
4179 * Major changes in release 6.0 (2006-08-15) [unstable]
4181 ** Improved robustness
4183 df: if the file system claims to have more available than total blocks,
4184 report the number of used blocks as being "total - available"
4185 (a negative number) rather than as garbage.
4187 dircolors: a new autoconf run-test for AIX's buggy strndup function
4188 prevents malfunction on that system; may also affect cut, expand,
4191 fts no longer changes the current working directory, so its clients
4192 (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer malfunction under extreme conditions.
4194 pwd and other programs using lib/getcwd.c work even on file systems
4195 where dirent.d_ino values are inconsistent with those from stat.st_ino.
4197 rm's core is now reentrant: rm --recursive (-r) now processes
4198 hierarchies without changing the working directory at all.
4200 ** Changes in behavior
4202 basename and dirname now treat // as different from / on platforms
4203 where the two are distinct.
4205 chmod, install, and mkdir now preserve a directory's set-user-ID and
4206 set-group-ID bits unless you explicitly request otherwise. E.g.,
4207 'chmod 755 DIR' and 'chmod u=rwx,go=rx DIR' now preserve DIR's
4208 set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits instead of clearing them, and
4209 similarly for 'mkdir -m 755 DIR' and 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx DIR'. To
4210 clear the bits, mention them explicitly in a symbolic mode, e.g.,
4211 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,-s DIR'. To set them, mention them explicitly
4212 in either a symbolic or a numeric mode, e.g., 'mkdir -m 2755 DIR',
4213 'mkdir -m u=rwx,go=rx,g+s' DIR. This change is for convenience on
4214 systems where these bits inherit from parents. Unfortunately other
4215 operating systems are not consistent here, and portable scripts
4216 cannot assume the bits are set, cleared, or preserved, even when the
4217 bits are explicitly mentioned. For example, OpenBSD 3.9 'mkdir -m
4218 777 D' preserves D's setgid bit but 'chmod 777 D' clears it.
4219 Conversely, Solaris 10 'mkdir -m 777 D', 'mkdir -m g-s D', and
4220 'chmod 0777 D' all preserve D's setgid bit, and you must use
4221 something like 'chmod g-s D' to clear it.
4223 'cp --link --no-dereference' now works also on systems where the
4224 link system call cannot create a hard link to a symbolic link.
4225 This change has no effect on systems with a Linux-based kernel.
4227 csplit and nl now use POSIX syntax for regular expressions, not
4228 Emacs syntax. As a result, character classes like [[:print:]] and
4229 interval expressions like A\{1,9\} now have their usual meaning,
4230 . no longer matches the null character, and \ must precede the + and
4233 date: a command like date -d '2006-04-23 21 days ago' would print
4234 the wrong date in some time zones. (see the test for an example)
4238 df now considers "none" and "proc" file systems to be dummies and
4239 therefore does not normally display them. Also, inaccessible file
4240 systems (which can be caused by shadowed mount points or by
4241 chrooted bind mounts) are now dummies, too.
4243 df now fails if it generates no output, so you can inspect the
4244 exit status of a command like "df -t ext3 -t reiserfs DIR" to test
4245 whether DIR is on a file system of type "ext3" or "reiserfs".
4247 expr no longer complains about leading ^ in a regular expression
4248 (the anchor is ignored), or about regular expressions like A** (the
4249 second "*" is ignored). expr now exits with status 2 (not 3) for
4250 errors it detects in the expression's values; exit status 3 is now
4251 used only for internal errors (such as integer overflow, which expr
4254 install and mkdir now implement the X permission symbol correctly,
4255 e.g., 'mkdir -m a+X dir'; previously the X was ignored.
4257 install now creates parent directories with mode u=rwx,go=rx (755)
4258 instead of using the mode specified by the -m option; and it does
4259 not change the owner or group of parent directories. This is for
4260 compatibility with BSD and closes some race conditions.
4262 ln now uses different (and we hope clearer) diagnostics when it fails.
4263 ln -v now acts more like FreeBSD, so it generates output only when
4264 successful and the output is easier to parse.
4266 ls now defaults to --time-style='locale', not --time-style='posix-long-iso'.
4267 However, the 'locale' time style now behaves like 'posix-long-iso'
4268 if your locale settings appear to be messed up. This change
4269 attempts to have the default be the best of both worlds.
4271 mkfifo and mknod no longer set special mode bits (setuid, setgid,
4272 and sticky) with the -m option.
4274 nohup's usual diagnostic now more precisely specifies the I/O
4275 redirections, e.g., "ignoring input and appending output to
4276 nohup.out". Also, nohup now redirects stderr to nohup.out (or
4277 $HOME/nohup.out) if stdout is closed and stderr is a tty; this is in
4278 response to Open Group XCU ERN 71.
4280 rm --interactive now takes an optional argument, although the
4281 default of using no argument still acts like -i.
4283 rm no longer fails to remove an empty, unreadable directory
4287 seq defaults to a minimal fixed point format that does not lose
4288 information if seq's operands are all fixed point decimal numbers.
4289 You no longer need the '-f%.f' in 'seq -f%.f 1048575 1024 1050623',
4290 for example, since the default format now has the same effect.
4292 seq now lets you use %a, %A, %E, %F, and %G formats.
4294 seq now uses long double internally rather than double.
4296 sort now reports incompatible options (e.g., -i and -n) rather than
4297 silently ignoring one of them.
4299 stat's --format=FMT option now works the way it did before 5.3.0:
4300 FMT is automatically newline terminated. The first stable release
4301 containing this change was 5.92.
4303 stat accepts the new option --printf=FMT, where FMT is *not*
4304 automatically newline terminated.
4306 stat: backslash escapes are interpreted in a format string specified
4307 via --printf=FMT, but not one specified via --format=FMT. That includes
4308 octal (\ooo, at most three octal digits), hexadecimal (\xhh, one or
4309 two hex digits), and the standard sequences (\a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t,
4312 With no operand, 'tail -f' now silently ignores the '-f' only if
4313 standard input is a FIFO or pipe and POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4314 Formerly, it ignored the '-f' when standard input was a FIFO, pipe,
4317 ** Scheduled for removal
4319 ptx's --copyright (-C) option is scheduled for removal in 2007, and
4320 now evokes a warning. Use --version instead.
4322 rm's --directory (-d) option is scheduled for removal in 2006. This
4323 option has been silently ignored since coreutils 5.0. On systems
4324 that support unlinking of directories, you can use the "unlink"
4325 command to unlink a directory.
4327 Similarly, we are considering the removal of ln's --directory (-d,
4328 -F) option in 2006. Please write to <bug-coreutils@gnu.org> if this
4329 would cause a problem for you. On systems that support hard links
4330 to directories, you can use the "link" command to create one.
4334 base64: base64 encoding and decoding (RFC 3548) functionality.
4335 sha224sum: print or check a SHA224 (224-bit) checksum
4336 sha256sum: print or check a SHA256 (256-bit) checksum
4337 sha384sum: print or check a SHA384 (384-bit) checksum
4338 sha512sum: print or check a SHA512 (512-bit) checksum
4339 shuf: Shuffle lines of text.
4343 chgrp now supports --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default),
4344 as it was documented to do, and just as chmod, chown, and rm do.
4346 New dd iflag= and oflag= flags:
4348 'directory' causes dd to fail unless the file is a directory, on
4349 hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version 2.1.126 and
4350 later). This has limited utility but is present for completeness.
4352 'noatime' causes dd to read a file without updating its access
4353 time, on hosts that support this (e.g., Linux kernels, version
4356 'nolinks' causes dd to fail if the file has multiple hard links,
4357 on hosts that support this (e.g., Solaris 10 and later).
4359 ls accepts the new option --group-directories-first, to make it
4360 list directories before files.
4362 rm now accepts the -I (--interactive=once) option. This new option
4363 prompts once if rm is invoked recursively or if more than three
4364 files are being deleted, which is less intrusive than -i prompting
4365 for every file, but provides almost the same level of protection
4368 shred and sort now accept the --random-source option.
4370 sort now accepts the --random-sort (-R) option and 'R' ordering option.
4372 sort now supports obsolete usages like "sort +1 -2" unless
4373 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set. However, when conforming to POSIX
4374 1003.1-2001 "sort +1" still sorts the file named "+1".
4376 wc accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4377 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4381 cat with any of the options, -A -v -e -E -T, when applied to a
4382 file in /proc or /sys (linux-specific), would truncate its output,
4383 usually printing nothing.
4385 cp -p would fail in a /proc-less chroot, on some systems
4387 When 'cp -RL' encounters the same directory more than once in the
4388 hierarchy beneath a single command-line argument, it no longer confuses
4389 them with hard-linked directories.
4391 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer fail due to
4392 a double-free bug -- it could be triggered by making a directory
4393 inaccessible while e.g., du is traversing the hierarchy under it.
4395 fts-using tools (chmod, chown, chgrp, du) no longer misinterpret
4396 a very long symlink chain as a dangling symlink. Before, such a
4397 misinterpretation would cause these tools not to diagnose an ELOOP error.
4399 ls --indicator-style=file-type would sometimes stat a symlink
4402 ls --file-type worked like --indicator-style=slash (-p),
4403 rather than like --indicator-style=file-type.
4405 mv: moving a symlink into the place of an existing non-directory is
4406 now done atomically; before, mv would first unlink the destination.
4408 mv -T DIR EMPTY_DIR no longer fails unconditionally. Also, mv can
4409 now remove an empty destination directory: mkdir -p a b/a; mv a b
4411 rm (on systems with openat) can no longer exit before processing
4412 all command-line arguments.
4414 rm is no longer susceptible to a few low-probability memory leaks.
4416 rm -r no longer fails to remove an inaccessible and empty directory
4418 rm -r's cycle detection code can no longer be tricked into reporting
4419 a false positive (introduced in fileutils-4.1.9).
4421 shred --remove FILE no longer segfaults on Gentoo systems
4423 sort would fail for large inputs (~50MB) on systems with a buggy
4424 mkstemp function. sort and tac now use the replacement mkstemp
4425 function, and hence are no longer subject to limitations (of 26 or 32,
4426 on the maximum number of files from a given template) on HP-UX 10.20,
4427 SunOS 4.1.4, Solaris 2.5.1 and OSF1/Tru64 V4.0F&V5.1.
4429 tail -f once again works on a file with the append-only
4430 attribute (affects at least Linux ext2, ext3, xfs file systems)
4432 * Major changes in release 5.97 (2006-06-24) [stable]
4433 * Major changes in release 5.96 (2006-05-22) [stable]
4434 * Major changes in release 5.95 (2006-05-12) [stable]
4435 * Major changes in release 5.94 (2006-02-13) [stable]
4437 [see the b5_9x branch for details]
4439 * Major changes in release 5.93 (2005-11-06) [stable]
4443 dircolors no longer segfaults upon an attempt to use the new
4444 STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE (OWT) attribute.
4446 du no longer overflows a counter when processing a file larger than
4447 2^31-1 on some 32-bit systems (at least some AIX 5.1 configurations).
4449 md5sum once again defaults to using the ' ' non-binary marker
4450 (rather than the '*' binary marker) by default on Unix-like systems.
4452 mkdir -p and install -d no longer exit nonzero when asked to create
4453 a directory like 'nonexistent/.'
4455 rm emits a better diagnostic when (without -r) it fails to remove
4456 a directory on e.g., Solaris 9/10 systems.
4458 tac now works when stdin is a tty, even on non-Linux systems.
4460 "tail -c 2 FILE" and "touch 0101000000" now operate as POSIX
4461 1003.1-2001 requires, even when coreutils is conforming to older
4462 POSIX standards, as the newly-required behavior is upward-compatible
4465 The documentation no longer mentions rm's --directory (-d) option.
4467 ** Build-related bug fixes
4469 installing .mo files would fail
4472 * Major changes in release 5.92 (2005-10-22) [stable]
4476 chmod now diagnoses an invalid mode string starting with an octal digit
4478 dircolors now properly quotes single-quote characters
4481 * Major changes in release 5.91 (2005-10-17) [stable candidate]
4485 "mkdir -p /a/b/c" no longer fails merely because a leading prefix
4486 directory (e.g., /a or /a/b) exists on a read-only file system.
4490 tail's --allow-missing option has been removed. Use --retry instead.
4492 stat's --link and -l options have been removed.
4493 Use --dereference (-L) instead.
4495 ** Deprecated options
4497 Using ls, du, or df with the --kilobytes option now evokes a warning
4498 that the long-named option is deprecated. Use '-k' instead.
4500 du's long-named --megabytes option now evokes a warning.
4504 * Major changes in release 5.90 (2005-09-29) [unstable]
4506 ** Bring back support for 'head -NUM', 'tail -NUM', etc. even when
4507 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. The following changes apply only
4508 when conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001; there is no effect when
4509 conforming to older POSIX versions.
4511 The following usages now behave just as when conforming to older POSIX:
4514 expand -TAB1[,TAB2,...]
4520 join -o FIELD_NAME1 FIELD_NAME2...
4525 tail -[NUM][bcl][f] [FILE]
4527 The following usages no longer work, due to the above changes:
4529 date -I TIMESPEC (use 'date -ITIMESPEC' instead)
4530 od -w WIDTH (use 'od -wWIDTH' instead)
4531 pr -S STRING (use 'pr -SSTRING' instead)
4533 A few usages still have behavior that depends on which POSIX standard is
4534 being conformed to, and portable applications should beware these
4535 problematic usages. These include:
4537 Problematic Standard-conforming replacement, depending on
4538 usage whether you prefer the behavior of:
4539 POSIX 1003.2-1992 POSIX 1003.1-2001
4540 sort +4 sort -k 5 sort ./+4
4541 tail +4 tail -n +4 tail ./+4
4542 tail - f tail f [see (*) below]
4543 tail -c 4 tail -c 10 ./4 tail -c4
4544 touch 12312359 f touch -t 12312359 f touch ./12312359 f
4545 uniq +4 uniq -s 4 uniq ./+4
4547 (*) "tail - f" does not conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001; to read
4548 standard input and then "f", use the command "tail -- - f".
4550 These changes are in response to decisions taken in the January 2005
4551 Austin Group standardization meeting. For more details, please see
4552 "Utility Syntax Guidelines" in the Minutes of the January 2005
4553 Meeting <https://www.opengroup.org/austin/docs/austin_239.html>.
4555 ** Binary input and output are now implemented more consistently.
4556 These changes affect only platforms like MS-DOS that distinguish
4557 between binary and text files.
4559 The following programs now always use text input/output:
4563 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy data:
4567 The following programs now always use binary input/output to copy
4568 data, except for stdin and stdout when it is a terminal.
4570 head tac tail tee tr
4571 (cat behaves similarly, unless one of the options -bensAE is used.)
4573 cat's --binary or -B option has been removed. It existed only on
4574 MS-DOS-like platforms, and didn't work as documented there.
4576 md5sum and sha1sum now obey the -b or --binary option, even if
4577 standard input is a terminal, and they no longer report files to be
4578 binary if they actually read them in text mode.
4580 ** Changes for better conformance to POSIX
4582 cp, ln, mv, rm changes:
4584 Leading white space is now significant in responses to yes-or-no questions.
4585 For example, if "rm" asks "remove regular file `foo'?" and you respond
4586 with " y" (i.e., space before "y"), it counts as "no".
4590 On a QUIT or PIPE signal, dd now exits without printing statistics.
4592 On hosts lacking the INFO signal, dd no longer treats the USR1
4593 signal as if it were INFO when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set.
4595 If the file F is non-seekable and contains fewer than N blocks,
4596 then before copying "dd seek=N of=F" now extends F with zeroed
4597 blocks until F contains N blocks.
4601 When POSIXLY_CORRECT is set, "fold file -3" is now equivalent to
4602 "fold file ./-3", not the obviously-erroneous "fold file ./-w3".
4606 -p now marks only directories; it is equivalent to the new option
4607 --indicator-style=slash. Use --file-type or
4608 --indicator-style=file-type to get -p's old behavior.
4612 Documentation and diagnostics now refer to "nicenesses" (commonly
4613 in the range -20...19) rather than "nice values" (commonly 0...39).
4617 nohup now ignores the umask when creating nohup.out.
4619 nohup now closes stderr if it is a terminal and stdout is closed.
4621 nohup now exits with status 127 (not 1) when given an invalid option.
4625 It now rejects the empty name in the normal case. That is,
4626 "pathchk -p ''" now fails, and "pathchk ''" fails unless the
4627 current host (contra POSIX) allows empty file names.
4629 The new -P option checks whether a file name component has leading "-",
4630 as suggested in interpretation "Austin-039:XCU:pathchk:pathchk -p"
4631 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6232>.
4632 It also rejects the empty name even if the current host accepts it; see
4633 <https://collaboration.opengroup.org/austin/interps/documents.php?action=show&gdid=6233>.
4635 The --portability option is now equivalent to -p -P.
4639 chmod, mkdir, mkfifo, and mknod formerly mishandled rarely-used symbolic
4640 permissions like =xX and =u, and did not properly diagnose some invalid
4641 strings like g+gr, ug,+x, and +1. These bugs have been fixed.
4643 csplit could produce corrupt output, given input lines longer than 8KB
4645 dd now computes statistics using a realtime clock (if available)
4646 rather than the time-of-day clock, to avoid glitches if the
4647 time-of-day is changed while dd is running. Also, it avoids
4648 using unsafe code in signal handlers; this fixes some core dumps.
4650 expr and test now correctly compare integers of unlimited magnitude.
4652 expr now detects integer overflow when converting strings to integers,
4653 rather than silently wrapping around.
4655 ls now refuses to generate timestamps containing more than 1000 bytes, to
4656 foil potential denial-of-service attacks on hosts with very large stacks.
4658 "mkdir -m =+x dir" no longer ignores the umask when evaluating "+x",
4659 and similarly for mkfifo and mknod.
4661 "mkdir -p /tmp/a/b dir" no longer attempts to create the '.'-relative
4662 directory, dir (in /tmp/a), when, after creating /tmp/a/b, it is unable
4663 to return to its initial working directory. Similarly for "install -D
4664 file /tmp/a/b/file".
4666 "pr -D FORMAT" now accepts the same formats that "date +FORMAT" does.
4668 stat now exits nonzero if a file operand does not exist
4670 ** Improved robustness
4672 Date no longer needs to allocate virtual memory to do its job,
4673 so it can no longer fail due to an out-of-memory condition,
4674 no matter how large the result.
4676 ** Improved portability
4678 hostid now prints exactly 8 hexadecimal digits, possibly with leading zeros,
4679 and without any spurious leading "fff..." on 64-bit hosts.
4681 nice now works on Darwin 7.7.0 in spite of its invalid definition of NZERO.
4683 'rm -r' can remove all entries in a directory even when it is on a
4684 file system for which readdir is buggy and that was not checked by
4685 coreutils' old configure-time run-test.
4687 sleep no longer fails when resumed after being suspended on linux-2.6.8.1,
4688 in spite of that kernel's buggy nanosleep implementation.
4692 chmod -w now complains if its behavior differs from what chmod a-w
4693 would do, and similarly for chmod -r, chmod -x, etc.
4695 cp and mv: the --reply=X option is deprecated
4697 date accepts the new option --rfc-3339=TIMESPEC. The old --iso-8601 (-I)
4698 option is deprecated; it still works, but new applications should avoid it.
4699 date, du, ls, and pr's time formats now support new %:z, %::z, %:::z
4700 specifiers for numeric time zone offsets like -07:00, -07:00:00, and -07.
4702 dd has new iflag= and oflag= flags "binary" and "text", which have an
4703 effect only on nonstandard platforms that distinguish text from binary I/O.
4705 dircolors now supports SETUID, SETGID, STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE,
4706 OTHER_WRITABLE, and STICKY, with ls providing default colors for these
4707 categories if not specified by dircolors.
4709 du accepts new options: --time[=TYPE] and --time-style=STYLE
4711 join now supports a NUL field separator, e.g., "join -t '\0'".
4712 join now detects and reports incompatible options, e.g., "join -t x -t y",
4714 ls no longer outputs an extra space between the mode and the link count
4715 when none of the listed files has an ACL.
4717 md5sum --check now accepts multiple input files, and similarly for sha1sum.
4719 If stdin is a terminal, nohup now redirects it from /dev/null to
4720 prevent the command from tying up an OpenSSH session after you logout.
4722 "rm -FOO" now suggests "rm ./-FOO" if the file "-FOO" exists and
4723 "-FOO" is not a valid option.
4725 stat -f -c %S outputs the fundamental block size (used for block counts).
4726 stat -f's default output format has been changed to output this size as well.
4727 stat -f recognizes file systems of type XFS and JFS
4729 "touch -" now touches standard output, not a file named "-".
4731 uname -a no longer generates the -p and -i outputs if they are unknown.
4733 * Major changes in release 5.3.0 (2005-01-08) [unstable]
4737 Several fixes to chgrp and chown for compatibility with POSIX and BSD:
4739 Do not affect symbolic links by default.
4740 Now, operate on whatever a symbolic link points to, instead.
4741 To get the old behavior, use --no-dereference (-h).
4743 --dereference now works, even when the specified owner
4744 and/or group match those of an affected symlink.
4746 Check for incompatible options. When -R and --dereference are
4747 both used, then either -H or -L must also be used. When -R and -h
4748 are both used, then -P must be in effect.
4750 -H, -L, and -P have no effect unless -R is also specified.
4751 If -P and -R are both specified, -h is assumed.
4753 Do not optimize away the chown() system call when the file's owner
4754 and group already have the desired value. This optimization was
4755 incorrect, as it failed to update the last-changed time and reset
4756 special permission bits, as POSIX requires.
4758 "chown : file", "chown '' file", and "chgrp '' file" now succeed
4759 without changing the uid or gid, instead of reporting an error.
4761 Do not report an error if the owner or group of a
4762 recursively-encountered symbolic link cannot be updated because
4763 the file system does not support it.
4765 chmod now accepts multiple mode-like options, e.g., "chmod -r -w f".
4767 chown is no longer subject to a race condition vulnerability, when
4768 used with --from=O:G and without the (-h) --no-dereference option.
4770 cut's --output-delimiter=D option works with abutting byte ranges.
4772 dircolors's documentation now recommends that shell scripts eval
4773 "`dircolors`" rather than `dircolors`, to avoid shell expansion pitfalls.
4775 du no longer segfaults when a subdirectory of an operand
4776 directory is removed while du is traversing that subdirectory.
4777 Since the bug was in the underlying fts.c module, it also affected
4778 chown, chmod, and chgrp.
4780 du's --exclude-from=FILE and --exclude=P options now compare patterns
4781 against the entire name of each file, rather than against just the
4784 echo now conforms to POSIX better. It supports the \0ooo syntax for
4785 octal escapes, and \c now terminates printing immediately. If
4786 POSIXLY_CORRECT is set and the first argument is not "-n", echo now
4787 outputs all option-like arguments instead of treating them as options.
4789 expand and unexpand now conform to POSIX better. They check for
4790 blanks (which can include characters other than space and tab in
4791 non-POSIX locales) instead of spaces and tabs. Unexpand now
4792 preserves some blanks instead of converting them to tabs or spaces.
4794 "ln x d/" now reports an error if d/x is a directory and x a file,
4795 instead of incorrectly creating a link to d/x/x.
4797 ls no longer segfaults on systems for which SIZE_MAX != (size_t) -1.
4799 md5sum and sha1sum now report an error when given so many input
4800 lines that their line counter overflows, instead of silently
4801 reporting incorrect results.
4805 If it fails to lower the niceness due to lack of permissions,
4806 it goes ahead and runs the command anyway, as POSIX requires.
4808 It no longer incorrectly reports an error if the current niceness
4811 It no longer assumes that nicenesses range from -20 through 19.
4813 It now consistently adjusts out-of-range nicenesses to the
4814 closest values in range; formerly it sometimes reported an error.
4816 pathchk no longer accepts trailing options, e.g., "pathchk -p foo -b"
4817 now treats -b as a file name to check, not as an invalid option.
4819 'pr --columns=N' was not equivalent to 'pr -N' when also using
4822 pr now supports page numbers up to 2**64 on most hosts, and it
4823 detects page number overflow instead of silently wrapping around.
4824 pr now accepts file names that begin with "+" so long as the rest of
4825 the file name does not look like a page range.
4827 printf has several changes:
4829 It now uses 'intmax_t' (not 'long int') to format integers, so it
4830 can now format 64-bit integers on most modern hosts.
4832 On modern hosts it now supports the C99-inspired %a, %A, %F conversion
4833 specs, the "'" and "0" flags, and the ll, j, t, and z length modifiers
4834 (this is compatible with recent Bash versions).
4836 The printf command now rejects invalid conversion specifications
4837 like %#d, instead of relying on undefined behavior in the underlying
4840 ptx now diagnoses invalid values for its --width=N (-w)
4841 and --gap-size=N (-g) options.
4843 mv (when moving between partitions) no longer fails when
4844 operating on too many command-line-specified nonempty directories.
4846 "readlink -f" is more compatible with prior implementations
4848 rm (without -f) no longer hangs when attempting to remove a symlink
4849 to a file on an off-line NFS-mounted partition.
4851 rm no longer gets a failed assertion under some unusual conditions.
4853 rm no longer requires read access to the current directory.
4855 "rm -r" would mistakenly fail to remove files under a directory
4856 for some types of errors (e.g., read-only file system, I/O error)
4857 when first encountering the directory.
4861 "sort -o -" now writes to a file named "-" instead of to standard
4862 output; POSIX requires this.
4864 An unlikely race condition has been fixed where "sort" could have
4865 mistakenly removed a temporary file belonging to some other process.
4867 "sort" no longer has O(N**2) behavior when it creates many temporary files.
4869 tac can now handle regular, nonseekable files like Linux's
4870 /proc/modules. Before, it would produce no output for such a file.
4872 tac would exit immediately upon I/O or temp-file creation failure.
4873 Now it continues on, processing any remaining command line arguments.
4875 "tail -f" no longer mishandles pipes and fifos. With no operands,
4876 tail now ignores -f if standard input is a pipe, as POSIX requires.
4877 When conforming to POSIX 1003.2-1992, tail now supports the SUSv2 b
4878 modifier (e.g., "tail -10b file") and it handles some obscure cases
4879 more correctly, e.g., "tail +cl" now reads the file "+cl" rather
4880 than reporting an error, "tail -c file" no longer reports an error,
4881 and "tail - file" no longer reads standard input.
4883 tee now exits when it gets a SIGPIPE signal, as POSIX requires.
4884 To get tee's old behavior, use the shell command "(trap '' PIPE; tee)".
4885 Also, "tee -" now writes to standard output instead of to a file named "-".
4887 "touch -- MMDDhhmm[yy] file" is now equivalent to
4888 "touch MMDDhhmm[yy] file" even when conforming to pre-2001 POSIX.
4890 tr no longer mishandles a second operand with leading "-".
4892 who now prints user names in full instead of truncating them after 8 bytes.
4894 The following commands now reject unknown options instead of
4895 accepting them as operands, so that users are properly warned that
4896 options may be added later. Formerly they accepted unknown options
4897 as operands; e.g., "basename -a a" acted like "basename -- -a a".
4899 basename dirname factor hostname link nohup sync unlink yes
4903 For efficiency, 'sort -m' no longer copies input to a temporary file
4904 merely because the input happens to come from a pipe. As a result,
4905 some relatively-contrived examples like 'cat F | sort -m -o F - G'
4906 are no longer safe, as 'sort' might start writing F before 'cat' is
4907 done reading it. This problem cannot occur unless '-m' is used.
4909 When outside the default POSIX locale, the 'who' and 'pinky'
4910 commands now output timestamps like "2004-06-21 13:09" instead of
4911 the traditional "Jun 21 13:09".
4913 pwd now works even when run from a working directory whose name
4914 is longer than PATH_MAX.
4916 cp, install, ln, and mv have a new --no-target-directory (-T) option,
4917 and -t is now a short name for their --target-directory option.
4919 cp -pu and mv -u (when copying) now don't bother to update the
4920 destination if the resulting timestamp would be no newer than the
4921 preexisting timestamp. This saves work in the common case when
4922 copying or moving multiple times to the same destination in a file
4923 system with a coarse timestamp resolution.
4925 cut accepts a new option, --complement, to complement the set of
4926 selected bytes, characters, or fields.
4928 dd now also prints the number of bytes transferred, the time, and the
4929 transfer rate. The new "status=noxfer" operand suppresses this change.
4931 dd has new conversions for the conv= option:
4933 nocreat do not create the output file
4934 excl fail if the output file already exists
4935 fdatasync physically write output file data before finishing
4936 fsync likewise, but also write metadata
4938 dd has new iflag= and oflag= options with the following flags:
4940 append append mode (makes sense for output file only)
4941 direct use direct I/O for data
4942 dsync use synchronized I/O for data
4943 sync likewise, but also for metadata
4944 nonblock use non-blocking I/O
4945 nofollow do not follow symlinks
4946 noctty do not assign controlling terminal from file
4948 stty now provides support (iutf8) for setting UTF-8 input mode.
4950 With stat, a specified format is no longer automatically newline terminated.
4951 If you want a newline at the end of your output, append '\n' to the format
4954 'df', 'du', and 'ls' now take the default block size from the
4955 BLOCKSIZE environment variable if the BLOCK_SIZE, DF_BLOCK_SIZE,
4956 DU_BLOCK_SIZE, and LS_BLOCK_SIZE environment variables are not set.
4957 Unlike the other variables, though, BLOCKSIZE does not affect
4958 values like 'ls -l' sizes that are normally displayed as bytes.
4959 This new behavior is for compatibility with BSD.
4961 du accepts a new option --files0-from=FILE, where FILE contains a
4962 list of NUL-terminated file names.
4964 Date syntax as used by date -d, date -f, and touch -d has been
4967 Dates like 'January 32' with out-of-range components are now rejected.
4969 Dates can have fractional timestamps like 2004-02-27 14:19:13.489392193.
4971 Dates can be entered via integer counts of seconds since 1970 when
4972 prefixed by '@'. For example, '@321' represents 1970-01-01 00:05:21 UTC.
4974 Time zone corrections can now separate hours and minutes with a colon,
4975 and can follow standard abbreviations like "UTC". For example,
4976 "UTC +0530" and "+05:30" are supported, and are both equivalent to "+0530".
4978 Date values can now have leading TZ="..." assignments that override
4979 the environment only while that date is being processed. For example,
4980 the following shell command converts from Paris to New York time:
4982 TZ="America/New_York" date --date='TZ="Europe/Paris" 2004-10-31 06:30'
4984 'date' has a new option --iso-8601=ns that outputs
4985 nanosecond-resolution timestamps.
4987 echo -e '\xHH' now outputs a byte whose hexadecimal value is HH,
4988 for compatibility with bash.
4990 ls now exits with status 1 on minor problems, 2 if serious trouble.
4992 ls has a new --hide=PATTERN option that behaves like
4993 --ignore=PATTERN, except that it is overridden by -a or -A.
4994 This can be useful for aliases, e.g., if lh is an alias for
4995 "ls --hide='*~'", then "lh -A" lists the file "README~".
4997 In the following cases POSIX allows the default GNU behavior,
4998 so when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set:
5000 false, printf, true, unlink, and yes all support --help and --option.
5001 ls supports TABSIZE.
5002 pr no longer depends on LC_TIME for the date format in non-POSIX locales.
5003 printf supports \u, \U, \x.
5004 tail supports two or more files when using the obsolete option syntax.
5006 The usual '--' operand is now supported by chroot, hostid, hostname,
5009 'od' now conforms to POSIX better, and is more compatible with BSD:
5011 The older syntax "od [-abcdfilosx]... [FILE] [[+]OFFSET[.][b]]" now works
5012 even without --traditional. This is a change in behavior if there
5013 are one or two operands and the last one begins with +, or if
5014 there are two operands and the latter one begins with a digit.
5015 For example, "od foo 10" and "od +10" now treat the last operand as
5016 an offset, not as a file name.
5018 -h is no longer documented, and may be withdrawn in future versions.
5019 Use -x or -t x2 instead.
5021 -i is now equivalent to -t dI (not -t d2), and
5022 -l is now equivalent to -t dL (not -t d4).
5024 -s is now equivalent to -t d2. The old "-s[NUM]" or "-s NUM"
5025 option has been renamed to "-S NUM".
5027 The default output format is now -t oS, not -t o2, i.e., short int
5028 rather than two-byte int. This makes a difference only on hosts like
5029 Cray systems where the C short int type requires more than two bytes.
5031 readlink accepts new options: --canonicalize-existing (-e)
5032 and --canonicalize-missing (-m).
5034 The stat option --filesystem has been renamed to --file-system, for
5035 consistency with POSIX "file system" and with cp and du --one-file-system.
5039 md5sum and sha1sum's undocumented --string option has been removed.
5041 tail's undocumented --max-consecutive-size-changes option has been removed.
5043 * Major changes in release 5.2.1 (2004-03-12) [stable]
5047 mv could mistakenly fail to preserve hard links when moving two
5048 or more arguments between partitions.
5050 'cp --sparse=always F /dev/hdx' no longer tries to use lseek to create
5051 holes in the destination.
5053 nohup now sets the close-on-exec flag for its copy of the stderr file
5054 descriptor. This avoids some nohup-induced hangs. For example, before
5055 this change, if you ran 'ssh localhost', then 'nohup sleep 600 </dev/null &',
5056 and then exited that remote shell, the ssh session would hang until the
5057 10-minute sleep terminated. With the fixed nohup, the ssh session
5058 terminates immediately.
5060 'expr' now conforms to POSIX better:
5062 Integers like -0 and 00 are now treated as zero.
5064 The '|' operator now returns 0, not its first argument, if both
5065 arguments are null or zero. E.g., 'expr "" \| ""' now returns 0,
5066 not the empty string.
5068 The '|' and '&' operators now use short-circuit evaluation, e.g.,
5069 'expr 1 \| 1 / 0' no longer reports a division by zero.
5073 'chown user.group file' now has its traditional meaning even when
5074 conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001, so long as no user has a name
5075 containing '.' that happens to equal 'user.group'.
5078 * Major changes in release 5.2.0 (2004-02-19) [stable]
5085 * Major changes in release 5.1.3 (2004-02-08): candidate to become stable 5.2.0
5089 'cp -d' now works as required even on systems like OSF V5.1 that
5090 declare stat and lstat as 'static inline' functions.
5092 timestamps output by stat now include actual fractional seconds,
5093 when available -- or .0000000 for files without that information.
5095 seq no longer infloops when printing 2^31 or more numbers.
5096 For reference, seq `echo 2^31|bc` > /dev/null takes about one hour
5097 on a 1.6 GHz Athlon 2000 XP. Now it can output 2^53-1 numbers before
5100 * Major changes in release 5.1.2 (2004-01-25):
5104 rmdir -p exits with status 1 on error; formerly it sometimes exited
5105 with status 0 when given more than one argument.
5107 nohup now always exits with status 127 when it finds an error,
5108 as POSIX requires; formerly it sometimes exited with status 1.
5110 Several programs (including cut, date, dd, env, hostname, nl, pr,
5111 stty, and tr) now always exit with status 1 when they find an error;
5112 formerly they sometimes exited with status 2.
5114 factor no longer reports a usage error if stdin has the wrong format.
5116 paste no longer infloops on ppc systems (bug introduced in 5.1.1)
5119 * Major changes in release 5.1.1 (2004-01-17):
5121 ** Configuration option
5123 You can select the default level of POSIX conformance at configure-time,
5124 e.g., by ./configure DEFAULT_POSIX2_VERSION=199209
5128 fold -s works once again on systems with differing sizes for int
5129 and size_t (bug introduced in 5.1.0)
5133 touch -r now specifies the origin for any relative times in the -d
5134 operand, if both options are given. For example, "touch -r FOO -d
5135 '-5 seconds' BAR" sets BAR's modification time to be five seconds
5138 join: The obsolete options "-j1 FIELD", "-j2 FIELD", and
5139 "-o LIST1 LIST2..." are no longer supported on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems.
5140 Portable scripts should use "-1 FIELD", "-2 FIELD", and
5141 "-o LIST1,LIST2..." respectively. If join was compiled on a
5142 POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, you may enable the old behavior
5143 by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5144 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5147 * Major changes in release 5.1.0 (2003-12-21):
5151 chgrp, chmod, and chown can now process (with -R) hierarchies of virtually
5152 unlimited depth. Before, they would fail to operate on any file they
5153 encountered with a relative name of length PATH_MAX (often 4096) or longer.
5155 chgrp, chmod, chown, and rm accept the new options:
5156 --preserve-root, --no-preserve-root (default)
5158 chgrp and chown now accept POSIX-mandated -L, -H, and -P options
5160 du can now process hierarchies of virtually unlimited depth.
5161 Before, du was limited by the user's stack size and it would get a
5162 stack overflow error (often a segmentation fault) when applied to
5163 a hierarchy of depth around 30,000 or larger.
5165 du works even when run from an inaccessible directory
5167 du -D now dereferences all symlinks specified on the command line,
5168 not just the ones that reference directories
5170 du now accepts -P (--no-dereference), for compatibility with du
5171 of NetBSD and for consistency with e.g., chown and chgrp
5173 du's -H option will soon have the meaning required by POSIX
5174 (--dereference-args, aka -D) rather then the current meaning of --si.
5175 Now, using -H elicits a warning to that effect.
5177 When given -l and similar options, ls now adjusts the output column
5178 widths to fit the data, so that output lines are shorter and have
5179 columns that line up better. This may adversely affect shell
5180 scripts that expect fixed-width columns, but such shell scripts were
5181 not portable anyway, even with old GNU ls where the columns became
5182 ragged when a datum was too wide.
5184 du accepts a new option, -0/--null, to make it produce NUL-terminated
5189 printf, seq, tail, and sleep now parse floating-point operands
5190 and options in the C locale. POSIX requires this for printf.
5192 od -c -w9999999 no longer segfaults
5194 csplit no longer reads from freed memory (dumping core on some systems)
5196 csplit would mistakenly exhaust virtual memory in some cases
5198 ls --width=N (for very large N) is no longer subject to an address
5199 arithmetic bug that could result in bounds violations.
5201 ls --width=N (with -x or -C) no longer allocates more space
5202 (potentially much more) than necessary for a given directory.
5204 dd 'unblock' and 'sync' may now be combined (e.g., dd conv=unblock,sync)
5206 * Major changes in release 5.0.91 (2003-09-08):
5210 date accepts a new option --rfc-2822, an alias for --rfc-822.
5212 split accepts a new option -d or --numeric-suffixes.
5214 cp, install, mv, and touch now preserve microsecond resolution on
5215 file timestamps, on platforms that have the 'utimes' system call.
5216 Unfortunately there is no system call yet to preserve file
5217 timestamps to their full nanosecond resolution; microsecond
5218 resolution is the best we can do right now.
5220 sort now supports the zero byte (NUL) as a field separator; use -t '\0'.
5221 The -t '' option, which formerly had no effect, is now an error.
5223 sort option order no longer matters for the options -S, -d, -i, -o, and -t.
5224 Stronger options override weaker, and incompatible options are diagnosed.
5226 'sha1sum --check' now accepts the BSD format for SHA1 message digests
5227 in addition to the BSD format for MD5 ones.
5229 who -l now means 'who --login', not 'who --lookup', per POSIX.
5230 who's -l option has been eliciting an unconditional warning about
5231 this impending change since sh-utils-2.0.12 (April 2002).
5235 Mistakenly renaming a file onto itself, e.g., via 'mv B b' when 'B' is
5236 the same directory entry as 'b' no longer destroys the directory entry
5237 referenced by both 'b' and 'B'. Note that this would happen only on
5238 file systems like VFAT where two different names may refer to the same
5239 directory entry, usually due to lower->upper case mapping of file names.
5240 Now, the above can happen only on file systems that perform name mapping and
5241 that support hard links (stat.st_nlink > 1). This mitigates the problem
5242 in two ways: few file systems appear to be affected (hpfs and ntfs are),
5243 when the bug is triggered, mv no longer removes the last hard link to a file.
5244 *** ATTENTION ***: if you know how to distinguish the following two cases
5245 without writing to the file system in question, please let me know:
5246 1) B and b refer to the same directory entry on a file system like NTFS
5247 (B may well have a link count larger than 1)
5248 2) B and b are hard links to the same file
5250 stat no longer overruns a buffer for format strings ending in '%'
5252 fold -s -wN would infloop for N < 8 with TABs in the input.
5253 E.g., this would not terminate: printf 'a\t' | fold -w2 -s
5255 'split -a0', although of questionable utility, is accepted once again.
5257 'df DIR' used to hang under some conditions on OSF/1 5.1. Now it doesn't.
5259 seq's --width (-w) option now works properly even when the endpoint
5260 requiring the larger width is negative and smaller than the other endpoint.
5262 seq's default step is 1, even if LAST < FIRST.
5264 paste no longer mistakenly outputs 0xFF bytes for a nonempty input file
5265 without a trailing newline.
5267 'tail -n0 -f FILE' and 'tail -c0 -f FILE' no longer perform what amounted
5268 to a busy wait, rather than sleeping between iterations.
5270 tail's long-undocumented --allow-missing option now elicits a warning
5273 * Major changes in release 5.0.90 (2003-07-29):
5277 sort is now up to 30% more CPU-efficient in some cases
5279 'test' is now more compatible with Bash and POSIX:
5281 'test -t', 'test --help', and 'test --version' now silently exit
5282 with status 0. To test whether standard output is a terminal, use
5283 'test -t 1'. To get help and version info for 'test', use
5284 '[ --help' and '[ --version'.
5286 'test' now exits with status 2 (not 1) if there is an error.
5288 wc count field widths now are heuristically adjusted depending on the input
5289 size, if known. If only one count is printed, it is guaranteed to
5290 be printed without leading spaces.
5292 Previously, wc did not align the count fields if POSIXLY_CORRECT was set,
5293 but POSIX did not actually require this undesirable behavior, so it
5298 kill no longer tries to operate on argv[0] (introduced in 5.0.1)
5299 Why wasn't this noticed? Although many tests use kill, none of
5300 them made an effort to avoid using the shell's built-in kill.
5302 '[' invoked with no arguments no longer evokes a segfault
5304 rm without --recursive (aka -r or -R) no longer prompts regarding
5305 unwritable directories, as required by POSIX.
5307 uniq -c now uses a SPACE, not a TAB between the count and the
5308 corresponding line, as required by POSIX.
5310 expr now exits with status 2 if the expression is syntactically valid,
5311 and with status 3 if an error occurred. POSIX requires this.
5313 expr now reports trouble if string comparison fails due to a collation error.
5315 split now generates suffixes properly on EBCDIC hosts.
5317 split -a0 now works, as POSIX requires.
5319 'sort --version' and 'sort --help' fail, as they should
5320 when their output is redirected to /dev/full.
5322 'su --version > /dev/full' now fails, as it should.
5324 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5326 cut requires 97% less memory when very large field numbers or
5327 byte offsets are specified.
5330 * Major changes in release 5.0.1 (2003-07-15):
5333 - new program: '[' (much like 'test')
5336 - head now accepts --lines=-N (--bytes=-N) to print all but the
5337 N lines (bytes) at the end of the file
5338 - md5sum --check now accepts the output of the BSD md5sum program, e.g.,
5339 MD5 (f) = d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
5340 - date -d DATE can now parse a DATE string like May-23-2003
5341 - chown: '.' is no longer recognized as a separator in the OWNER:GROUP
5342 specifier on POSIX 1003.1-2001 systems. If chown *was not* compiled
5343 on such a system, then it still accepts '.', by default. If chown
5344 was compiled on a POSIX 1003.1-2001 system, then you may enable the
5345 old behavior by setting _POSIX2_VERSION=199209 in your environment.
5346 - chown no longer tries to preserve set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits;
5347 on some systems, the chown syscall resets those bits, and previous
5348 versions of the chown command would call chmod to restore the original,
5349 pre-chown(2) settings, but that behavior is problematic.
5350 1) There was a window whereby a malicious user, M, could subvert a
5351 chown command run by some other user and operating on files in a
5352 directory where M has write access.
5353 2) Before (and even now, on systems with chown(2) that doesn't reset
5354 those bits), an unwary admin. could use chown unwittingly to create e.g.,
5355 a set-user-ID root copy of /bin/sh.
5358 - chown --dereference no longer leaks a file descriptor per symlink processed
5359 - 'du /' once again prints the '/' on the last line
5360 - split's --verbose option works once again [broken in 4.5.10 and 5.0]
5361 - tail -f is no longer subject to a race condition that could make it
5362 delay displaying the last part of a file that had stopped growing. That
5363 bug could also make tail -f give an unwarranted 'file truncated' warning.
5364 - du no longer runs out of file descriptors unnecessarily
5365 - df and 'readlink --canonicalize' no longer corrupt the heap on
5366 non-glibc, non-solaris systems
5367 - 'env -u UNSET_VARIABLE' no longer dumps core on non-glibc systems
5368 - readlink's --canonicalize option now works on systems like Solaris that
5369 lack the canonicalize_file_name function but do have resolvepath.
5370 - mv now removes 'a' in this example on all systems: touch a; ln a b; mv a b
5371 This behavior is contrary to POSIX (which requires that the mv command do
5372 nothing and exit successfully), but I suspect POSIX will change.
5373 - date's %r format directive now honors locale settings
5374 - date's '-' (no-pad) format flag now affects the space-padded-by-default
5375 conversion specifiers, %e, %k, %l
5376 - fmt now diagnoses invalid obsolescent width specifications like '-72x'
5377 - fmt now exits nonzero when unable to open an input file
5378 - tsort now fails when given an odd number of input tokens,
5379 as required by POSIX. Before, it would act as if the final token
5380 appeared one additional time.
5382 ** Fewer arbitrary limitations
5383 - tail's byte and line counts are no longer limited to OFF_T_MAX.
5384 Now the limit is UINTMAX_MAX (usually 2^64).
5385 - split can now handle --bytes=N and --lines=N with N=2^31 or more.
5388 - 'kill -t' now prints signal descriptions (rather than '?') on systems
5389 like Tru64 with __sys_siglist but no strsignal function.
5390 - stat.c now compiles on Ultrix systems
5391 - sleep now works on AIX systems that lack support for clock_gettime
5392 - rm now works around Darwin6.5's broken readdir function
5393 Before 'rm -rf DIR' would fail to remove all files in DIR
5394 if there were more than 338.
5396 * Major changes in release 5.0 (2003-04-02):
5397 - false --help now exits nonzero
5400 * printf no longer treats \x specially when POSIXLY_CORRECT is set
5401 * printf avoids buffer overrun with format ending in a backslash and
5402 * printf avoids buffer overrun with incomplete conversion specifier
5403 * printf accepts multiple flags in a single conversion specifier
5406 * seq no longer requires that a field width be specified
5407 * seq no longer fails when given a field width of '0'
5408 * seq now accepts " " and "'" as valid format flag characters
5409 * df now shows a HOSTNAME: prefix for each remote-mounted file system on AIX 5.1
5410 * portability tweaks for HP-UX, AIX 5.1, DJGPP
5413 * printf no longer segfaults for a negative field width or precision
5414 * shred now always enables --exact for non-regular files
5415 * du no longer lists hard-linked files more than once
5416 * du no longer dumps core on some systems due to "infinite" recursion
5417 via nftw's use of the buggy replacement function in getcwd.c
5418 * portability patches for a few vendor compilers and 64-bit systems
5419 * du -S *really* now works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5422 * du no longer truncates file sizes or sums to fit in 32-bit size_t
5423 * work around Linux kernel bug in getcwd (fixed in 2.4.21-pre4), so that pwd
5424 now fails if the name of the working directory is so long that getcwd
5425 truncates it. Before it would print the truncated name and exit successfully.
5426 * 'df /some/mount-point' no longer hangs on a GNU libc system when another
5427 hard-mounted NFS file system (preceding /some/mount-point in /proc/mounts)
5429 * rm -rf now gives an accurate diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5430 under certain unusual conditions
5431 * mv and 'cp --preserve=links' now preserve multiple hard links even under
5432 certain unusual conditions where they used to fail
5435 * du -S once again works like it did before the change in 4.5.5
5436 * stat accepts a new file format, %B, for the size of each block reported by %b
5437 * du accepts new option: --apparent-size
5438 * du --bytes (-b) works the same way it did in fileutils-3.16 and before
5439 * du reports proper sizes for directories (not zero) (broken in 4.5.6 or 4.5.7)
5440 * df now always displays under 'Filesystem', the device file name
5441 corresponding to the listed mount point. Before, for a block- or character-
5442 special file command line argument, df would display that argument. E.g.,
5443 'df /dev/hda' would list '/dev/hda' as the 'Filesystem', rather than say
5444 /dev/hda3 (the device on which '/' is mounted), as it does now.
5445 * test now works properly when invoked from a set user ID or set group ID
5446 context and when testing access to files subject to alternate protection
5447 mechanisms. For example, without this change, a set-UID program that invoked
5448 'test -w F' (to see if F is writable) could mistakenly report that it *was*
5449 writable, even though F was on a read-only file system, or F had an ACL
5450 prohibiting write access, or F was marked as immutable.
5453 * du would fail with more than one DIR argument when any but the last did not
5454 contain a slash (due to a bug in ftw.c)
5457 * du no longer segfaults on Solaris systems (fixed heap-corrupting bug in ftw.c)
5458 * du --exclude=FILE works once again (this was broken by the rewrite for 4.5.5)
5459 * du no longer gets a failed assertion for certain hierarchy lay-outs
5460 involving hard-linked directories
5461 * 'who -r' no longer segfaults when using non-C-locale messages
5462 * df now displays a mount point (usually '/') for non-mounted
5463 character-special and block files
5466 * ls --dired produces correct byte offset for file names containing
5467 nonprintable characters in a multibyte locale
5468 * du has been rewritten to use a variant of GNU libc's ftw.c
5469 * du now counts the space associated with a directory's directory entry,
5470 even if it cannot list or chdir into that subdirectory.
5471 * du -S now includes the st_size of each entry corresponding to a subdirectory
5472 * rm on FreeBSD can once again remove directories from NFS-mounted file systems
5473 * ls has a new option --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir, which
5474 corresponds to the new default behavior when none of -d, -l -F, -H, -L
5476 * ls dangling-symlink now prints 'dangling-symlink'.
5477 Before, it would fail with 'no such file or directory'.
5478 * ls -s symlink-to-non-dir and ls -i symlink-to-non-dir now print
5479 attributes of 'symlink', rather than attributes of their referents.
5480 * Fix a bug introduced in 4.5.4 that made it so that ls --color would no
5481 longer highlight the names of files with the execute bit set when not
5482 specified on the command line.
5483 * shred's --zero (-z) option no longer gobbles up any following argument.
5484 Before, 'shred --zero file' would produce 'shred: missing file argument',
5485 and worse, 'shred --zero f1 f2 ...' would appear to work, but would leave
5486 the first file untouched.
5487 * readlink: new program
5488 * cut: new feature: when used to select ranges of byte offsets (as opposed
5489 to ranges of fields) and when --output-delimiter=STRING is specified,
5490 output STRING between ranges of selected bytes.
5491 * rm -r can no longer be tricked into mistakenly reporting a cycle.
5492 * when rm detects a directory cycle, it no longer aborts the entire command,
5493 but rather merely stops processing the affected command line argument.
5496 * cp no longer fails to parse options like this: --preserve=mode,ownership
5497 * 'ls --color -F symlink-to-dir' works properly
5498 * ls is much more efficient on directories with valid dirent.d_type.
5499 * stty supports all baud rates defined in linux-2.4.19.
5500 * 'du symlink-to-dir/' would improperly remove the trailing slash
5501 * 'du ""' would evoke a bounds violation.
5502 * In the unlikely event that running 'du /' resulted in 'stat ("/", ...)'
5503 failing, du would give a diagnostic about '' (empty string) rather than '/'.
5504 * printf: a hexadecimal escape sequence has at most two hex. digits, not three.
5505 * The following features have been added to the --block-size option
5506 and similar environment variables of df, du, and ls.
5507 - A leading "'" generates numbers with thousands separators.
5509 $ ls -l --block-size="'1" file
5510 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 47,483,707 Sep 24 23:40 file
5511 - A size suffix without a leading integer generates a suffix in the output.
5513 $ ls -l --block-size="K"
5514 -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert src 46371K Sep 24 23:40 file
5515 * ls's --block-size option now affects file sizes in all cases, not
5516 just for --block-size=human-readable and --block-size=si. Fractional
5517 sizes are now always rounded up, for consistency with df and du.
5518 * df now displays the block size using powers of 1000 if the requested
5519 block size seems to be a multiple of a power of 1000.
5520 * nl no longer gets a segfault when run like this 'yes|nl -s%n'
5523 * du --dereference-args (-D) no longer fails in certain cases
5524 * 'ln --target-dir=DIR' no longer fails when given a single argument
5527 * 'rm -i dir' (without --recursive (-r)) no longer recurses into dir
5528 * 'tail -c N FILE' now works with files of size >= 4GB
5529 * 'mkdir -p' can now create very deep (e.g. 40,000-component) directories
5530 * rmdir -p dir-with-trailing-slash/ no longer fails
5531 * printf now honors the '--' command line delimiter
5532 * od's 8-byte formats x8, o8, and u8 now work
5533 * tail now accepts fractional seconds for its --sleep-interval=S (-s) option
5536 * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)
5537 * uniq now obeys the LC_COLLATE locale, as per POSIX 1003.1-2001 TC1.
5539 ========================================================================
5540 Here are the NEWS entries made from fileutils-4.1 until the
5541 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5544 * 'rm symlink-to-unwritable' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.10]
5546 * rm once again gives a reasonable diagnostic when failing to remove a file
5547 owned by someone else in a sticky directory [introduced in 4.1.9]
5548 * df now rounds all quantities up, as per POSIX.
5549 * New ls time style: long-iso, which generates YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM.
5550 * Any time style can be preceded by "posix-"; this causes "ls" to
5551 use traditional timestamp format when in the POSIX locale.
5552 * The default time style is now posix-long-iso instead of posix-iso.
5553 Set TIME_STYLE="posix-iso" to revert to the behavior of 4.1.1 through 4.1.9.
5554 * 'rm dangling-symlink' doesn't prompt [introduced in 4.1.9]
5555 * stat: remove support for --secure/-s option and related %S and %C format specs
5556 * stat: rename --link/-l to --dereference/-L.
5557 The old options will continue to work for a while.
5559 * rm can now remove very deep hierarchies, in spite of any limit on stack size
5560 * new programs: link, unlink, and stat
5561 * New ls option: --author (for the Hurd).
5562 * 'touch -c no-such-file' no longer fails, per POSIX
5564 * mv no longer mistakenly creates links to preexisting destination files
5567 * rm: close a hole that would allow a running rm process to be subverted
5569 * New cp option: --copy-contents.
5570 * cp -r is now equivalent to cp -R. Use cp -R -L --copy-contents to get the
5571 traditional (and rarely desirable) cp -r behavior.
5572 * ls now accepts --time-style=+FORMAT, where +FORMAT works like date's format
5573 * The obsolete usage 'touch [-acm] MMDDhhmm[YY] FILE...' is no longer
5574 supported on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001. Use touch -t instead.
5575 * cp and inter-partition mv no longer give a misleading diagnostic in some
5578 * cp -r no longer preserves symlinks
5579 * The block size notation is now compatible with SI and with IEC 60027-2.
5580 For example, --block-size=1MB now means --block-size=1000000,
5581 whereas --block-size=1MiB now means --block-size=1048576.
5582 A missing 'B' (e.g. '1M') has the same meaning as before.
5583 A trailing 'B' now means decimal, not binary; this is a silent change.
5584 The nonstandard 'D' suffix (e.g. '1MD') is now obsolescent.
5585 * -H or --si now outputs the trailing 'B', for consistency with the above.
5586 * Programs now output trailing 'K' (not 'k') to mean 1024, as per IEC 60027-2.
5587 * New df, du short option -B is short for --block-size.
5588 * You can omit an integer '1' before a block size suffix,
5589 e.g. 'df -BG' is equivalent to 'df -B 1G' and to 'df --block-size=1G'.
5590 * The following options are now obsolescent, as their names are
5591 incompatible with IEC 60027-2:
5592 df, du: -m or --megabytes (use -BM or --block-size=1M)
5593 df, du, ls: --kilobytes (use --block-size=1K)
5595 * df --local no longer lists smbfs file systems whose name starts with //
5596 * dd now detects the Linux/tape/lseek bug at run time and warns about it.
5598 * ls -R once again outputs a blank line between per-directory groups of files.
5599 This was broken by the cycle-detection change in 4.1.1.
5600 * dd once again uses 'lseek' on character devices like /dev/mem and /dev/kmem.
5601 On systems with the linux kernel (at least up to 2.4.16), dd must still
5602 resort to emulating 'skip=N' behavior using reads on tape devices, because
5603 lseek has no effect, yet appears to succeed. This may be a kernel bug.
5605 * cp no longer fails when two or more source files are the same;
5606 now it just gives a warning and doesn't copy the file the second time.
5607 E.g., cp a a d/ produces this:
5608 cp: warning: source file `a' specified more than once
5609 * chmod would set the wrong bit when given symbolic mode strings like
5610 these: g=o, o=g, o=u. E.g., 'chmod a=,o=w,ug=o f' would give a mode
5611 of --w-r---w- rather than --w--w--w-.
5613 * mv (likewise for cp), now fails rather than silently clobbering one of
5614 the source files in the following example:
5615 rm -rf a b c; mkdir a b c; touch a/f b/f; mv a/f b/f c
5616 * ls -R detects directory cycles, per POSIX. It warns and doesn't infloop.
5617 * cp's -P option now means the same as --no-dereference, per POSIX.
5618 Use --parents to get the old meaning.
5619 * When copying with the -H and -L options, cp can preserve logical
5620 links between source files with --preserve=links
5621 * cp accepts new options:
5622 --preserve[={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}]
5623 --no-preserve={mode,ownership,timestamps,links,all}
5624 * cp's -p and --preserve options remain unchanged and are equivalent
5625 to '--preserve=mode,ownership,timestamps'
5626 * mv and cp accept a new option: --reply={yes,no,query}; provides a consistent
5627 mechanism to control whether one is prompted about certain existing
5628 destination files. Note that cp's and mv's -f options don't have the
5629 same meaning: cp's -f option no longer merely turns off '-i'.
5630 * remove portability limitations (e.g., PATH_MAX on the Hurd, fixes for
5632 * mv now prompts before overwriting an existing, unwritable destination file
5633 when stdin is a tty, unless --force (-f) is specified, as per POSIX.
5634 * mv: fix the bug whereby 'mv -uf source dest' would delete source,
5635 even though it's older than dest.
5636 * chown's --from=CURRENT_OWNER:CURRENT_GROUP option now works
5637 * cp now ensures that the set-user-ID and set-group-ID bits are cleared for
5638 the destination file when when copying and not preserving permissions.
5639 * 'ln -f --backup k k' gives a clearer diagnostic
5640 * ls no longer truncates user names or group names that are longer
5642 * ls's new --dereference-command-line option causes it to dereference
5643 symbolic links on the command-line only. It is the default unless
5644 one of the -d, -F, or -l options are given.
5645 * ls -H now means the same as ls --dereference-command-line, as per POSIX.
5646 * ls -g now acts like ls -l, except it does not display owner, as per POSIX.
5647 * ls -n now implies -l, as per POSIX.
5648 * ls can now display dates and times in one of four time styles:
5650 - The 'full-iso' time style gives full ISO-style timestamps like
5651 '2001-05-14 23:45:56.477817180 -0700'.
5652 - The 'iso' time style gives ISO-style timestamps like '2001-05-14 '
5654 - The 'locale' time style gives locale-dependent timestamps like
5655 'touko 14 2001' and 'touko 14 23:45' (in a Finnish locale).
5656 - The 'posix-iso' time style gives traditional POSIX-locale
5657 timestamps like 'May 14 2001' and 'May 14 23:45' unless the user
5658 specifies a non-POSIX locale, in which case it uses ISO-style dates.
5659 This is the default.
5661 You can specify a time style with an option like --time-style='iso'
5662 or with an environment variable like TIME_STYLE='iso'. GNU Emacs 21
5663 and later can parse ISO dates, but older Emacs versions cannot, so
5664 if you are using an older version of Emacs outside the default POSIX
5665 locale, you may need to set TIME_STYLE="locale".
5667 * --full-time is now an alias for "-l --time-style=full-iso".
5670 ========================================================================
5671 Here are the NEWS entries made from sh-utils-2.0 until the
5672 point at which the packages merged to form the coreutils:
5675 * date no longer accepts e.g., September 31 in the MMDDhhmm syntax
5676 * fix a bug in this package's .m4 files and in configure.ac
5678 * nohup's behavior is changed as follows, to conform to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5679 - nohup no longer adjusts scheduling priority; use "nice" for that.
5680 - nohup now redirects stderr to stdout, if stderr is not a terminal.
5681 - nohup exit status is now 126 if command was found but not invoked,
5682 127 if nohup failed or if command was not found.
5684 * uname and uptime work better on *BSD systems
5685 * pathchk now exits nonzero for a path with a directory component
5686 that specifies a non-directory
5689 * who accepts new options: --all (-a), --boot (-b), --dead (-d), --login,
5690 --process (-p), --runlevel (-r), --short (-s), --time (-t), --users (-u).
5691 The -u option now produces POSIX-specified results and is the same as
5692 the long option '--users'. --idle is no longer the same as -u.
5693 * The following changes apply on systems conforming to POSIX 1003.1-2001:
5694 - 'date -I' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'date --iso-8601'.
5695 - 'nice -NUM' is no longer supported. Instead, use 'nice -n NUM'.
5696 [This change was reverted in coreutils 5.3.1.]
5697 * New 'uname' options -i or --hardware-platform, and -o or --operating-system.
5698 'uname -a' now outputs -i and -o information at the end.
5699 New uname option --kernel-version is an alias for -v.
5700 Uname option --release has been renamed to --kernel-release,
5701 and --sysname has been renamed to --kernel-name;
5702 the old options will work for a while, but are no longer documented.
5703 * 'expr' now uses the LC_COLLATE locale for string comparison, as per POSIX.
5704 * 'expr' now requires '+' rather than 'quote' to quote tokens;
5705 this removes an incompatibility with POSIX.
5706 * date -d 'last friday' would print a date/time that was one hour off
5707 (e.g., 23:00 on *thursday* rather than 00:00 of the preceding friday)
5708 when run such that the current time and the target date/time fall on
5709 opposite sides of a daylight savings time transition.
5710 This problem arose only with relative date strings like 'last monday'.
5711 It was not a problem with strings that include absolute dates.
5712 * factor is twice as fast, for large numbers
5714 * setting the date now works properly, even when using -u
5715 * 'date -f - < /dev/null' no longer dumps core
5716 * some DOS/Windows portability changes
5718 * 'date -d DATE' now parses certain relative DATEs correctly
5720 * fixed a bug introduced in 2.0h that made many programs fail with a
5721 'write error' when invoked with the --version option
5723 * all programs fail when printing --help or --version output to a full device
5724 * printf exits nonzero upon write failure
5725 * yes now detects and terminates upon write failure
5726 * date --rfc-822 now always emits day and month names from the 'C' locale
5727 * portability tweaks for Solaris8, Ultrix, and DOS
5729 * date now handles two-digit years with leading zeros correctly.
5730 * printf interprets unicode, \uNNNN \UNNNNNNNN, on systems with the
5731 required support; from Bruno Haible.
5732 * stty's rprnt attribute now works on HPUX 10.20
5733 * seq's --equal-width option works more portably
5735 * fix build problems with ut_name vs. ut_user
5737 * stty: fix long-standing bug that caused test failures on at least HPUX
5738 systems when COLUMNS was set to zero
5739 * still more portability fixes
5740 * unified lib/: now that directory and most of the configuration framework
5741 is common between fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5743 * fix portability problem with sleep vs lib/strtod.c's requirement for -lm
5745 * fix portability problems with nanosleep.c and with the new code in sleep.c
5747 * Regenerate lib/Makefile.in so that nanosleep.c is distributed.
5749 * sleep accepts floating point arguments on command line
5750 * sleep's clock continues counting down when sleep is suspended
5751 * when a suspended sleep process is resumed, it continues sleeping if
5752 there is any time remaining
5753 * who once again prints whatever host information it has, even without --lookup
5755 ========================================================================
5756 For older NEWS entries for the fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils
5757 packages, see ./old/*/NEWS.
5759 This package began as the union of the following:
5760 textutils-2.1, fileutils-4.1.11, sh-utils-2.0.15.
5762 ========================================================================
5764 Copyright (C) 2001-2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5766 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
5767 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
5768 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
5769 Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
5770 Texts. A copy of the license is included in the "GNU Free
5771 Documentation License" file as part of this distribution.